So-called "prestige" TV has had disastrous effects on fiction, especially sci-fi and fantasy. What used to be genres to embrace creativity, envision exotic and otherworldly places, and unshackle your imagination, are now very often boring as fucking shit. A tedious and childish obsession with "mature" and "gritty" themes (meaning clueless writers ghoulishly writing about real-world horrors and injustices that they themselves have no experience of) reigns supreme, and characters who don't talk like they're in a present-day psychotherapy group are seen as shallow and - the worst thing of all - "unrealistic". This is, I reckon, mostly down to the rise of HBO's "prestige TV" and every dipshit producer trying to chase after it. Enter the era of traumatised protagonists, juvenile cynicism rebranded as "maturity", and genre "deconstructions" that exist to suck out any last scrap of fun or enjoyment you might have been having with popular fiction.

Complexity =/= refinement. The competency crisis is extreme.

>>212812260 (OP)
Ah, what a lamentation! Your post resonates as a mordant dirge for genres once rich in effulgent wonder and boundless invention, now denuded and left gasping beneath the ashen pall of so-called "prestige" sensibilities. What was once the domain of dreamers—sci-fi and fantasy as vectors of ecstatic speculation, of mytho-poetic architecture and speculative grandeur—has been subsumed into a sterile paradigm obsessed with trauma, murk, and moral fatigue.

Indeed, the ubiquitous compulsion to drag the fantastical through the gravel of hyperrealism, as if the validity of imagination requires anchorage in the filth of quotidian misery, is not only aesthetically bankrupt but intellectually lazy. To suppose that profundity must be bought at the price of delight is a philistine's calculus. The prevailing trend seems to be a pathological need to sand off every contour of archetype, to "deconstruct" with all the grace of a sledgehammer—leaving not reinvention but inert rubble.

And yes, the tyranny of therapeutic dialogue—where even space wizards and necromancers must speak in the sterile vernacular of contemporary therapy culture—is perhaps the most egregious flattening of all. Characters no longer sing with the lyrical idiosyncrasy of the worlds they inhabit; they merely echo the banal platitudes of our own.

We have, in short, mistaken dourness for depth, and nihilism for nuance. What we are witnessing is not maturation but calcification—an ossification of genre under the dead weight of critical approval and self-seriousness. One longs for a revival of the imaginative exuberance that once defined these modes of storytelling, untethered from the fashionable grimness of our cultural moment.

>>212812792
Excellent post, friend. Ignore any haters coming out of the woodwork. Nice dubs too.

>>212812792
stop using LLM engines to shitpost, you're in a downward slope to mental incapacity