In order for someone to actually be pretentious, there has to be a pretense. Being purposefully non-mainstream doesn't make someone pretentious as much as a more normal individual would like to believe. Hipsters aren't necessarily pretentious, even when they have a pattern of rejecting the mainstream. A hipster might be pretentious if their image is disingenuous (ex. wearing some article they don't actually identify with, pooh-poohing something publicly while appreciating it secretly), but that doesn't have to describe all or most hipsters.
I get called a hipster because I often reject or have no interest in many things that most people consider good on that basis alone. When something becomes mainstream, I like it less because I believe something going from unknown to mainstream is usually a bad sign, and that instinct is almost always right. Breaking Bad was way better until everyone started slobbering over it and chanted "get back to cooking meth bruh", and look how it ended. Such a long way for a ham sandwich. haha
It isn't that you like something, it's that you don't want to be associated to some other things. And you don't want to be associated to those other things because of some pretense about what associating to those things means.
Maybe this is confusing because of the phrase "false pretense", which is redundant and can lead to some people thinking that there's such a thing as a pretense that isn't false-ish.
At the end of the day, I think the pretentiousness comes from superiority signalling. When a vegan talks about how eating meat is wrong the implication is that they feel morally superior to those who eat meat. And when someone rejects things generally, as opposed to just liking their own things, it implies that those things they reject aren't worth consideration, and hence anyone who does has some inferior judgement or taste.
The statement "I would never listen to disco music" implies there is something wrong with doing so, and hence something wrong with those who choose to. "I would never listen to disco music" is a pretentious statement.
Star Wars, once lauded, has been milked dry. There are a few good works, but by and large they're beating a dead horse.
The same thing is happening to Marvel. People checked out after Endgame.
Game of Thrones was so near to perfection. It had an unusually large cast of a hundred characters and an expansive world to draw down. But even if the new show is good, the magic is gone.
The mystery of Stranger Things after season one ended. We're getting a rehash with common character tropes you can find anywhere.
The allure of Westworld softened after season one attempted to open up to bigger themes, but actually cut down on the possibility space.
The third Godfather. Dexter. Every single Jurassic Park but the first. Jaws. On and on.
Chiefly, it's simply a function of multiplied probabilities to continue with a success streak. Eventually the odds do not pay off in your favor.
But I think another contributing factor is that our brains begin to fit the shape of the setting, the motifs, the character arcs, the narrative world - and we just aren't surprised or pleased any longer. Few people would ask for twenty seasons of a show. Or ten movies in a given franchise. Our brains learn the shape of the landscape and grow bored.
First, it would be weird to say that was because Marvel was falling apart. It was the conclusion of a decade long movie franchise. Of course people might watch something else once the story they had been following was done. It doesn't mean they won't come back or didn't like the new movies, it means they wanted a break.
But mainly, it's also not true. Leaving aside 2020 (when Marvel released their movies all online), let's look at 2021. 4 out of the top 10 movies were Marvel movies (including number 1).
In 2022, they have 3 of the top 10 slots. They were beaten out by the Top Gun reboot and the latest Jurassic Park
My point exactly. We tire of the familiar.
> 4 out of the top 10 movies were Marvel movies
Disney operates at a scale none of their peers can match. They have the most well tuned pipeline of any production company. I'd expect this.
Nevertheless, metrics point to declining interest. If I had time to write a longer comment, I'd be able to cite sources and offer more than just a suggestion to google "marvel fatigue".
Which is both sad and hilarious in the context of this thread
In 2021, the only original things were the highest production cost Chinese movie in history that glorified the Chinese army vanquishing their enemies (South Korea, the US) in the Korean War (this is the one that got a sequel) and a Chinese comedy. The western movies were the latest Bond, Fast and Furious, Kong vs. Godzilla, and Sing 2.
(A Chinese movie series also was in the top 10 in 2021)
That's been true since 1983.
in that the corporate machine made a mistake in not extracting all that it could from it in follow-up seasons, movies, sequels, etc.
You know how good a movie is by how many sequels it took to kill it.
Kojima and the Metal Gear series.
Popular movies get discussed to death and over-mis-interpreted to the point where just the mention of it causes a mental effort to ignore the assumed sycophantic rambling that's to follow.
Popularity ruins perceived quality by the nature of media to seize upon it and, as someone else said in a slightly different context above, squeeze every last cent of profit out of the opportunity that's presented by it's popularity.
Technically it doesn't affect the quality, but it adds a thick layer of media slime that can take years to dry up and fall off.
Lastly, popularity and quality are two scales that have interesting intersections. It's a concept I'd actually like to investigate further.
Another mechanism is flanderization, in which writers simplify characters or other aspects of the show for various reasons, mostly laziness and to conform to expectations the audience develops about how characters should act. Characters with depth become shallow shadows of their past selves as one aspect of their personality starts to dominate the others. When characters are driven by audience expectations instead of the writer's internal muse, they become soulless and predictable.
Another is overdeveloping the setting. Throwaway lines in earlier media get needlessly turned into developed storylines. It leaves less to the imagination. This is often related to the first mechanism I mention; the writers squeezing all the juice out of the earlier media.
Hipsters are people who follow trends. They try to be "hip."
Rejecting things because everyone else likes them is not being a hipster. It's being a contrarian.
If someone ever asks me for an example of a pretentious comment, I'm going to give them this