I never heard of Freytag’s triangle until just now. When I was in the GATE program in high school, our English classes were all about analyzing stories in the context of Campbell’s monomyth and Aristotle’s tragic hero.
TvTropes has probably taught the younger generations about a lot of genre conventions that people my age and older wouldn’t have consciously picked up on.
My son is 11. Freytag’s triangle, which isn’t always called that , is an elementary school thing.
It goes way beyond just TV Tropes–there are so many YouTube channels that really do analysis, very high level analysis. Like, Overly Sarcastic Productions takes tropes and in addition to illustrating examples, talks about why writers use them and what they bring to stories, along with what makes them work and what didn’t. Here is an analysis they did over mentors, using Into the Spiderverse as one of the main reference texts.
There was just no equivalent to that in terms of narrative/artistic analysis when I was a schoolkid in the 80s and 90s. Nothing that nuanced that was also accessible to a 5th grader. My son watched a video the other day that broke down the musical themes in Into the Spiderverse. It was amazing. There was nothing like that back in the day. I had to go to college to have those sorts of conversations.
I’ve noticed this; my kid has a much better command of many elements of media than I or my peers did.
I don’t remembr hearing the term Freytag’s triangle when I was in school but then I graduated high school in 1984. Googling the concept, though, I think we did learn about the idea of a dramatic arc.
And as to the complexity of modern media, eighteen years ago, The New York Times Magazine ran this article (gift link to Watching TV Makes You Smarter) about how modern TV shows, even as far back as Hill Street Blues, requires the viewer to track multiple plotlines and multiple characters. (I think something like Game of Thrones is even more complex and more demanding of the viewer.) The article is adapted from a book by the same author.
I don’t think there is any doubt TV got a whole lot smarter starting in the 90s. My personal theory is that people who grew up taking TV seriously finally got old enough to shape it.
But my argument is that in the last 10, even 5, years, entertainment as a whole has gotten a lot more self-conscious about the meta. And (to take us back to the topic of the thread), I would argue the Into the Spiderverse movies are only enjoyable if you can think analytically about metanarratives, even if you don’t have that vocabulary. In this case, it’s like the people who grew up taking deconstructionism seriously are finally making, well, texts.
Kids may have better knowledge of tropes and structure but from what I have observed on Twitter there is a great deal of people in the younger generation that have no concept of subtext. Everything to them is literal and they make no effort to see anything beyond what is there on screen.
I thought it was an amazing movie, and I’d strongly recommend seeing it on a big screen. The first spider-verse movie was already one of my favorite comic book movies of all time, and I think this one might take the top spot. It’s overwhelming in the best ways possible, both in terms of the storytelling and the visuals, but there’s still a lot of highly hitting emotional moments.
The “to be continued” completely blindsided me. I’m not good at judging how much time has passed in the movies, so I thought there was still enough time for a confrontation with Spot. I thought I’d be more upset, but the movie was good enough to not mind too much.
I’ve seen the exact opposite problem - younger people overanalyzing material that doesn’t have any greater subtext or meaning to it. I’ve lost track of the number of Reddit threads I’ve read where I wanted to grab the OP by the collar and shout at them “IT’S A JOKE, IT HAPPENED THAT WAY BECAUSE IT’S FUNNY, STOP LOOKING FOR DEEPER MEANING WHEN THERE ISN’T ANY”.
Strangely I think we are talking about the same phenomenon but coming at it from two different directions. They don’t see the joke because they take what they saw as literal which makes them assume they missed something. A good example of what I mean is during the discourse over The Last Jedi many people were complaining about how Luke had a different look on his face during two flashbacks to the same event. Clearly the point was two people saw the event differently, but that literal “Cinema Sins” way of looking at movies made them say, “Plot hole!”. This is getting off topic though I suppose.
Seen it, loved it, will be rewatching it.
Didn’t really get a Citadel of Ricks vibe from Nueva York.
If we take Miguel at face value (and I realise that you might not) then he’s saving seven billion lives per dimension at the cost of one. That’s a different thing than Thanos killing half of everyone on the vague sense that life will be better for the others.
Again, taking him at face value, if Miguel doesn’t do what he does, all those people die when their dimension collapses including the police captain. The captain is doomed no matter what.
My teen and I watched it today and neither of us, nor anyone in the theater, expected the cliffhanger ending. Lots of groans and swearing when that showed up.
My teen also started going over a lot of pieces in the movie and came up with a lot of examples of redundancies: ATM machine, chai tea, naan bread, Arachnid Humanoid Poly-Metaverse, the two cakes, and a few others that we can’t recall right now. They also have an interesting observation that the death of Captain Moralez can’t be canon because Miles isn’t canon because he was bitten by the 42 spider. It’s also possible that Miguel is choosing to blame “canon” events over taking responsibility over his own actions, which caused that universe with his alt family to collapse.