aging out

[kradeelav]

>> @hausofdecline.bsky.social When I was 8, I showed my mom the first Jigglypuff episode of Pokémon and she stared at the screen with a Tommy Lee Jones "No Country for Old Men" expression. I didn't understand how she felt right up until the point I saw The Amazing Digital Circus.

‪> @theyoungdoyler.bsky.social‬ I remember so vividly being in my early 20s, watching gravity falls and having the dawning realization a few episodes in: "oh I just like this as a kid's cartoon. it's well made and enjoyable. but I'm not a kid anymore"
> It was liberating not feeling that manic fandom drive for the latest sensation
 

this is kinda a cool if bittersweet phenomenon.

no shade but i specifically remember feeling this way about homestuck & when vine started becoming popular. realized video was extremely not my Thing, and that hetalia/naruto was really the last mainstream fandom i enjoyed being around as somebody of that generation. i say hetalia & homestuck because they're both web based media works with very sprawling (and infamous) fandoms, but hetalia felt very livejournal, deviantart, and text-ish, wheras homestuck's fandom was... elsewhere.

when was y'alls moment of experiencing this?

Comments

[uskglass]

Man, good question!! I think I was never into the thing-of-the-moment intensely enough to have a HARD cliff dropoff for this, always had somewhat out-of-sync fandom etc interests and often older stuff, but I think a bigger one in my 30s has been like. Billie Eilish and other whispery/mumbly sorta lo-fi music. I don't hate it at all, but it's the first time I've been like "huh, music really is trending this way, and it is genuinely not my thing in a generational way."

[neotula]

I do think it's kinda funny: what might be too kiddish for one person might not be it for someone else. Know there's stuff I still vibe with, but I know I bounced hard off a lot of anime that's aimed more at teens that's real big in the zeitgeist.

I bounced off My Hero Acadamia when a friend showed it me ten or so years ago, and I've never been able to get into it. Felt like I might have liked it as a teen, but as an adult, it just wasn't compelling to me and felt very much like a show for kids. I was just starting to get into anime. I think all I'd seen was One Punch Man and I did like that, so I was asking for recs and My Hero Acadamia was one I got then and still get but really isn't for me.

i think homestuck (2013/14) and red vs blue (2015/16ish) were my last times being super involved with a fandom that was big active.

(i was arguably into fire emblem three houses when it was big, but i learned pretty quick that fire emblem fandom proper was not for me, and also post-rvb and homestuck fandom i was pretty keen to establish some big space as those two were pretty awful fandoms to be in on tumblr.)

[am_herrington]

Ahhahaha, I definitely feel that way about TADC. I mentioned not really being into it to my siblings and some peers, and they were insistent that it gets better after the first episode (which gave me a headache). But I just really didn't want to. Maybe it is just as cool, existentialist, mature, and character-driven as people are saying it is, but... I would not choose this vector for my existential horror. It's not that I don't understand it "gets good," I simply don't click with it.

Let's see... the first time I felt this must have been ENA. I like ENA, but some of my age group peers are very intense about it and write manifestos about how ENA portrays neurodivergence. I don't relate to her character, though (maybe because I'm only the autistic flavour, as opposed to ADHD or AuDHD). It's just a cool piece of experimental absurdist/surreal art to me.