Nostalgia Filter's description needs work

The description for Nostalgia Filter is ironically dated and need of some work itself. Take this paragraph for example:

The line about "girls or sex" is real weird, and written in a pretty sexist way. Boys discover girls and sex, while girls are just there to be discovered, I guess? Very Men Act, Women Are.

People in their 20s not being adults is also pretty dependent on culture. Plenty of 20-somethings have full time jobs.

The entire description is written in a way that makes a lot of assumptions and has an overly narrow point of view.

Not just that, but the way it's written sounds misogynist.

By how it's written, it seems that females don't have pop culture, which is very false in reality.

I think you're misreading it. The sentence order is off, but it's not saying only boys have pop culture- the girls/sex part is just sort of a random tangent.

A proposed description rework. I don't think it would need TRS, since I kept the definition the same and just...cleaned it way up.

Good lord it was repetitive with a lot of dead verbiage.

The nostalgia filter is the tendency to view media created in your younger years as better than anything created after. In the words of Sam Viviano, art director of MAD: "MAD was at its best whenever you first started reading it." A corollary to that is that, if you didn't like MAD, it was at its best shortly before you started reading it.

The most impressionable time is during pre-adolescent, adolescent, and teenage years. These are the years where one is young and undistracted, or less distracted, by the full responsibilities of adulthood and the burdens of getting older. Apart from schoolwork, they simply can afford time to absorb the pop culture or cult genre of the era.

People's tastes are influenced by the media they grew up with. This is most notable when Values Dissonance comes into play: Modern day art may positively depict contemporary societal norms that would have been frowned on years before. Conversely, tastes often change as someone ages: what may have seemed brilliant to a child or teen would seem crude or laughable to most adults, but the memories of how great something from one's youth seemed to linger. And if a person's preference is for something that is out of fashion right now, they may have little choice besides 'hang onto the older version' or 'give up on it completely' if the genre is considered "dead."

It may also be Sturgeon's Law combined with the passage of time: as new media is released, the vast majority will be mediocre or worse, but over time, a powerful selection pressure causes all but the best material (and in some infamous cases, the worst) to be rapidly forgotten, leaving an increasingly inaccurate impression of the overall quality. This can be easily demonstrated by a careful review of the period works that are not remembered today.

Of course, this is certainly not to imply that newer is automatically better or that the Nostalgia Filter applies to every single case. Sometimes the older work is better, or at least has its own appeal that the present things don't — even beyond "Charm", which is often thrown around to describe stuff mostly to just mean, "It's nostalgic".

You'll notice that this trope sometimes overlaps with the Periphery Hatedom. Almost always, when people complain about how new stuff sucks, they bring up examples of things which were marketed towards the youth of their own generation as examples of "good" or even "classic" works in the genre. Never mind that 20 years ago, when it was being marketed towards them, many adults were saying the exact same thing. It's a never-ending cycle.

While adults abusing the Nostalgia Filter has become a bit of a cliché (particularly in media aimed at teens and/or preteens), there are many Real Life adults (of various ages) who enjoy both old and new media in equal measures. This is especially true for those who are socially active and hang around a diverse group of people. How many real people subscribe to it is highly debatable. However, one thing is for certain: Those who abuse it or abuse the concept of it tend to be very vocal about it.

See also Nothing but Hits, They Don't Make Them Like They Used To, Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be, and Appeal to Tradition. Another reason for this trope is that True Art Is Ancient. Contrast Condemned by History and They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Disco Dan can be what happens when someone puts the Filter on and refuses to take it off to the extent that they act like they're still living in their favourite time period.

In-Universe Examples Only. Pretty much any genre or form is subjected to this in Real Life, so such examples aren't really necessary. Plus, they're very prone to age stereotyping, which we don't want on this page.

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 22nd 2022 at 12:59:57 PM

This is a lot better. Though I'm not sure the Future Loser part from the original description makes a lot of sense. I thought that had more to do with time travel or prophesies than someone in the present just feeling like they have a bad life.

Cut that sentence. I can swap it out if people are cool with that.

That's better. Still a bit long, but an improvement over the existing description.

It is, but I was trying to be conservative in the rewrite. I'll go swap it in.

Edit: Wow, I lost the ending of the description when I swapped in because it lost so much length.

Edited by Eiryu on Jan 23rd 2022 at 8:07:45 AM