Growing up in the 2000s fucked my brain hard. The sexism, homophobia and racism coupled with the free-range parenting that was simultaneously neglectful while gaslighting everyone into thinking that it was too coddling, and an internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized. All topped off with a resurgence of Western jingoism from the “war in terror”.
The only good thing about that period was some of the videogames were okay I guess but only if you avoid ANYTHING remotely military flavoured. A lot of shit outside of Nintendo was afraid of colour and everything was that washed out brown. Just a miserable time. Everyone was so uncreative and the world had some fucked up Southpark brainworms.
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Wasn’t as bad as now IMO. Far more people in desperate financial straits now and far less hope for the future. Misogyny, transphobia and homophobia all on the rise now, any gains made in those departments since the 00s look set to revert.
Yeah true. It’s pretty bad.
It’s really impossible to overstate how much damage South Park did to an entire generation. To this day I see ripples of it. At the time I was oblivious, but looking back, god damn.
South Park is the show people who don’t like Rick and Morty think that is
i will never forgive cringe culture for continuing to make it hard for me to properly express myself
And it’s making a comeback. I fucking hate people policing the most harmless shit while being so forgiving of actual bad things like racism and shit.
mfw i’m plural and get people claiming im not real plural bc something i do is too cringey, despite the fact i fill in all the criteria for DID lmao
Cringe culture (aka trans/homo/acephobia & ableism galore), South Park humour, everything becoming a COD clone, half of the media being arab/russian killing simulations, neoliberal realism and people still thinking capitalism works.
Yeah the late 2000-2010s sucked.
Millennials have gotten shit for our 90s nostalgia but this is what we had to compare it to
I just want to appreciate that in the span of two years we have:
Y2K - Not a real threat but I was young and it felt like it could be real
9/11
Post 9/11 AnthraxIf you really want to be technical:
- Bush stole the election
- Y2K
- 9/11
- Anthrax
By 2004 we have the War on Terror. By 2007 we have Virginia Tech and the financial crisis. 2000-2010 was one hell of a decade.
That’s not listing all the other stuff. Creationism in schools, Katrina, The Tsunami, Covid Part 1, Dotcom bubble, Enron, Columbia Shuttle Explosion. It just fucking goes on and on. It was a decade where decades happened. There was no social media to get a sense of 'The discourse" either. You just went off cable news, online news papers, blogs, and whatever shit your classmates/coworkers and parents were talking.
Don’t forget Trump had a reality TV show where contestants had to win business mini games. It aired on the exact same network as Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.
Not to detract from your point but Y2K was a very real threat - albeit likely not to things like nuclear weapons or planes as was often reported, but to every day software that was beginning to run the world - and it was only not a problem bc thousands of engineers worked like hell to fix it ahead of time. I only like to mention it because it’s somewhat hopeful, like dealing with the ozone layer. We can in fact take collective action to fix problems.
Anyway Google “2038 problem” if you wanna get in on the ground floor of grifting for the next one
Most of the mainstream TV of that era was astonishingly shitty and mean-spirited. I was really into watching 24, which in retrospect is one of the worst television shows to ever shoot out of a cathode ray tube.
Everyone at that time was out there debating whether we torture and/or the moral ramifications and 24 just rips off the veil and shows Jack GoodGuy successfully torture a guy for intelligence.
I actually have really fond memories of 24. My mom and I would make some solid snacks and watch it each week cause we both thought it was really funny. She’s not much of a jokester, especially compared to me and my dad, we can’t get through a paragraph without a joke and while basically a socdem out of being a decent person, she has never expressed any political thought on anything more than annissue by issue basis. Somehow this show was our mystery science theatre. We miffed hard on that show. I only remember characters by the nicknames we gave them. I’d never ever rewatch it now u less my mom wanted to do another round when I’d go visit for that, but I had a blast with that show as a kid when it aired. It’s so fucking stupid in every way possible. It’d such a weird thing to be a memorable bonding experience with my mom and the first time I enjoyed making fun of a bad shoe or movie with someone cause that is generally not her at all, but something about this show did it.
I’m glad you found some positive enjoyment out of it. Thinking about my other comment about Halo LAN multiplayer, I think the key thing that we loved about these experiences was that we spent time with our loved ones and friends, and in particular were joking and laughing with them.
