Not Just Nostalgia
Any time I, or fellow authors David V. Stewart and JD Cowan, bring up 1997 as the point when cultural advancement stalled, a predictable chorus pipes up with the same tired objection:
“You’re just nostalgic! Of course you think things were better when you were a kid!”
Screencap; @ReviewsPossum on X
Here’s the problem such critics of Cultural Ground Zero face: Nostalgia implies subjective preference. It means someone is looking back with rose-colored glasses and filtering out the bad stuff.
But the entire point of Cultural Ground Zero is that we're not talking about subjective feeligns. We're talking about objective metrics of collapse.
Related: Cultural Ground Zero
Let's review a few falsifiable data points from ca. 1997.
Marvel Files for Bankruptcy
Screencap: Harvard Business School
You know what’s not a matter of opinion? The biggest comic book company in America going bankrupt.
In December 1996—spilling into early '97—Marvel Comics, then the undisputed king of the medium, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their reckless expansion during the speculator bubble of the early ’90s had imploded.
The comic book industry never recovered. We’re still witnessing the slow death of the comic book shop: an institution that was a mainstay of 1990s pop culture. The comic books that served as source material for the next decade’s movie universes were reduced to IP fodder around the same time you were discovering anime and wondering where your local drug store’s spinner rack went.
That’s not nostalgia pangs. That’s a measurable collapse.
Millennials vs. the Past
Screencap: @Tsarnick on X
Another common argument from critics goes that “You just think old stuff is better because you grew up with it. Young people today love the new stuff!”
OK, let’s put that theory to a road test.
Millennials—the generation born in the 90s—now routinely denounce the same movies, shows, and music that dominated their formative years.
Scan any social media feed, and you'll find thirtysomethings hammering out TEDx-length threads on how Return of the Jedi, Mortal Kombat, and the first several seasons of The Simpsons are “problematic” and should be buried in a salt mine.
In general, Millennials are not celebrating the past; they’re apologizing for it.
The only reason people under forty still talk about pre-2000s movies at all is because the modern equivalents are so vapid, sterile, and forgettable that nothing sticks long enough to inspire guilt, let alone affection.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s a buried standard poking through the sand like a sunken statue.
But the silver bullet that shoots down the “It’s just nostalgia!” cope is that 1990s nostalgia is overwhelmingly driven by members orf Generation Y.
For those of you who are new here, Gen Y are not the Millennials. Ys were born in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. For the vast majority of Gen Y, their daily experience of the 90s was waking up to development-stunting sleep deprivation, being herded into a fluorescent-lit detention center for systematic emotional abuse by low-IQ, misandrist state functionaries, and trudging back to an empty house with maybe a TV dinner thawing on the counter.
Related: Lost Generations
Saying that Ys miss being kids is absurd on its face. Gen Y does not miss being powerless and naive under the Baby Boomers’ boot. The reason they miss the popular entertainment product of the 1990s is much simpler.
Those products were just better.
And speaking of which …
Quality Really Had Been Rising
A reliable way we can know that Cultural Ground Zero marked a decline is that right up until then, the state of pop culture had been improving.
Don’t get me wrong. Movies made in the mid-20th century were good. But by the 80s, they were often great. By the mid-90s, we were getting Jurassic Park, Groundhog Day, and Heat. By no means was early-mid 90s cinema perfect, but the expectation remained that each new offering would top the last.
Then the advancement stopped.
Since 1997, how many movies have matched Terminator 2 for craftsmanship, effects, writing, and rewatchability?
How many rock bands since 1997 have had even half the cultural footprint of Nirvana or Metallica?
How many games since Super Metroid or Chrono Trigger have innovated, rather than just rehashed?
And to flip the script, how many blockbusters of the past three decades have been reboots, reimaginings, and requels of IPs that broke into the mainstream in the 1990s?
Entertainment wasn’t always good, but it was getting better—until it wasn’t. That’s not to say that every movie, game, and TV show produced since 1997 has sucked; it is to point out that the expectation of improvement is gone.
It’s Not Just Us
Photo; @ObsoleteSony on X
If this were just some Gen Y mid-life crisis, you’d expect Boomers to remember the '90s with indifference and Zoomers to dismiss the decade completely.
Instead, we see people of all ages, including younger fans, gravitating back to old media. They’re buying DVDs, collecting vinyl records, and emulating games made before they were born.
Because even the remnants of a once-living culture are better than the fraying skinsuits we’re left with now.
Cultural Ground Zero isn’t about fond memories. It’s about recognizing the moment the producers of pop culture stopped striving for substance and originality.
We’re not whining because our favorite toys got taken away. We’re pointing to a smoking crater and saying, “This is where it happened.”
That’s not nostalgia. It’s forensics.
And when your civilization’s cultural output is a stack of reboots, a graveyard of dying IPs, and AI-generated filler, it’s not the people remembering better days who are delusional. It’s the ones pretending this is fine.
Get VIP access to my patron-exclusive Discord, early looks at my works in progress, and the chance to influence my writing.
Sign up at Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can relate to battling vs overwhelming odds
