Social Rants
The "Millennial" Writing Problem
I’ve been hearing a lot about the consequences of Capeshit writing as of late, though sometimes it’s often referred to as “Millennial” Writing/Humor. To blame it on my generation (which could arguably be split up between Early and Late Millennials in my opinion based on if you were born in the 80s or 90s) is objectively invalid as Millennials are not the ones who conceived it nor were necessarily in the position to be part of a writing team. Granted, many of them do consume these products in the same manner a chicken or a pig is given fattening foods before they sent to the slaughter house. That does not make them guilty for the writing in particular.
Rather, it’s a product of Gen X, the generation that came after the Boomers. Though not as wealthy, they are in positions of power within the media and political industry. These people grew up with cartoons, dorky metal music, comic books in particular, and even the earliest forms of vidya to their credit. In a way, these people are the parents of Millennials and Gen Z. Maybe Gen Alpha too.
I find it hard to believe people online generally think Gen Xers are the first doomers but that’s only when they were younger. Even when they were bitching about how life sucks, they were crying over mundane existential philosphy, or crying because “waaaaaaaaaaaaah my band is too mainstream waaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh I’m going to do drugs and blow my brains out waaaaaaaahhh sex doesn’t feel good anymore man…...waaaaaaah I hate my 9-5 middle classs stable income job with a house that isn’t a mansion but is still bigger than what I actually need waaaaaaah and so forth.” without realizing how good they actually had it.
So in order to overcome these “problems”, gen Xers would use a lot of irony and subversive humor to cope. This is taking into the fact that these people are highly nostalgic of their youth, their cartoons and comics, and the music of their childhood. Adam Koralik on YouTube constantly states that Millennials are the first nostalgia generation but that’s incorrect when many Gen Xers would had been consuming media in the 70s and 80s. It’s from them that the Millennials get their so called “Humor” from because these people raised Millennials this way.
In a way, whenever you see the signs of this humor in practice, it always comes off across as like a dad trying to pretend to understand and feel what the younger generation is like. There was a lot of “LOL SO RANDUMB” humor in the later years of the early Internet with stuff like YouTube and YTMND, and Newgrounds which was popular around circles at the time. I personally didn’t have a problem with this kind of humor at the time. I have to presume that has to be a product of Gen X as well because stuff like the GI Joe PSA dub videos could had only been produced by someone who grew up with the show and most of my classmates at the time would had only known about the toys or maybe had a couple of tapes from their parents. Honestly, a lot of it was pretty funny but those were the early signs of things to come: The Ironic Humor, the nostalgia baiting, and the quirky wholesome motifs all had their start in this era. A lot of the Gen Xers that contributed or consumed these ideals would make it their entire personality and it’s no surprise why it’s so prevalent today.
Take the Marvel movies for instance. I’m going to be honest here and say I never liked Capeshit. The only movies from that genre I liked were maybe the Spiderman movies of the early 2000s (Unlike a lot of capeshit, these try to humble and humanize the hero and villians with a fair amount of seriousness) and the Joker 2019 which was essentially just Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy with incel leaning undertones that I found actually refreshing. I could careless about cinematic universes or any of that. Frankly, they all feel like video game cut scenes to me and might as well be them because the CGI in some of these movies is outright abysmal when you compare it to some the CG films of the 90s and early 2000s. The explosion of capeshit is the product of Gen X. Not Millennials. And because Gen Xers are so nostalgic for their comic book characters and irony, they keep making them because they think they are breaking the mold or portray themselves to be masterminds of cinematic genius when they are really just dorky losers with too much money.
The same could be said with the way they create video games. Not too long ago before the 7th generation, games were made as interactive mediums. They stood in their lane and didn’t try to be something that they weren’t. Even in the most linear games had some agency of freedom with player input. It’s when you get into the cinematic games where this freedom is lost in exchange for graphics and narrative, two of the most unimportant aspects of a video game. In a way, video games have become a venue for gen X producers and writers who were not good enough for the film industry and had to settle as video game writers instead. So they all think they are the next Spielberg or Kubrick just because they wrote a game with more cut scenes and story telling that takes up the majority of the game’s data more so than your average game where the plot is either a background to justify the existence of the game or a world to shape in the player’s image.
It’s even worse when it comes to humor in video games. Take Borderlands for instance. A game with so much quirky humor it hurts to listen to. Or one infamous example of Gen X writing (trying to pass it off for Millennials btw) is the reboot of Saints Row where the characters are all struggling with Student Loans and look like hipsters. Not to mention the game is filled with political jabs that pretend to sound smart but are actually not. It’s not only offensive to my generation but also negligent of what good writing should be like. Oh and all the reboots in video games and movies is not a Millennial fault but those of Gen Xers who refuse to write new stories and insist on bringing up their childhood on the fore front thinking it’s the coolest thing ever when in actuality stuff like Capeshit was always for kids, rock music is just try-hard safe edgy music designed to piss off conservative boomers and the generation before them in the most immature way possible, and ironic humor is just a facade for real humor.
So where does that leave us now in 2026 (the time I’m writing this blog)? How long will we have to bear witness to this form of dreadful quips? Not very long by the looks of it. Super Hero Films are starting to flop. Good Riddance. It should had died off in the 2010s but better late than never. Video Games that try to appeal to millennial like that Saints Row reboot I talked about are flopping too. The recent Metroid Prime game from 2025 where they added that annoying millennial character Miles McKenzie turned off even some of the video game journalists who usually eat this shit up and that game flopped because of him (and the fact that the game is boring and empty). At the same time, I’m worried about how Millennial will turn out when they eventually start writing movies and video games. But let’s be real here. Gen Xers aren’t going anywhere unlike the boomers who are thankfully starting to lose their own powers in the political space even though they are still dominant in their 90s but I don’t want a world ran by Gen Xers either. Besides, I doubt most of them will give up their positions in media and politics so Millennials are hardly going to get into these positions assuming they aren’t broke and lonely like I am (and most are). One thing is for certain about some Millennials and especially Gen Z (and maybe Gen Alpha), they aren’t afraid to be sincere instead of acting like dorks to overcome distress. Real distress.
The Millennial Nu-Male isn't the result of Millennial culture. It was fabricated by Gen X dorks who wanted to get revenge on the jocks who rightfully mocked them for having childish tastes in media.
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