Slop

2025-09-30

I have not watched anything in the Star Wars or Marvel franchises since episode 9 and Endgame, respectively. I didn't want to watch either of them, but I made a concious choice to do so, because both represented natural jumping off points and because these two giant franchises owned by one media megacorp represent something to me: slop.

I'm tired of slop. Low to mediocre quality, mass-produced, generic creative content optimized overwhelmingly for the dollar rather than anything resembling the human spirit. The apotheosis of a "culture industry" as described by Adorno and Horkheimer. It almost doesn't need explanation, because the term has arisen so naturally to describe an omnipresent phenomenon in modern culture. Maybe, in fact almost certainly, I'm too much of an aesthete. But the opposite is true of our zeitgeist and it worries me.

As massive as these franchises are, I was socially corralled into participating, but they were never particularly my thing. Early on, that was more because I was of the DC and Star Trek tribes, rather than a sophisticate. Something has changed in the 10-15 years. Some of that is me and some of that is the world.

On my end, it ironically started with an attempt to get deeper into the comic book world. My introduciton had been cartoons and not the actual comic books, so as an adult I started buying them. Very quickly, I learned a lot of creative content was terrible, expensive, and the most important lesson of all, that I needed a way to separate the good from the bad. Comics were a well-trodden medium by that point and the answer was repeated everywhere I looked: you had to actually follow along with the creative people involved in what you liked, not merely the fictional world or character. The analog to this in other works quickly became apparent and I have entirely stopped caring about actors, for instance, in favor of looking up which writers and producers are involved.

Our media landscape has, I think, encouraged the opposite. After 2005, Star Trek has been rebooted with an entirely different set of people behind the scenes. The actors come back sometimes, but they're essentially human props. I hate it. It has none of the same je ne sais quoi. Some of my fellow fans have recognized this, but their attribution is to variance in quality. Discussion never seems to hit on the central point I have already made, which is that the people, the minds, involved in this creative endeavor have changed entirely. Very few seem to have caught onto the Baudrillardian sign-order switch that has occurred.

Everywhere I look, I see that same pattern. In board games, the biggest consumers are infatuated with themes and art which are pasted-on by publishers, rather than the underlying mechanisms or a true ludic narrative. Popular music is in such an advanced stage of it, I don't even know what to write. Books are perhaps the most concerning to me and increasingly look like a funhouse mirror for liberal women to fantasize. At the bookstore I go to often, the poetry section was recently removed for an expansion of dime-store romance, because that's where the money is. What hope do we have as a culture when women can't even get off to poetry anymore?

I don't have a remedy for this. Not even a suggestion. Perhaps this post is a failure altogether, but these are some things I have seen and needed to get out into words.