Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.
South Park?
Maybe collectively those "actually the villain is just misunderstood" movies I hear are becoming a thing recently? They seem like a decent candidate for the "window into the culture of the time" thing.
Some of those wide-audience computer games like Candy Crush and Farmville?
This trend is a good decade or more old. First one I can think of offhand was the 2013 movie Maleficent.
Part of the problem of our time is that shared culture has significantly receded. There's little capacity to maintain "classics" as we understand them today. Take any massive artistic output (film, book, TV show) and it's nowadays either not seen/read/heard by more than 20% of the population or it's a flash in the pan hit which will be forgotten in another year or so (e.g. Barbenheimer).
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dril/comments/cqde0e/pound_for_poun...
Civilization has progressed little in the last 100 years.
* Minecraft: This will probably hold the position Pac Man holds to us. Single biggest culture-marker perhaps.
* Taylor Swift: She's like Michael Jackson was (perhaps because of access and audience size improvements)
I don't know if Wikipedia or the mainline social media websites would count. People remember The Myspace Era. Tumblr and Twitter have reputations for their culture but would they be classics? Hard to tell.
I think the film Tár will be. It captures the “fake it until you make it” spirit of the present really well along with the god complex and repressed guilt that accompany “making it”. Also the performances and direction are just excellent.
What work captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s and so far of the 2020s? I certainly can’t think of any novels that did it, far too much of that literary decade was about self-obsessed New Yorkers and had no relevance to anyone else. None of the reactions against it (i.e. Dimes Square) produced anything of lasting note either.
No ending was going to be good. Sopranos had a controversial ending too.
Silicon Valley captured the feel of the bay area and did a good job with satire.
2000s would be easier, I think 2010 is about the switch to super hero movies.
> No ending was going to be good
Why do you say that? Plenty amazing shows have great endings. And GOT isn't some uniquely incredible story. Killing MCs is not new to GOT, either, and you give that show too much credit. Lost did it long before GOT. 24. Grey's Anatomy is SUPER famous for it. They killed off like half the original cast in a single helicopter crash.
ASOIAF wasn't original bc it killed MCs. It was original bc it treated fantasy as political first, fantasy second.
It only ended a few years ago. The office took over 10 years to have a popularity resurgence.
At minimum they needed a full extra season and a full final season, if not more. But without GRRM handholding them throughout the entire plot they completely lost the path.
The writers just lacked the courage to do it. They tried to tack a Disney ending onto a tragedy.
The Lannisters would've had the only real army left without that WWE-style defeat of the Night King. Cersei's consistently outwitted everyone (except Tommen, I guess), and they knew how to buy loyalty.
Instead we ended up with the usual plot armor, and a "twist" that the character that behaved like a tyrannical zealot for 7+ seasons was, in fact, a tyrannical zealot.