If you've been in a fandom for any significant amount of time, especially a corporate-owned Intellectual Property (IP) that has been around for a long time, you've seen this happen a few times:
|
As we get older, there's a tendency to avoid trying new things. After all, sometimes new things really aren't for us. Whether it's food that we gag on, a story that fails to connect to us, or whatever. Every time we try something new, there's a risk of feeling bad, and it starts to seem like deliberate self-inflicted pain to try anything new. Too much heartbreak.
The result is that we tend to stick with the stuff we know we like. We might try slightly new tweaks, like a new topping on pizza or a new writer in a genre we like, but that's as far as we'll risk our hearts (or tongues). As a result, we no longer get the thrill of discovering something NEW that we like. Sure, a lot of people make an effort to at least sometimes open themselves up to new stuff, but a lot don't.
And that often leads to toxic nostalgia. Because if you won't try anything new, you can start to resent your existing favorites for not feeling new. Self-awareness on this point is hard to come by, even compared to the usual difficulty, so fandoms tend to enter into a sort of victimhood groupthink. The companies that own what we like are putting out crap for Reasons. If only they would Do It Right, we could enjoy the same old things as if they were new.
We want creators to restore our innocence so that we can experience something for the first time again and again.
We want something exactly like what we know, but we want it to feel new.
We can't articulate what would make it "cooler," we just know that it needs to be cooler. (About 20% cooler would do.)
Ultimately, the problem isn't with the property, we want the work to be so transformative that it helps us feel like old things are new again. We are asking the creator to change us. Once in a great while a creator manages to pull it off, giving fans the required "familiar but new" that works for them, but it's definitely a Sisyphean task in general.
The rest of the time, we're unsatisfied until and unless we recognize that the problem lies within ourselves. No matter how much better the new stuff is, it's competing with emotional memories rather than factual ones. It's the whole Toyhack effect that I wrote about years ago.
What's the solution? I'm afraid there's no easy way out of this, it's a bug in our operating system. In general, we crave both novelty and the familiar, and that's a tension that humanity has not resolved in millennia of pondering, so I rather doubt I'll come up with much myself beyond the obvious, "Try to be aware of why you feel what you feel," which is good if difficult advice in general.