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Comment by dooraven | Hacker News Reader

> A tell-tale sign of a decadent society where people are depressed and unfulfilled, more interested in escape from life than engagement with life because everything they might live for is compromised for profit at the expense of everything else.

Not really, where exactly am I going to get dragons in real life?

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How are you contradicting my point? It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features. We are living in strange times and it's not coincidence. We have lost capacity for art that engages with sincere human experience, a concerning situation for a society to find itself in. It means we are losing capacity to engage with ourselves; it is no laughing matter.

Truly, these are strange times. We need to go back to the times where adults scoffed at the robots of Asimov. I mean the time machines and vampires of Wells and Stoker. I mean the electrically reanimated corpses of Shelley. I mean the ghosts and fairies and witchcraft of Shakespeare. I mean the demigod superheroes of Homer. I mean…

Narrative works can make use of otherworldly features without being remotely escapist. Shakespeare and mythology are fine examples of this.

Science fiction is historically not escapist at all, but that has somewhat changed.

These days we have adults everywhere who will openly exclaim their plain adoration of dragons and robots and hobbits devoid of any particular meaning or social value. They just merely love dragons and robots and hobbits. This is escapism and it's historically unprecedented.

Shakespeare was escapist. So was Asimov. So was mythology.

Not technically wrong, but it is one thing to decorate the complexities and contradictions of the human experience, and quite another to distract from the complexities and contradictions of the human experience. I think we both know which one is happening today.

> decorate the complexities and contradictions of the human experience

That is not something American cinema ever done tho.

Jules Verne's books basically 'young adult' fiction in his day. I think the 19th century nature of his works, which may challenge modern readers, likely obscures this fact from people today.

I've been reading some of his books recently and enjoy them, he's a legend for a reason. But once you get accustomed to the style and archaic words, you start to realize the stories and characters are pretty basic. Where he really shines are the creative premises.

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features.

Literally the oldest surviving epic is Gilgamesh, which features Tiamat, the mother of dragons.

is this a bit or have you not read any chinese or indian myths? where do you think the yellow dragon being associated with the chinese emperor comes from? or Indira and the Vitra? what about St George and the Dragon?

humans have been obsessed with fantasy for centuries and even more.

Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.

We live in a time when adults everywhere will openly exclaim their adoration for fantastical nonsense. They will unabashedly assure you that they simply adore dragons and robots and hobbits, devoid of any purposeful meaning or relation to the world we live in. Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.

> Mythology and fantasy are drastically different things. Meaning, purpose, context, are very important for understanding art, of course.

They are literally the same. Fantasy is just modern mythology and most fantasy is rooted in ancient historical tales or historical events. The Kree-Skrull war for example was based on WWII USA vs Japan.

Old mythological stories and religions are based on historical events and switched to entertain. It's almost a certainty that Ramanaya never happened but Indian invasions of Sri Lanaka did happen etc.

> Almost nobody who loves zombie films, for example, has the first clue what zombies meant when first devised.

Ok and who cares? People don't speak ancient Sanskrit or old English either. Are you going to be complaining people who love English don't have the first clue what English looked like when it was invented.

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features

Ever heard of Odyssey and Homer? That is adults being fascinated by escapist features long long time ago. We have records of adults entertainment and adults being fascinated by entertainment from pretty much any historical periods we have records from.

> It's historically very abnormal for adults to be so fascinated with dragons and other escapist features.

For some reason dubious psychologists had a thing for King Arthur stuff for quite a while and I'm not really sure there's any dragons in there, there's weird fisher kings and stuff. I think someone is rich enough and has enough free time (probably over a billion now, but similar people existed in the past in lower numbers), they would find some weird thing to work on or think about.

You’re basically calling them all the adults who read the young adult books

Or just maybe I don’t care that people think I’m too old to enjoy the things I like, and don’t force myself to suffer through some art house cringe fest because some guy on the internet thinks it’s a sign of living in a capitalistic hell scape while posting on a site specifically targeting capitalists.

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