Listening to Green Day drop the f slur, but against themselves sarcastically for opposing the Iraq War
Ngl I loved Holiday when I was a kid
“Hear the dogs howlin’ out of key~ To a hymn called “Faith and Misery”, And bleed, the company lost the war todaaaaaaay~”
My most listened albums this year are American Idiot, The Black Parade, and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
I’ve ripped off the opening riff a couple times by speeding it way up
Such a good song, and then the music video makes no sense and has nothing to do with the music. The music is an antiwar song, the music video is nothing like that.
He says it cuz he’s literally bi, but I hate them for selling kuerigs
It was a terrible time and a lot of what has led my life to disaster can be traced to that. The 9/11 jingoism did a number on my family. Death to AmeriKKKa, it was not a good time to be from one of the terrorist races here.
But I don’t know that there’s ever been a good time to be growing up. I look at what friends’ kids have to deal with now and it’s still terrible. Like, kids were thrown into the meatgrinder of Covid for the economy because supposedly it didn’t impact kids (which never made any biological sense) and now the pediatric Long Covid population just keeps growing year after year because recurrent covid infections greatly increase the chance of long covid. Meanwhile, the economy gets more and more fucked. We just live in a horrible fascist society. And for all that some of the younger generations are more based, others are more fascist. Then when they get out of school they are plunged into an extremely fucked economy.
Things were bad and are just getting worse. 2000s nostalgia is nostalgia for when things were slightly less bad for slightly more people.
One thing that is better is that there’s way more awareness and acceptance of queer people. It would have been so helpful for realistic understandings of gender (read: trans-aware) to be this prevalent in the 2000s.
Another thing that’s gotten better, at least in some circles, is that “jokes” about SA, general misogyny, trans- and homophobia, pedophilia, ableism, etc. aren’t tolerated anymore.
I was reading the archive of Laissez’s Fair, the “leftist” subforum of Something Awful a year or two ago, and holy shit, I’d forgotten how casually the F and R slurs were used even on the “leftist” forum. Made me think how much different a space like Hexbear would’ve been in the 2000s
Yeah… that’s true.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I think people are misunderstanding me, just because I think my childhood sucks doesn’t mean I’m not saying it’s just as bad now. It’s just a different kind of bad. The purpose of this post was to make fun of my own nostalgia.
To be clear I wasn’t thinking you thought things are better now, just adding or riffing off what you said that got me thinking about related stuff. Not that there’s any way you could have known that because of the imperfections of communicating like this
Apparently the washed-out brown thing in games of that era was a way for developers to get around the graphics limitations of the hardware with “grittiness”.
Definitely agree that the War on Terror both destroyed political discourse for a decade and just fucked culture. Outside of a handful of anti-war protest songs (and some of that veered into lib territory), there was this general sense of avoiding anything spicy due to the War on Terror and “remembering 9/11.” Politically, we’re still dealing with the fallout of that as this belief of Dems that running candidates that are former military and/or CIA will win over swing voters is them learning all the wrong lessons from the Bush-Kerry race.
However, I don’t think free-range parenting was that pervasive, that seemed like more of a minority backlash to the more common helicopter parenting. What I would say happened then was the start of the “mommy wars” and the weaponizing of the “right” way to rear kids as a cultural/political football; that’s when the whining over “participation trophies” became a talking point. Which was toxic and hinted at how future online culture war slop would play out.
Elder scrolls n mgs 3 was peak fam
Good things that came out of the 00s:
- The Gamecube
- The Gameboy Advance
- The Ace Attorney series
- Let’s Plays
- The last good Disney movies (yes it’s me, I’m the weirdo who liked Atlantis)
- Literally nothing else
Treasure Planet, Lilo and Stich and Emperor’s New Groove all slap hard
Lilo and Stitch is my favourite Disney movie. I hope they don’t ruin it with a live action remake
They can’t unmake the original.
no but they can supplant it and make the default version of it the shitty one.
