Lately there's this thing happening and I still haven't figured out what to call it.
I'll put on a show everyone keeps telling me I have to watch. Or I'll boot up a game that landed with a 94 on Metacritic and a thousand YouTube thumbnails screaming about a generational masterpiece. Half an hour in, sometimes sooner, there's that feeling. The feeling of having signed up for something rather than just getting to enjoy it. Like there's a syllabus somewhere and I'm behind on the reading.
Starfield on launch day. Six hours in, I genuinely couldn't have told you what I'd done. The game wasn't broken. Wasn't really boring. It was just fine. That was what got me. A hundred million dollar budget, a thousand planets, Bethesda's whole reputation riding on it, and the thing was so desperate not to upset anybody that it forgot to actually say anything. I closed it, went to bed, and by Monday morning I'd basically forgotten I owned it.
I still care about this stuff. Obviously. Games, TV, comics, books, tech, all of it. This has been my whole adult life. But caring has started feeling heavier than it used to. More of an upkeep job than I signed up for.
Pop culture got managed.
There was this window, I think it shut somewhere around 2011 or 2012, where finding something you loved still felt a bit random. Firefly aired on Fox with no launch event behind it. Nobody pretended Life Is Strange needed a shared universe bible. And Warren Ellis got five years to scream into Transmetropolitan before anybody at DC tried to stop him. Those things happened because someone had a thing to say and found a gap in the wall before the meeting could catch up.
Now everything shows up already explained. Disney announces the Marvel slate through 2028 like they're guiding Wall Street through Q3. One Piece is a Netflix show, a merch empire, and somewhere underneath all that, yes, still technically a manga. Nobody stumbles into stuff anymore. You get onboarded. There's a viewing order, and often an approved emotional reaction the discourse settled on before you pressed play.
Remember the Red Wedding? Half the internet had read A Storm of Swords and spent the broadcast filming the other half's faces. Reaction videos were online before the credits had rolled. The shock wasn't really yours to have anymore.
Miss a step and the next thing stops making sense. Try watching Secret Invasion without having Phase Four memorised, or having an opinion on the latest Star Wars show without a spreadsheet and three Wiki tabs open.
It's tiring in this weirdly polite, carefully legal way.
And nobody really wants to say out loud how much it's grinding everyone down.
I watched Baldur's Gate 3 take over the internet for something like four months in 2023, and I felt guilty about being stuck in Act One. Guilty. About a video game. "The dog ate my homework."
I liked Andor. Really liked Andor, it's probably the best Star Wars anything since 1980. But every single time someone asked me about it I had to do this little defensive preamble. Yes, it's actually good, you don't need to rewatch Rogue One first, and it's Star Wars but doesn't feel like Star Wars. By the time I got through all of it the other person was already glazing over and we were both on our phones again.
Comics are the worst of it though. I bought House of X #1 the week it came out. Loved it. Thought Hickman was doing something genuinely strange with the X-Men for the first time in about a decade. Two months later there were fourteen interlocking titles, a reading order chart with coloured arrows on it, and someone on Substack writing 4,000 words a week about the Quiet Council. I have a job and other things going on. Hobbies aren't supposed to turn into second shifts, but that's where it landed, and that's where I quietly stopped buying single issues for nearly a year.
Everything's optimised for continuity and scale. Which is the polite way of saying: optimised so nothing fails. And because failure isn't just bad anymore but actively dangerous to someone's Q4 slide, the weirdness gets sanded off before the thing even ships. Anything that can't be pitched in a boardroom in under ninety seconds doesn't make it out of the notes.
You end up with a culture that looks incredible and feels hollow.
I don't want out of pop culture. I want the subscription to feel like something I actually picked again.
Stuff still gets me. Disco Elysium did. Dispatch did. None of those were flukes — they had a pulse, and the people making them had a specific shape in mind and were willing to lose part of the audience to keep it. The Bear keeps landing every season, top to bottom. And comics can still do it in a single image, when Alex Ross paints a Superman cover that's doing more real work than a twelve-issue crossover.
Caring about this stuff doesn't mean clapping every time it does a trick. I lost most of February 2014 to Black Flag, and every Assassin's Creed since Origins feels like watching a band that used to be great phone it in. That's just the frustration of having been there before. And it's also how I know the stuff can still be alive when it's allowed to be one specific shape instead of trying to do everything at once.
Which is where the site comes in.
I wanted somewhere I could actually write about why Star Trek: Starfleet Academy didn't land, without first having to wade through the pre-made internet argument about whether it was a masterpiece or a hate crime, or having to dance around language that's been weaponised so thoroughly that nobody using it is describing anything real anymore.
A place to talk about why Celeste, a small game about a girl climbing a mountain while having a panic attack, ended up meaning more to me than most of the hundred-hour RPGs I've played in the last ten years. And room to think out loud about AI-generated art without pretending the conversation is either utopian or apocalyptic, when nobody actually believes either of those things — they're just the two positions you're allowed to take in public.
A place where 'but it made two billion dollars' isn't a closing argument. Where I can say a thing should've been allowed to be smaller and weirder, even if it meant failing, instead of getting resuscitated by a marketing budget the size of Iceland.
I'll be wrong about plenty of it. Probably end up defending some game two years after everyone else has moved on, because I'm still thinking about it while brushing my teeth. Comes with the work.
If you're here because you're quietly tired of pretending that keeping up with things is the same as caring about them — yeah, this is for you.
Pop culture isn't dying. It's just stuck in a loop too polite and too expensive to break, repeating itself until somebody finally says the thing everyone's already thinking but nobody's actually typed out.
That's what this is. A place to finally say the thing. To talk about the games and shows and comics and strange corners of the internet that properly got to us — the game that wrecked you, the show you keep recommending to people who never watch it, that one panel still sitting in your camera roll from 2013 — without doing the little performance where we pretend any of it is above criticism.
Mostly I'm aiming for honesty, with as much humour as fits. Some of the pieces will be worse than I meant them to be. Some will surprise me. I'll find out which is which by writing them.
— Ben Touati, Popkulturist
