“The current obsession with nostalgia and remake culture is easy to understand when you realize that it’s a symptom of a culture that isn’t allowed to imagine a future.”
Nah. It’s just a management decision to ensure shareholder satisfaction by reusing proven bestsellers.
Still need market demand. People want these products.
You can’t just chase a trend and throw out a game and expect it to print money. Ask Sony how that went for their run at a hero shooter.
But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.
Or… Maybe for most of human history we re-told the same stories over and over again for thousands of years until the relatively recent concept of “intellectual property” has forbidden us individuals from doing what comes naturally, forming this sort of weird resentment for when corporations do it?
This is a real Im14AndThisIsDeep meme. More people have access to platforms where they can share their creative works than at any other point in human history, if you aren’t seeing it then you’re not really trying to find it. That point would be fair, too; its hard to find original content (even more so with the rise of AI-driven SEO). It’s not the trend in hollywood, but hollywood doesn’t define culture NEARLY as much as they’d like to think they do…)
I think that lately people are taking refuge in things that made them happy in the past because not being able to see a clear future in their lives. Returning again and again to the things that made them happy in their day. And companies are only taking advantage of that. I’m not saying new thing don’t exist, I’m saying people are not willing to search them because they only want to escape to the past.
Idk, I see more people that they live is something like pokemon that actually they family, career or they own projects or dreams.
You’ve a winning argument, to be sure! Not sure where I quantified how much I think hollywood influences culture but okay.
FWIW, obviously popular media both is influential and responds to culture. “Hollywood” really shouldn’t be treated as a singular entity if we’re trying for a semblance of legitimacy. This is really quickly going to fall into a discussion of the role of the audience and how that’s changed in the digital era (vs. when Aristotle first brought it up…), and neither of us care enough to suffer through thay. Suffice to say it’s not cut and dry, and beyond that I dont know any better than you do what specific impact they have (and neither do they).
People like what they know, but if something’s good enough people will like it. Maybe touch grass for a bit.
I feel like people are taking this commentary a little too literally. I don’t think it’s intended to suggest that all remakes are always bad and we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying them. Mankind has a habit of romanticising the past, and that’s led to something of a modern obsession with nostalgia. These are fair, and interesting, statements.
That said, the choice of pairing the statement with an allusion to FF7 is probably not a great choice. The remake is fantastic, and isn’t at all symptomatic of the problem of quick cash-in, nostalgia driven remakes. Hell, the first game specifically tackles themes of pre-determination, which functions as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for nostalgia. And fascinatingly the meta-analysis of this is critical of exactly the same thing: there are literally spirits of sorts which attack the player and manipulate events to ensure the original story remains untouched, and they become a prominent antagonist of the game as the player works to tell a story that is different from the one told in the original. Perhaps there’s something counterproductive about attaching this message to a remake that’s critical of soullessly telling the same stories we’ve already heard.
You seem to have liked the remake (and the game in general). I have finished the first one last year but for some reason, it didn’t click with me and the whole commentary you made wooshed over me (unless your whole text is satire). Are there some pointers you could give me to understand FF7 a bit better?
No satire here; I genuinely think it’s a great example of a remake done well.
There are some major breaks from the original plot, which in itself would be neat, but they introduce an entire plot element that interacts with this derivation. The spirits I was talking about, “Whispers” (had to look up the official name, tbh), appear whenever the story attempts to break from the original story from the original release. In universe, this is explained as pre-determination, or destiny. Thanks to our meta knowledge, we know in reality that these spirits are attempting to maintain the timeline from the original release.
As an early example, after the events at the first Mako reactor, Cloud decides to collect his pay and go his own way, which is not the original intended path of the game. To correct this, a group of Whispers attack the party, and ultimately injure Jessie, preventing her from going on the mission. Needing another body, Barrett is forced to rehire Cloud for Avalanche’s mission to the next reactor. Without spoiling specific details, the whispers slowly become a form of antagonist as the characters try harder to get away from the original plot of FFVII.
This is interesting in a few ways. First, we’ve introduced a new major conflict in the form of the characters fighting against a physical embodiment of destiny. They do not want the outcome of their struggles to be predetermined, particularly as that predetermination involved the death and suffering of some specific characters. This is, in my opinion, an interesting new plot element beyond being “the same game again.”
Second, stepping back, and examining this with a wider lens, we can look at the Whispers for what they are to us, the players, rather than what they are to the characters. We know they are not maintaining “destiny,” but instead trying to reestablish the original story we loved. As a result, I see the Whispers as the collective voice of the “change nothing” remake ideology. When a community asks for new content of IPs they love, there will always be diehard essentialists who want their loved stories to remain untouched; the Whispers, then, are these people.
So if the Whispers are a physical representation of the “change nothing” remake ideology, then what is there to make of the fact that they’re largely an antagonist? This seems to me that the writers were critical of this culture, so much so that they ask you to fight it to earn the different take on the story. Of course, it’s far from the only derivation from the original game, but that’s exactly my point: FFVII remake was so far divorced from the conceptual, soulless “let’s pump out the same game again” remake that they literally wrote that culture into a new antagonist.
Wow, I went in on the remake blind (having never played the original before) and shrugged off the whole Whisper thing as another element of the world that makes little sense to me yet. That’s actually a very interesting idea and I wish I had played the original first to get to appreciate it.
Thanks for the explanation!