Hasn’t worked so far
you’re a star trek fan
And ‘nutrek’ hasn’t at all supplanted or even attempted to supplant older trek. I guess you could say the tng generation supplanted TOS as the default trek but I’d say that was for the better. Even ignoring the swathes of people (a lot of whom are chuds) who hate all of newer stsr trek entirely, I’d say the people who generally enjoy it were lukewarm at best about disco, Picard seasons 1 and 2 are universally hated where 3 is about 50/50. Lower Decks fans (myself included) think it’s one of the best things trek has done, me and the 6 other people who watched Prodigy loved it. Strange New Worlds seems to have pretty broad appeal even though I’ve got some major criticisms of season 2 and some worries about the direction the show will go
It… Wasn’t great. It felt pretty souless. My wife and I saw it yesterday since we have MoviePass and figured might as well. I’d wait for it to stream free.
i don’t get why they bothered with Lilo & Stitch of all things, it’s nowhere near being public domain and felt like the last one that would be improved by live actors
hell, toy story feels like it would have more upside by making the outside world/vehicles IRL (but that would still turn out shit tbh)
The last good Disney movies (yes it’s me, I’m the weirdo who liked Atlantis)
wdym its literally an artistic masterpiece and a cult classic, all the gurlies nowdays thirst over the main protag.
Most of the characters were hot tbf
True, Helga & Kida were both baddies.
Agreed. We got Wario Land 4 but at what cost?
It was the beginning of the end for a lot of tabletop games (Warhammer, M:tG, Warmachine, D&D, etc). Around ~2014 a lot of them got more enshittified than they already were.
The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya.
The only thing I know (courtesy of a friend) about that anime is that one of the early episodes apparently involves a false SV accusation as a plot point, which made me want to stay far away from it
Yes, although it’s extremely minor and nothing about how it’s presented is saying it’s OK. There’s some male-gaze stuff here and there, although it’s definitely less bad about it than almost any other anime.
FLCL; Fooly Cooly too
BitTorrent came out in 2003, so add that to the list.
no they on the large part rocked and nothing you have listed is actually notable to the 2000s itself except the war on terror.
“internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized” have you scrolled any social media site for an hour recently?? Sure, in the 2000s you had a pretty good chance of stumbling upon shit like 2Girls, BME Pain Olympics, or various beheading videos if you were on various sites or downloading shit from Limewire (i’ll never forgive whoever renamed a bunch of porn audio to be the Pokemon 2.B.A Master tracks so when my 8yo ass downloaded it from limewire and played it off the speakers, I was immediately banned from using the computer without supervision for the whole summer) but I would argue you’re more likely to see worse in ‘tame’ corners of the internet these days. Go on Facebook or Youtube and you’ll be traumatized by some AI generated trauma porn (this dog with 5 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange & bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), some real trauma porn (this dog with 3 broken legs managed to walk again - the first minute of this 1:30 video will be the dog nearly dead from mange and bleeding out its rectum. oh yeah it autoplays too), AI generated/real racism, various TikTok Communities/Facebook Groups promoting eating disorders (search ‘skinny’ on tiktok!), so on and so forth. Do you think the internet gives a fuck who it traumatizes now??
A dog with 5 broken legs followed by a dog with 3 broken legs, how heart breaking 💔
lol
I just saw an extremely cringy post in the modlog that reminded me of how much I hated that whole Maddox edgelord garbage that was so popular online at the time
The only thing I’m willing to give Maddox is that he liked Ikaruga, one of the greatest games ever.
I was unfortunately fully a Maddox fan until around when he started making video content and was associated with that dick Masterson guy
The number of people who actually kept watching his video content has to be like 1% of the people who used to visit his site, at best.
his approach to web design was way better than all the slop that was starting to be made at the time and has continued to be terrible
Evry decade is the worst decade Safe for all the ones that come after it. That’s just the logic of capitalism
You’re not wrong but I will go to bat for Halo actually being cool and good
That franchise was pure War on Terror brainworms
Yeah, they gave the aliens a weird and wrong religion
Put emphasis on how they were willing to die to kill us
The only good alien is the one who figures out his worldview was a sham
If it wasn’t intentional, it was still gross
The single player campaign is some of the lowest pulp military sci fi out there. But the couch multiplayer was top-notch, and brought me together with a lot of other friends in-person. I think Halo 2’s online multiplayer was the beginning of the end, though - a lot of those guys I haven’t seen in person since literally 2004.
akshually the earthgov canonically used the spartans to put down peasant revolts, so you’re playing as the bad guy against another bad guy.
Ok, but so is cs (even more explicitly at that) and there’s still a weird soft spot some people here express for it
I stand with Halospoiler
Bungie era only
