You know what they say – nostalgia isn't
what it used to be!
[silence]
Every generation has its own urban legends,
from the hook dangling from the car door at makeout point-
"...dangerous lunatic has escaped..."
to the gangly figure of Slender Man. Like a
lot of community-based activities, the
development and spread of urban legends
has become a largely online activity, in
the form of creepypasta. Two of the most
popular categories of creepypasta are
"lost episodes" and video game creepypasta.
Lost episode stories like "Candle Cove"
and "Suicide Mouse" focus on unaired
episodes of cartoons or children's shows,
usually featuring creepy or violent
imagery. Video game creepypasta, like "Ben Drowned"
and "Lavender Town Syndrome," featured
modified haunted game cartridges. From a
cultural angle, the interesting thing
about all these creepypasta is that they
focus on retro media objects. Nobody's
writing creepypasta about Fortnight; it's
always older media objects from
childhood that we're looking back on and
turning sinister.
But why?
To understand what's happening, you have to understand
the purpose of nostalgia. Humans desire
continuity. When we go through periods of
cultural upheaval, we use nostalgia to
look back and try to find continuity
between the past and present. Which often involves rewriting, refocusing, or
entirely omitting parts of the past. So
for instance, when people of a certain
age venerate 1950s America, it's because
they're trying to recapture the good
stable times they felt in their youth by
focusing on rock-and-roll and diners and
Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. But they erased the unstable parts that made them
uncomfortable, like the Cold War
McCarthyism and the Civil Rights
Movement. Nostalgia as defined by
theorists Svetlana Boym is a desire "to
turn history into private or collective
mythology." It allows people to develop a
sense of community by rallying around a
shared past. Like when somebody says
"only 90s kids will remember," they're knitting together individual childhood
experiences into a larger collective.
I remember this.
I am a 90s kid. I belong to a
community of 90s kids. In 2005,
sociologist Janelle Wilson posited the
idea of "negative nostalgia," where instead
of looking back and finding happy
memories, we uncover misery, horror,
confusion and trauma. When Wilson was
conducting her research, I don't think negative nostalgia
existed as a broad phenomenon
yet. But since then, there's been a huge
uptick in media and legends that tell
warped stories about our collective
mediated past. Like dark fan theories
that warp mundane media. Have you heard
that Ferris Bueller was like just a
projection of Cameron's fractured psyche?
Or consider "Too Many Cooks," the surreal
sitcom-parody turned horror short.
Or "Petscop," an ongoing YouTube series about a creepy, unreleased game cartridge.
We're living in a time of unprecedented access to media. Previous generations couldn't
stream any obscure show from their youth. People remembered the parts of shows
that made sense to them – logically and
emotionally. So darker or more adult
aspects are overlooked. But our
relationship to media of the past
changes as our values change. Movies that are considered classics of a previous
era are often looked upon with horror as
the prevailing cultural norms shift.
Which all plays a part, but negative
nostalgia is more than that. We're
rewriting our past to be miserable and
broken because it creates continuity
with our present. It makes it seem like
things were always bad and always will
be. It's a profoundly hopeless stance. For
the most part, the negative nostalgia
that we've seen so far are fairly
playful fandom-esque activities. So as
long as you aren't basing your entire
identity on clickbait articles and fan
theories, you should have a well-rounded
sense of the past and the future. But it
does make me wonder what aspects of
today will be co-opted by our future
selves, as part of nostalgic
mythologizing. The halcyon days of
Pokemon Go? That year everyone played
Fortnight? What do you think we'll be
cherry-picking in the future? Leave your
response in the comments below.
Thank you for watching this video! I hope
you enjoyed it. If you did, go ahead and
hit like and subscribe to
Polygon. If you haven't watched the other
videos in this series, they're all pretty
much along these lines, talking about
culture and horror media and what it all
means to us now in these days today.
Today!
