Manchildren

Epidemic or symptom?

It started with the Millennials. They were the first generation to begin infantilizing themselves, with their “adult coloring books” and their “barcades”. Nostalgia had existed prior to them, but it was more of an appreciation for what the world used to be like rather than a harkening back to their particular childhood. I think, during Coronavirus, it got substantially worse. You used to be very shamed for liking anything viewed as “immature”, even if the material was made for adults. Today, adults regularly consume movies, shows, play video games made for children. There are a lot of adults who simply never grow out of their childhood interests, but then there are also adults who actively pursue content really made for children. The cartoons and movies adults are permitted to watch is getting younger as well, perhaps as a byproduct of there simply being less of a market for “children’s cartoons”.

First of all, people are having less kids. Have you noticed? I rarely see pregnant women in public nowadays. Maybe I only noticed them in the past because people tend to have kids in close succession, so being a younger kid I saw more people whose parents were pregnant. But, the statistics would like up with there really being less pregnant women nowadays. An entirely adult audience is corrosive to popular culture, but I’ll get to that later… Secondly, kids are no longer engaging exclusively with “kids products”. They’re already falling into the YouTube and Social Media rabbit hole before they exit Grade School.

What is the mechanism that brings us from a low-child society, to adults gravitating towards children’s entertainment? I have noticed that it is not even distributed in the way you think it would be, with the ever-deceitful stereotype of the “nerd” floating into one’s head when they imagine what a manchild or womanchild would be like. No, it is very common in the less sophisticated sectors of society for adults to never stop watching cartoons. Haven’t you ever noticed that Black people are obsessed with Spongebob? I like Spongebob, it’s very ‘Spongebob and Mr. Krabs’ if you ask me. But they don’t really grow out of that phase. The “Disney Adult” thing is also certainly not a characteristic of the upper middle class. Much of America’s working class, especially women, have basically been forced to become “Disney adults” out of necessity. Disneyworld is their big vacation they take every so often, maybe with their family but often with only a “partner” or some adult best friends. They can’t afford to do something “bougie” for vacation, like visit Europe or Japan. Or at least, they cannot do so while retaining the level of comfort that they can get going to Disneyworld. So this large swathe of America is forced to gaslight themselves into believing the obvious cornball nonsense that Disney spits out about their amusement parks being “magical places”. Propaganda originally meant for children. Albeit, Disney’s array of products is larger now.

Yes, Disneyworld is probably pretty fun, I know that a lot of effort goes into that park, but people still spend a great deal of money on it despite it being cheaper than going somewhere across the ocean. Although the term is “manchild”, I have noticed that this childishness is really more common among adult women, it’s just that women don’t really like “things” as much as men. A lot of grown ass women I know are still buying a bunch of plush toys for their rooms. If they play vidya, it is often games like Animal Crossing… When it was most popular during Coronavirus it was then that this shift in behavior first hit me… To see all of these grown 26 year old women and men playing a “relaxation game” that is really meant for 8 year olds, it was just kind of cringey. Just look at Animal Crossing, it is very obviously meant for children and it doesn’t really have any skill involved. And it was big, I remember even the Byedon campaign tried to sail off of its success.

Biden’s official campaign Animal Crossing Island

I played Animal Crossing when I was, hmm, probably in about 5th grade. It was pretty fun then, but I really only enjoyed the fishing and the bug catching. I didn’t like the NPCs. And if you want to work on a house, go play Minecraft or something. Speaking of which… Another game I have noticed adults increasingly playing is Roblox. This one is really quite strange, because Roblox had a bad reputation as “full of 10 year olds” when I used to play it (I started in 2013). I guess Roblox has gotten much more varied in content these days, so maybe that’s why people who played it as kids are still playing it. A third weird example of adults liking childish shit is Bluey… This show is fucking ass dude, don’t even let your kids watch it.

