Post by egon1982 on Oct 2, 2018 7:12:03 GMT
Fact. I'm an adult and I've never seen a single adult refer to something as "kiddie". I HAVE seen plenty of young people around ages 14-23 refer to light-hearted fare as "kiddie". These are young adults desperate to establish themselves as adults and thinking they can achieve said goal by "shedding" themselves of "kiddie" things. How do they do that? The same way most emos their age do: run toward "dark" and "serious" material as a way of showing how "mature" and "adult" they are.
Little do these young adults realize is that, as an adult, your taste in everything changes. You stop caring about trivial things such as "how will people perceive me for liking this?" Thoughts like those are thoughts that exist in the minds of very young people trying to establish themselves in the world and worried about criticism. It's the angsty age where everything is about image and cultivating your "adult" status.
Seasoned adults in their late 20's and above adopt a very different mindset. It's the "I don't give a sh!t what people think" mindset. Little do these very young adults realize is that, as a seasoned adult, we often crave a VARIETY of tones and themes and don't single one out as "too kiddie for me". Adults don't think that way. In fact, as seasoned adults, it's much more likely for a person to choose a light-hearted movie at the end of a hard workday or workweek. It's a way to "unwind".
For all those calling the MCU "kiddie", I've seen far more adults around my age (37) and even older than I did teenagers when attending them in the theaters. On the contrary, I see far more teens/early twentysomethings at the few nowadays horror movies I attended at theaters.
As seasoned adults, we embrace a VARIETY of different themes and tones. In my experience, I've seen many people in the 14-23 bracket embrace darker material more than any other form.
My point in all this? Only a very young person would bash a product for being light-hearted or proclaim it to be "kiddie". Adults--seasoned (been in the real world for several years, paying bills and such) adults don't think this way at all. We don't go around, calling things "kiddie" or "Mature and adult".
All this grasping for "grounded" and "realistic" CBM's...there is an old expression that basically says that: "Adults crave fantasy even more than children". And, it's true. Fantasy is a form of escapism. Only a very young mind has this constant "need" for an uber-realistic product all the time. Adults enjoy a BLEND of fantasy and realistic products. Children or very young adults have tendency to gravitate toward the darker, more serious and more "realistic" material because they have this idea in their minds that "fantasy is for kids"...but, what they don't realize, is that you reach a certain point in adulthood where fantasy becomes appealing again. When that point arrives, you no longer care how that fantasy "makes you look" to others. You appreciate it as an escapism from everyday life. As a more seasoned adult, a craving for constant realism becomes less prevalent because, at that point, you already know enough about the world to decide "Hey--I need a little escapism".
Now, that's not to say that seasoned adults don't want realism--we do. We just don't need a CONSTANT dosage or CONSTANT emphasis on it. We don't need it to define our lives/entertainment.
THAT is the fundamental difference between real adults and young adults still trying to establish themselves.
All that I think of when I see someone refer to something as "kiddie" is a very young person who is ashamed of their young age and only wants to be seen as older. And what I stated is something that a very young mind can't possibly understand until they reach that point in life...and most of us do. Those who don't become, well, manchildren.
Levity and maturity go hand in hand. The harder you try to force maturity and "seriousness" the more immature and juvenile your work appears. Human beings use humor even in the most dire of situations to deal with bad things, when a person is at their lowest they want nothing more than to laugh again.
When someone here compared Batman vs Superman to some humorless 90's grim gritty comics, Some of those '90s comics trying to be so dark to look "grown up" make me think of what it was like to be a teen-ager. Every teen tries to do their imitation of how they think an adult should be--wearing dark clothing, brooding, treating others like they're crap, posturing. Usually by the time you hit twenty you figure out that's not what being grown up is really about. If you don't, you're going to have miserable life when reality finally does hit you. And they are right, some did took the wrong lessons from Kevin Eastman's Ninja Turtles with Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, Alan Moore and Frank Miller without understanding what made them successful comics in the 80s.