something fascinating from a sociological meta perspective about all these franchises going off the rails and ending bleakly is that it's in line with studios attempting to cash in on the modern nihilistic sense of humor. I saw someone describe it as "pop culture nihilism" and this feels so off-putting yet accurate, that instead of getting uplifting tales to make us feel and do better we get stories that only affirm that nothing we do will matter
we’ve always had stories like that. it’s just far more prevalent in the era of stories being gate-kept by corporations and/or producers from the one-percent. of course they prefer stories that emphasize nothing ever matters, because the last thing they want is change. or that’s the second-to-last thing they want, with the actual last thing being competition.
it’s not just grimdark nihilism, either. you can see it in rom-coms where a successful big-city character experiences small-town life and discovers that doing small-town things on a small-town budget is just so much more fulfilling than wearing the latest fashions, having access to all the newest broadway shows, international cuisines, amazing museums... oh, no, that can’t possibly compare to truck rallies and small-town bake sales.
while this is often gendered, with high-powered women forced to be a stand-in mother (or pretend wife) and discovering their previous material/physical success was a hollow substitute covering up their desperate need to be a wife and/or mother -- sometimes it shows up on the male side, too.
where the high-powered corporate guy gets hit on the head or caught in a time loop or whatever gimmick and wakes up to find himself married to his high school sweetheart, working long grueling hours in blue collar, with three kids and too many bills to pay. yet somehow the lesson isn’t ‘thank god I made the choice I did not to get my girlfriend pregnant at sixteen and have to marry’ but ‘wow life is so much more fulfilling when you have little to no money, work in a brutal blue collar job, and have no prospects of affording college for those three monsters’. (or alternately, his car breaks down in a small town and he’s forced to deal with the locals and discovers they’re so much more ‘real’ and ‘true’ than the slick city types he’s used to.)
death of the author and all that, but in this case we have to look at who bankrolls these stories (at least in the US) -- and they’re very much the top-five-percent, financially. which means the story that’s supposedly affirming these situations as the ‘best’ thing (and all the limitations that come with that: less/lower education, less/lower job prospects, less/lower cultural exposure) are basically saying: oh, you should pity the person with the full bank account who’s just jetted off to Paris, or eats at the best restaurants, or shops at all the best tailors, who has corporate meetings all day and broadway tickets at night, the poor things, their lives are so hollow and empty what-with not knowing what it’s like to live in a ‘real’ place with its ‘real’ values. feel good in your small town with your limited prospects and your never-ending bills, because at least you have a ‘real’ life unlike these people with none of your worries.
that’s a different kind of nihilism, but when you step back, you can see it’s just as bleak, in its own way. like stories that should be uplifting heroic sagas yet either end with nearly everyone (except the white people) dead or are gritty grimdark rise-to-the-top-only-to-get-stabbed -- there’s a common theme that trying to have more is gonna make you miserable and lonely (or dead, depending on the genre). and it’s all geared towards getting you to come away with the conclusion that those at the top are just miserable suffering bastards who have no friends other than their possessions and you’re so much better off not even trying. oh, those pitiful rich people.
although sometimes it’s also gendered in another direction -- looking at you, Avengers and The Witcher -- where the story sets up the cards in such a way that a female character cannot simultaneously be powerful and a mother. Or that trying for both dooms her in some way, although more often she’s forced to ‘sacrifice’ being a mother if she’s to gain that power. And then, of course, she views herself as an aberration or as broken, as if an inability to bear children renders a woman somehow monstrous. (it’s only one step removed from the true monstrosity, culturally, of a woman who refuses to have children, which is also on the story gatekeepers’ list of characters that must be punished for daring to step out of line.)
but all that said, we need to look at the stories that have staying power -- and a lot of the stories that come to mind, right now, just haven’t been around long enough to demonstrate whether they’ll become cultural touchstones.
whenever we talk about stories and the zeitgeist, I’m reminded of that avatar movie (the one with blue people) that was so lauded at the time for its technical stuff, that it’d stand up there with Titanic and It’s a Wonderful Life and whatever. But now (if it’s ever even mentioned) it’s mostly in terms of comparison of budget, or special effects. otherwise it was mostly seems a blip on the cultural radar, quickly forgotten, but you need that time and distance to see that it was barely a few ripples in the cultural ocean.
compared to films like, say, the first Star Wars movie. or Lord of the Rings -- book or movie. or any of Jane Austen’s books. all of those fundamentally do posit worlds in which change can happen, there can be happy endings where the bad guys are put in their place and the good guys (even the little ones) can eventually prevail. there’s a ton of others, across every genre, but it takes time to see that long-term impact.
which is to say, yes. over the past thirty years, there’s been a tremendous trend (especially in fantasy) to take a grimdark approach where nothing we do will ever matter and/or we shouldn’t try to do anything because it’s doomed to failure/misery. there’s tons of books and films and shows pushing that perspective. in the end, though, the stories that matter most, the ones whose lessons have the greatest impact, are those we go back to over multiple generations, remaking them, recasting them, revisiting them.
those are the time-tested stories that speak loudest, and I would not be surprised if --- like A New Hope or Lord of the Rings or Star Trek --- those stories, overall, are ones that argue the exact opposite of this flash-in-the-pan nihilism. that even the smallest can play a role, that change is not only possible but worth the fight, and that the arc of history does bend towards justice.
