“Persona 5 is the In The Aeroplane Over the Sea of video games”

I woke up this morning and, while still half asleep and brushing my teeth, this thought came to me. And with all my other completely gibberish thoughts, it ended up on Twitter, where it gained seven likes (pushing it above the threshold of a deleted Tweet). I don’t even think it really means anything, looking back. But I think it’s an interesting commentary on how the Internet — specifically, the spheres of online media criticism — have absolutely decimated how I, and many other people, interpret the world around us. I think that really the worst thing about this sentence isn’t how little sense it makes — it’s how my brain keeps trying to tell me otherwise.

I am, unabashedly, a child of the digital era. Some of my first childhood memories are literally breaking computers, from incorrectly plugging in laptop chargers to accidentally resetting the family iMac to “Classic Mode”. Similarly, Internet culture — and its absurdism — has been ever-present in my development as a person. I went straight from watching episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh to watching episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged. To be blunt, I did not experience culture in a pre-Internet era.

Similarly, I never grew up around traditional media criticism. Roger Ebert was not a name I knew until a little more than a year ago. By that point, however, I could provide an endless list of names of Internet personalities who framed media criticism in a vast array of different forms, from videogamedunkey to Karsten Runquist, from The Angry Video Game Nerd to Schaffrillas. The New York Times’s opinion on an MCU movie meant nothing to me, but I would internalize and reflect on a rando on YouTube’s thirty-five minute video essay.

This man is a personal role model of mine, which kind of explains everything about myself, actually

I don’t think it’s surprising that I began trending toward media analysis of my own during quarantine. I began trying my best to listen to a new album a day before eventually trending towards the Pitchfork Top 200 Albums of the 2010s. I realized that even if nobody was reading it, I enjoyed organizing my thoughts on albums and expressing how I felt on albums.

A screenshot of the spreadsheet I used to keep track of album scores. Ignore the fact that I didn’t like Replica ❤

One thing that I found myself doing a lot during this process was inherently pushing myself towards comparing different albums. Sometimes, the comparisons made sense — I think it’s reasonable to compare ASTROWORLD to Rodeo— but eventually, I found myself almost incapable of describing music in a vacuum. I went back and realized that a majority of my reviews involved an outer frame of reference. Most of the times, it was the context I listened to an album, whether it be “I cried while biking” or “I listened to this album while drunk and playing Minecraft” (bonus points if you can name the two albums these statements were about). But sometimes, the review ended up becoming completely incomprehensible nonsense for those without context. I described America! by Bill Callahan as “Beto O’Rourke-core”. Literally what on earth does that mean!

The two albums in question from earlier, by the way. Strongly recommend both of them.

I think the real problem with my thoughts on America! is that, similarly to my Tweet from the morning, with the proper context, these statements are not only perfectly reasonable, but an informed statement on the nature of both parties. And I think that’s the important difference between the modern era of media criticism and what came before it — you are expected to have all the context. When Dunkey puts out a video tearing into Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or when Fantano holds nothing back about his thoughts on Birds in the Trap, two personal favorites of mine, I understand their viewpoints and how they fundamentally differ from mine. Modern media critics have done away with facades of objectivity in favor of context informed viewpoints.

So when I say “Persona 5 is the In the Aeroplane over The Sea of video games”, I come from a perspective where I see both of these works as highly acclaimed, but maybe a little bit overexaggerated by their online fanbase. I see them as strong works in their field, with strong coming-of-age themes. But in order for that to have made any sense, it had to come from an informed viewpoint about how I experience and interpret media around me.

I suppose that all I’m really trying to say is that I’d love to hear a Neutral Milk Hotel cover of Rivers in the Desert.