Curate, connect, and discover
My latest hot take is that Warrior Cats and Yellowstone, while vastly different media with vastly different target audiences, appeal to their respective audiences for the exact same reasons. Similarities include:
- the beauty of nature is a major theme and the expansion of cityscape is treated in both with the exact same level of narrative grief
- gratuitous violence and dysfunction
- readers/viewers vicariously live a power fantasy
- territorial disputes of a kind that no one else in their respective worlds engages in
- characters who are undeniably badass but all their ambition stems from their intense self-loathing
- oaths of unbreakable loyalty
- constant existential doom
- strict hierarchy enforced by violence
- murder plots that go off without a hitch
- murder plots that absolutely do not go off without a hitch
- lies about who your family is
- adoptions, but they’re a really weird dynamic
- lots of doomed romantic relationships
- “their death was all your fault”
- jaded antiheroes who can’t actually believe in the future they’re striving toward and sabotage it every time they get close by aiming for something imperfect (the best they think they can get/deserve)