People in this generation, in a broader sense, never get over their childhoods. Whenever I have conversations with my peers, it often directs to reminiscing about interests we had as children. “Remember X? Yeah it was the shit back then”. This definitely became a very big thing with Millennials, there was a long while where they never shut the hell up about the Nineties. There is also a broader sense of dread about being an adult, and a wish to return to being a child. Everyone wishes they were a kid again. There is an effort to pretend that old age is the “best years of your life” which is why you should waste your youth away doing busy work in government-funded child prisons and then spend most of your life grinding for money to “spend when you’re older”. This is not an authentic argument and that is why nobody likes to hear it. Before a few decades ago, it was well-understood that you weren’t working for yourself. You were working so that your children could live a better life than you did. In an increasingly child-free society, there is a lack of subjects who adults can impress their childish whimsy onto, and “adulting” delivers more and more anxiety. It would make sense for people to regress into childish habits, but this prophecy is made into a self-fulfilling one due to the authority of nonsense psychology about “healing internalized trauma” and your “inner child”. The problem with the manchildren is not really that they are childish, it is more that they are babyish… They do not desire the wonder of childhood, they desire the security of it. The comfort. The feeling that no action needs to be taken. This is why they play animal crossing, and do coloring books, and other extremely low-stakes habitual activities for “good vibes” and such and such.

All of that being said… This is a symptom more than it is a cause. A symptom of a society increasingly disconnected from the tree of life, and coping with it. It is also a symptom of a society declining in cultural sophistication, but I think that culture generated for adults is actually so bad that there are some things we are “taking with us” out of necessity. They’re just way better than the garbage which gets produced for “mature audiences”. Dragon Ball Z and other Shonens are pretty undeniably made for middle school aged boys. Although I am a big fan of Dragon Ball, if you’ve ever seen IQ unadjusted by age you might understand why a certain demographic of people have the same tastes as 12 year old White and Japanese boys. And yet, rewatching Dragon Ball Z Kai, I am reminded just how dogshit media actually directed at me is. Dragon Ball is a lot like the Iliad, it’s all about some strong guy rampaging everyone, and then getting beaten by an even stronger guy. That is a blunt way to describe many parts of the Iliad up until the climactic battle between Achilles and Hector. I talk about this more in depth about my post on children’s cartoons, but basically it seems like a lot of the stuff I grew up watching (and on top of that, playing) had a positive simple message of pursuing excellence, which is precisely what the classical hero’s journey is. Meanwhile, this theme is considered too shallow for something “sophisticated” in this day and age. Video games sort of necessarily have this message because, well, it is a game. The objective is to win. Well, not if you are a big baby who plays Animal Crossing at the ripe old age of 26.

I am usually pleasantly refreshed by the non-subversiveness of the characters from my favorite video games growing up. Comic books are extremely pozzed. Anime is, ehh, sort of pozzed. All Western popular culture that was popular 20 years ago and has had any material made of it in the past 10 years? Probably pozzed. This is an enduring issue with “popular culture”. Tolkien will never be pozzed no matter how much shitty games and TV shows they make with his IP, because we all know only the things Tolkien wrote are canon. I can see the problem that Nintendo is increasingly reliant on autistic tranny adult fans, and not actual children whose parents didn’t want them playing something like GTA or COD (usually this brand of parents have a conservative bend). They’re still leagues better than most American gaming companies, but you can tell they’re starting to cave. Princess Peach and Zelda not getting kidnapped as much… More serving as playable characters and not damsels in distress. These parents also ruin games and TV shows though by getting mad at them for “promoting violence”. Like most things, this is a product of libtardation even if the crowd doing it is more conservative. Liberals made “school shootings” an issue in order to peddle gun control (school shootings are a non-issue — unless you also consider lightning strikes an issue). Liberals have also made hereditarianism socially taboo, so people have to pretend that a criminals and other social undesirables must have been conditioned to be the way they are. So, less stuff oriented at children focuses on conflict these days, but that’s also possibly because these infantilized Millenioidz are the ones consuming this content and they have a sort of psycho-ideological desire to bubblewrap everything.

So, it seems there are actually two types of immaturity possible in modern society — the first, is the harm avoidance and escapism which characterizes many a neurotic Liberal. These such people’s gravitation towards childish activity comes from a fear of “adulting”. Then, there are those who feel suffocated by modern society, who really wish to return to the “boyishness” present in pretty much all previous societies — they retain a sense of childlike curiosity, love of games, and rebelliousness. And there are people in between these two extremes, with another axis for intensity of immaturity. The image I headed this article with presumably refers to someone of the latter category, those who are bored of adulting — the opposite of being “afraid” of it… Is this version necessarily desirable? Well, you should hold onto those positive attributes that children and adolescents have, but it is also worth remembering that when you were a kid you almost certainly didn’t like it that much. When you’re a kid, you always want to be an adult. It’s so foolish, but it’s better for us that we have that desire.

Next post… What should it be. Confederacy or Anime?