#zillenial

[cherrydanish]

[hwang-inhos-fish]

I miss when YouTube was all Little Guys Doing Silly Videos all alone in their bedroom, and grandpas making lofi 10 minute life advice rambles, and dumb skits people filmed on a potato at 2am.

It used to be a museum of random creativity, or like a scrapbook of cool stuff people found. Scraps of authentic human experience. Now everything is polished. Now the 14 year olds filming alone in their bedrooms are doing it in front of carefully curated backgrounds.

[sugarplumraindrop]

[silvermoon424]

Watching a video about adults who are jealous of teenagers and there was a brief segment about how Britney Spears was treated by the media as a child and teenager. I was just a kid in the 2000s so thankfully I wasn’t aware of a lot of this, but JESUS CHRIST, the way people talked about Britney was criminal, vile, and completely horrifying.

People were talking about her “budding sexuality” and how “seductive” she was becoming when she was A TINY 10-YEAR-OLD CHILD!!! It only ramped up when she became a teenager and she had to deal with people both sexualizing and slut-shaming her. This is why I will ALWAYS support Britney, because it’s outright impossible for ANYONE to turn out “normal” after a life like hers.

I’ve blocked out a lot of it from my conscious memory but growing up as a girl in the 2000s was straight-up traumatic. Celebrity girls and women had it the worst, obviously, but that culture of misogyny, fatphobia, sexualization, etc pervaded absolutely every facet of society. Gen Z tends to glamorize the Y2K era and there were parts of it that were good, but speaking as someone who grew up during the era there’s so much trauma about my self-image I have left to unpack.

[haley-harrison]

so ticked off when I hear "the youth is too leftist" or "young people are radicalized". bitch if we were, we'd be seizing the means of production. i personally think we aren't left and radical enough

[199x-200x]

[3milybaby2008]

[galateas-revenge]

Maybe it’s because I’m now an old™ but I’ve noticed that there’s been a change in a lot of fandom spaces where people don’t comment that much anymore. Like back in the glory days when I was but a young teen lurker there would be long ass threads of repost discussions. I really miss that. I wanna talk to people about art (mine, theirs, whomevers) while kicking my feet back and forth like a teen girl.

Is it cringe? Yeah. But a life lived uncringe is like food with no seasoning.

Give me your sappy Hansry head cannons! Let loose the dogs of cringe and live!

Edit: Also if you want them fics updated you gotta comment on them. Like o feel like this used to be standard practice but I feel like the best part about reading/writing fanfiction was the fact that you could literally talk with the author. Like I had a specific POTC fanfic author I loved and I remember us chatting back and forth and learning about how she was from Quebec etc.