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I don't usually feel like watching/playing/etc something when everyone around me is doing it
This has bugged me for a while. Why is this the case?
I'm not actually trying to be a hipster or anything. I don't have any (conscious) objections to liking something popular.
But, for some reason, when everyone around me is chattering about something, all I seem to get from it is that that something is really popular. I don't have any special inclination to experience it.
Say people keep talking Skyrim around me. This tells me (1) this game called Skyrim is really popular. It may even cause me to (2) look up what Skyrim is and maybe get a basic idea of the game. It, however, won't cause me to become interested in it. Well, I guess if word-of-mouth is a marketing tactic, it might get me to evaluate the product to an extent that I find sufficient. (But even then, I still haven't even watched the trailer for Skyrim on Steam, and I really don't feel like finding out more about it.)
This applies even when people say that the product is excellent. People have praised Bioshock Infinite and The Walking Dead and FTL: Faster Than Light and Virtue's Last Reward and various other games extensively in front of me. I still don't really have that feeling of wanting to play them, though.
I know when everyone was chattering about Puella Magi Madoka Magica, all that chatter pretty much produced three pieces of information in my head about it: that it's an alleged deconstruction of the magical girl genre, that it's really popular (and is annoying me by displacing my own pet mature-take-on-the-magical-girl-genre series Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha), and that Kyubey is evil. While I've seen a few other magical girl series, I didn't really feel much of a reason to watch it. It was somewhere far down on my to-watch list, and remained there until someone mentioned that Yuki Kajiura wrote the soundtrack, at which point it shot up to my shortlist.
The closest that large-scale peer pressure has come to making me want to play something is Minecraft. I've run into Minecraft players in several different social contexts, in meatspace and webspace. And Minecraft actually has a major social component as a core part of its gameplay. And I still haven't bought Minecraft, though I've contemplated it seriously at least twice.
But in general, I just don't feel any special "reason" to hop onto a bandwagon regarding a creative media work. To me, all the chatter about [particular item] is just kinda...there. Or maybe this is only because I haven't quite found that many people who share my tastes, with whom I'd actually have a better reason to bandwagon?
Maybe because I've had experiences of getting recommendations from people and feeling that they just totally missed the mark, even if they were derived from something that hit the mark? Or maybe it's because I've learned to ignore hype from getting my entertainment on a limited budget as a kid?
Anyway, anyone else feel this way about stuff that people talk about a lot around you?
Comments
pretty sure nanoha and meduka actually had the same director, akiyuki shinbou
who also did a bunch of shaft weirdness.
First season only.
Plus the guys in charge of the plots are different, Gen Urobuchi for Madoka and someone from Seven Arcs for Nanoha.
If PMMM taught me anything, it's that transforming super heroes in Japan can all count as the same genre, no matter how different they look.
Also, I love this image macro:
But toku shows and mahou shoujo magical girl shows have noticeably different storytelling devices, general themes and such, regardless of how many literal plot details Madoka Magica shares with that one Kamen Rider Ryuki.
First off, sorry for the rant mode:
Thematically, Madoka is honestly bizzarely similar to Ultraman Nexus too. Besides the blatant Faust influence, Witches' Labyrinths being similar to Meta/Dark Field without the constraints of live-action, something about hope, the message in both epilogues, and how
Oh, and there's how both shows have the protagonist spend most of the show without actually having any powers.
I'm not really sure what I'm getting at with this. But it's possibly related to how I'm annoyed by people on that Godzilla forum complaining about things in Ultraman that are basically par for the course in tokusatsu, but they didn't seem to actually know because their main point of reference/comparison was kaiju movies, even though that genre's not very alive these days (although Legendary's Godzilla might change that).
More to the point (did I ever have a point?), Precure apparently shares writers with Sentai and Rider, although at least one of those is That Dude Who Writes Episodes For Everything.
Also, I think Madoka might be more than a little overrated in terms of being a magical girl show, since a biig portion of the fanbase don't wach other magical girl stuff, but maybe that's just the impression I get.
Anyway, something more on-topic:
I don't think I ever needed to develop an inclination to watch something, and I don't think hype for anything has ever put me off from actually watching. Like, I noticed a lot of hype about Pacific Rim, but I didn't pay attention to that. I just thought one day "oh, giant robots and monsters. Guess I'll just go to the movie theater and see." But movies might be a different case due to shorter overall runtime.
Maybe your problem isn't so much hype aversion, but that you need to feel an inclination to watch something? Finishing is one thing, but just checking out a couple of episodes isn't quite the same.
Of course, this is coming from someone who specifically avoids making "I'll watch this someday" plans so as not develop a backlog.
That's just Toei cutting costs though
That's a thing Nanoha has too, I think <_<
Actually I've heard a lot about Doctor Who and it seems pretty interesting, so I'm actually mildly interested in seeing it.
Maybe it just depends on what it is. I mean, I've heard a lot about Homestuck but I'm not interested in it and am also slightly annoyed at how it's everywhere. But I don't get that same feeling with Doctor Who.
You know where Madoka's themes come from? It's Faust. You know, the one that actually had a paragraph of it stuck in as graffiti in like the second episode?
^ Yeah, I know that. It's actually kinda discussed in a Q&A session with Urobuchi, which I have an urge to bring out whenever I can (btw, there might be spoilers for his other stuff there, in case anyone cares). My point is, PMMM doesn't really strike me as much of a magical girl work, unless said genre isn't really a thing. Does it really count as a "mature take on the magical girl genre" when it's biggest influences are certainly not magical girl stuff? The impression I get is that it wasn't written as "this is waht magical girl shows would be like if they were more mature" but rather "lets make a magical girl show with XYZ themes".
I'm just going in a roundabout way to say "PMMM is good, but not deserving of all that praise", aren't I?
@fourteenwings wouldn't that kind of thing have greater implications when cutting costs involves sharing writers?
If that's true about Nanoha's fanbase as well, I have to wonder: are the most popular examples of every genre only popular because they have fans that otherwise don't watch/read/play/etc things in said genre?
Man, this is derailing a lot.
Generally, yes.
I remember that in the TV Tropes Madoka thread, Arilou said that, given its obvious influences, Madoka would probably end in a really similar way, to what madotards responded what amounted to basically "b-but muh grimdark gen urobuchi"... I would've liked to see their reactions once he turned out to be absolutely right, but that thread was a shithole, so I decided to not venture into it again.
Well, logically, the most popular, say, magical girl shows are probably going to be watched by more people than just those who watch a bunch of magical girl shows.