Thread by @overunderwriter

So having read your particular blog post on the Spoony One and the transformation of Gen Y nostalgia @wastelandJD , it made me think of something that had flopped twice somewhat with the audiences. But had the same Gen Y vibes.

Scott Pilgrim. Both versions by Brian O'Malley.

https://twitter.com/wastelandJD/status/1956777691576717459

So for those who've long since forgotten about Scott Pilgrim, it was one of those heavily in comic blogs rotation recommendations that came about from Brian Lee O'Malley graduating from his minor manga inspired web comics work

Brian Lee O'Malley as a Gen Y man was coming off of three major developments in his generation when he started that series in 2005.
1) The 1990's boom in a variety of web comic sites in NA.
2) The still vibrant bars and night life of most urban centers in the west.

3) The vast expansive flea markets of reasonably used thrifty goods from estate sales to ebay. Everything from sofas, to musical instruments to just about every form of media from musical records/tapes/cds to even old video games.

This particular odd market glut environment sadly also ran head first into the 2001 odd dreamtime of slack and odd somewhat well paying service cubicle jobs like call centers filling out the landscape in the wake of the first tech collapse in NA.

I mean even those shift service jobs still were a smidge below proper full time gigs at the time, but there was enough of an excess of everything that someone in their 20's could still have the illusion that you could take some of the slack time to make it in the arts.

Running a band or two, you could be Oni Press and with enough low overhead you put out books in the burgeoning graphic novels business with the big bookstore boom, or you had a still existent nightlife. And if you had a first mover mindset the nascent web could make you bank.

For the time period that Scott Pilgrim reflected with O'Malley that period would most likely be from 2001 to around 2005, by the time Scott Pilgrim was finished with all six books it was 2010, which was around the same time that the Wright's film adaptation came out.

Which probably explains why Wright's adaptation as a youth film was a dud. Most of it's arcade references were already out of date, the night life that any Gen Y man or women experienced in the early aughts was already evaporating in a variety of major cities by that time.

Main streets and malls were hollowed out in the era of big boxy stores like Wal-Mart, the final removal of most civilian manufacturing was gone, there was the final outsourcing of so many services out of the country and the quiet death of recent hipster burger joints.

Which is funny, because after Scott Pilgrim sorta recovered it's costs in the home video market (or what was left of it at the time) we did end up getting O'Malley's last major opus Seconds. Can you guess what the plot of this book is?

Gen Y in your 30's when the slack is gone.

Oddly enough this book was published in 2014, and it's around about that time just after Noah Antwiller imploded, the used market for so many goods from books to media starts rapidly rising again in costs, and we're six years in from the biggest financial implosion world wide.

Yet somehow I couldn't help but notice similar earmarks of decline. Our female chef/entrepreneur chef Katie Clay after making it big in the proxy Kingston, ON restaurant scene wants to expand a second restaurant to make a name for herself.

She becomes rather erractic and neurotic about the whole process, and in a rather interesting metaphor, she's more or less inbimbing in a variety of drugs to correct or deal with constant errors in the expansion of her own enterprise. Along with a lot of journaling.

An interesting parallel that Noah Antweiller's work had become once the easy juice of having fun snarky moments of the past had run out for him, and he's dreams of going Hollyweird in his heart of hears just wasn't going to happen, hence his depression medications and alcoholism

Along with increasingly focusing more and more on misery let's plays and angry vlogs that were no longer entertaining to his own audience. Even though he had made it, he like Katie Clay had no real spiritual nor moral center to make sense of their 30's.

After all for men like yourself @wastelandJD , the purpose of your blogging for years and your writing was to try and get some centering and guidance from how the world looked as if so many Gen X and Gen Y elites had gone mad when they couldn't handle that they were mid.

Gamergate in 2014 was a mass conversation from many anons in the Gen X and Gen Y bracket conversing about how their own upper crust of men and women had failed to have any spiritual drive other than hedonism and bugman consumerist identities. And lots of drugs in those communes

Chances are you've known more than few Gen Y guys who under went some hard disenchantment post 2014 and never came back. Much in the same way that Gen Y O'Malley in 2014 also had a divorce with his then indie artist wife Hope Larson.

But just as Noah's patreon was supposed to launch him to the next big thing to becoming a "comedian", so to was O'Malley's Seconds with it being a under a proper book publisher under Ballantine was supposed to launch him to the next big thing, and it sorta kinda just didn't...

Just as the rise of low interest financing and private equity debt swaps with foreign Chinese capital now funded Hollyweird productions that not even indie joints would license new indie comic (with a few exceptional brands)

The streaming market has led to the firehose of communist fun that no one truly wants to be watching outside of the covid years anymore. And with the direct comics market flooded with Big Two Socialist Scat that no one will read at any price you can get the rest.

After knowing all of this and watching some of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, I realized that it like many of the elite rich Gen Y and Gen X kids was hoping to rearrange all of mankind to perfection with it's consumer show. O'Malley most likely realizing he'd never have it big again.

Come to think of it, that might be the same thing that's sadly happen with Steven Wright too, the distinct Gen Y's director style with the Cornetto trilogy has more or less felt more and more generic post Attack the Block. There's no real identity anymore.

Could they in the depths of the Hollyweird's most debt drowning hour reclaim their glory? Well they can't unless they really could pull this hat trick off:

Yet there's a spot of hope but there's alot of black coffee to also go around on this. Smaller Gen Y and X guys on here and throughout in the post 2014, are still broadcasting and trying to work are way around the elites and their kids who are Spoony on steroids.