How to Be Deep: State the Obvious

So I was just having a skype chat with a friend and we got to shooting the crap about recent trends in media (particularly indie gaming but both of us have a tendency to jump the rails), and we got to talking about Undertale and Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Thing we ended up talking about is how both wound up getting a perception from their fanbase that they were some sort of deep, complex or intellectual experiences, basically for putting a lot of complexities on top of what, played straight, would’ve been straightforward premises. Undertale in particular often gets said to be this really moving mind-opening experience for teaching people that violence is bad.

Like… wait, people don’t already know that violence is bad? This is seriously something none of Undertale’s fans had ever heard before or realized for themselves before going on a pacifist run?

I saw a similar reaction to the movie “The Dark Knight.” Okay, this is kinda spoilery I guess, but….

.
.
.
Well, you had a chance to back out.

Anyway, at one point there’s this scene where Joker does a “social experiment” involving placing bombs on two boats, handing the switch to the bombs to the people on the opposite boat, and saying “if you want to live, blow up the other boat.” On one boat there’s this big scary black man with a convict suit on, and he’s made out to be a criminal who will blow up the boat so he’s intimidating everyone into handing the remote to him… then he throws the remote out the window.

I remember for years (hell, I still see it even today) people pointing at that and being like “Oh how enlightened this movie is for being about how you can’t judge people by looks!”

Again, if you’re over the age of ten, this is something that modern society should’ve already taught you.

It’s not like that scene is even original–the He-Man episode “Heart of a Giant” basically did the exact same thing (presenting a nominally-scary person and showing he’s actually not what you think) and that’s just off the top of my head. So something a children’s cartoon from 1983 did was suddenly being hailed as forward-thinking in the early 2000s.

But its not even just works of fiction. On Youtube, there are all these channels that are… well, “political commentators” is probably the umbrella that covers most of them, though even that not very well. They tend to divide into Left or “SJW” (Shaun and Jen, hbomberguy, etc) or “Rational Skeptic” (Sargon of Akkad, Armoured Skeptic, etc). Of these, the only one worth watching is TL;DR and even he’s not perfect.

Now, every last one of these channels has people who preach to the high heavens about how their chosen talking head is the one true messiah and so wise and enlightened, when really, all they do is parrot your own beliefs back at you, and thus what you’re really praising is having your biases confirmed. That’s right, depth is code for bias confirmation now.

It’s funny how these channels obstensibly dislike each other but they’re very similar. I mentioned my own fave is Teal Deer, who apparently fought with Shaun and Jen (a fight I feel he won, incidentally), but they’re both very similar in a few respects… both, for example, talk a lot about how you can’t trust news sources because they’re all biased and will word things in ways intended specifically to support a narrative. Despite this, both are bad about taking everything they read at face value when it supports their own predisposed beliefs… or, if you’d rather, when it confirms their narrative.

It’s all so stupid.

As long as we praise people for the intellectual equivalent of drawing a circle using a drawing compass, we’ll never produce anything of true merit. Or really advance our thought.