kasdeya
kasdeya
there was a certain era of internet art that I think of as “the Newgrounds era” - where you have a bunch of artists who are suddenly given absolute free reign to make whatever they want, with no censorship or limitations whatsoever, after living their entire lives up to that point in a stifling environment of censorship
and because of this new freedom they of course go absolutely over-the-top on gore, sex, violence, and other types of transgression - just to revel in their newfound freedom. a great example of this is The Binding of Isaac
nowadays we still have that level of freedom on the internet, but 2026-era internet art isn’t nearly as interested in transgression or shock value because the novelty wore off
and lately I’ve been wondering if mainstream art (especially TV shows and mainstream video games) is going through its own Newgrounds era, where shows like The Boys and Peacemaker - and video games like Baldur’s Gate 3 - are going for over-the-top violence and sex and shock value simply because they can, and because they’re reveling in their freedom to do it
if so that has me hopeful that eventually mainstream media will calm down again and go back to being more thoughtful and mature and maybe dial it back down to a 5 or at least a 7, instead of being at an 11 all the time
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[Viridi Vix]
vivi@arff.archandle.net
@kasdeya any commercial entertainment product that only has things at a 7 is "forgettable" and "makes fewer headlines" and will make less money than the 11, so won't be made 
i'm truly sick of the investor-mandated boink scene in Every Movie Ever Even When It Doesn't Make Sense myself but i don't think it will be going away sadly
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rpgwaiter
rpgwaiter@based.zone@kasdeya personally I miss that era of online art. Like, the novelty never wore off on me, I'll probably always be a fan of gratuitous sex and (especially) violence in online media. I'm hopeful it'll happen in waves and after this current era of calm, there will be another resurgence in the extreme, at least enough of one for me to satiate my media appetite
I don't watch or play mainstream media, can't speak to that
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Purple Skies
Leviamicky@meow.social@kasdeya stuff gets old really fast when it's constantly going to 11, very much looking forward to 6-8 being the expected mean average.
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Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt@kasdeya I kind of agree but then I'm confused about BG3, it felt very vanilla to me. Am I corrupted by M+ games?
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@nina_kali_nina it starts with a parasite crawling into your eyesocket and about 10 minutes later you pull someone’s brain out of their exposed skull, and overall the violence feels extremely over-the-top to me, while also being flippant about how over-the-top it is. like it has all the gore of a horror game but it’s also got that slightly goofy lighthearted D&D tone
there’s also full nudity in the game and the character creator lets you customize your genitals, and there’s a lot of sex including (I’ve heard) bestiality with a druid in bear form. I think this part is great btw! but it’s also much more than I would ever expect a mainstream video game to have
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Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbtShow content
@kasdeya I have finished the game, and I really don't think any of what you mention is really all that unusual in M-rated video games, maybe with the exception of nudity and sexuality for the Western games. I guess it is somewhat uncommon for an M-rated game to get that popular... But then there's GTA and Witcher 3 which are both very very popular and at times shocking...
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@nina_kali_nina that’s part of my point! I think GTAV and Witcher 3 are also part of what I’m calling the Newgrounds era. I think they’re deliberately dialing up the gore and violence - sometimes flippantly and sometimes seriously - in the same way that Newgrounds artists did
I think video games in particular have been doing this for a lot longer than TV shows have been - since even the original Doom was meant to be transgressive and shockingly violent. but I think it’s part of the same zeitgeist that led to shows like The Boys - it’s just that video games were able to get started much earlier than TV shows were, for whatever reason. maybe censorship for video games has historically been more lax than for TV shows, and only recently has TV show censorship been relaxed
but I think that now that so much popular media is doing this Newgrounds thing, people will get jaded to it over time and things will calm down
(the only alternative that I can think of is that art naturally gravitates toward extreme violence, and censorship is the only thing that stops it from going there, but I don’t like that possibility because it gives censorship a reason for being)
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to be clear what I’m basically trying to say is “popular media has gotten more and more violent, transgressive, and disturbing over time and I hope this is just a temporary trend. I also hope that censorship isn’t actually needed in order for there to be media that’s more toned down, for people like me”
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