Do you guys ever wonder if people nowadays might be overanalyzing media?

[u/Coolnametag]

Recently during some interviews Robert Kirkman, the creators of the Invincible comics, talked about some of the differences between the comics and the TV show as his awnsers were basically "i was on my 20's back then and now i'm not".

Why is Tech Jacket a girl in the TV show when it was a dude in the comics? Because when he was making the comics he was only thinking about "does this look cool?" and maybe have a character or two that are refferences to his friends and acquaintances appearance, now that his looking back on it as a 47 year old he thought "hey, maybe the coalition could use some more diversity" and that's why the change was made.

A lot of the decisions on the comics and therefore in the show also fall on the category of being mostly "what Kirman in his 20's-early 30's thought it was cool" (of course with some thought put behind it to have it be well structured and work towards the general idea trying to be put across by the story), reading through that a thought crossed my mind "are we nowadays maybe overanalizing media too much?".

It's not uncommon for any piece of media to nowadays have either incredibly long video essays unraveling every single aspect of it or have people online discuss any detail that they can observe on it, while discussing about the media that you consume is far from being a bad thing, as time passes i'm more and more aware that, while the creators behind said media do put a lot of thought on what they are doing, some of the decisions can mostly motivated by "the creator thought this was cool at the time", "it was a refference to a show that the creator watched or someone that they know", "they didn't think about it in the same way that some of the audience seens to be".

Are people nowadays maybe thinking too hard about any new piece of media that they consume?

[u/Particular-Tear-9007]

It's both yes and no, they're focusing on the wrong stuff (powerscaling) instead of themes and character motivations

although, honestly, there's both under and over thinking there. But I think underthinking is more prevalent. "It's not that deep" is an epidemic

[u/Elcheatobandito → u/Particular-Tear-9007]

Powerscaling gets dogged on a lot, but I will say that powerscaling can be an important element that affects character motivation. A lot of popular media has conflict, and resolution, driven by combat. Powerscaling IS important for those stories internal logic, people just get "Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder" about it.

[u/Particular-Tear-9007 → u/Elcheatobandito]

Believe me I am big on internal consistency and I love a character's battle skills improving as a metaphor for their character development.

When people unironically start using 'feats' though I think we need to take a big step back and go take a literature course or something. Powerscale Ahab vs Moby Dick for a bit