yeah i absolutely feel you, i don’t bring this aesthetic language up as like the prescriptive Good Way to do things or anything, i feel like ignoring the actual use and purpose of thematic/emotional signifiers in a specific aesthetic language and just treating it as a monolithic and previously understood genre template to be uncritically and methodically reproduced and reciprocated in it’s entirety is how you get mind numbingly boring and impotent shit like the Retro Game Spiritual Sequel indie startup boom or the ‘Boomer Shooter Revival’ people further up the thread are referencing. (man i motherfucking hate dave oshry so much he’s such an annoying stupid as shit rich guy).
what i actually mean is i really wish people who make games would think more deliberately about the emotional tones they’re invoking and for what purpose of the work they’re doing it because imo it would lead to more generative and personal expressions of interiority and development of artistic process, the thing people do now where they go “i want to make Cute Game so i will make my game look like all other Cute Game” and it becomes a weird memetic prefab artstyle is so uninspired to me.
i feel like this is a REALLY bad faith reading of what i’m trying to say. i’m not advocating for more adult swim shows lol, what i mean is that i’m someone who finds a lot of power and expressive potential in cartooning and other exaggerated visual languages to communicate really layered complex things visually and spatially and i find that the conceptualization people have that this aesthetic language is only to be invoked for content that’s ethically pure or dimly pleasing both artistically squandering and intensely alienating on a personal level as someone who is effed up and emotionally messy. (especially with the added implication that it’s only being done to hurt or trick people or threaten children???).
creepycute as an aesthetic language is really foundational to my own artwork even and i find invoking it’s signifiers really powerful for communicating complex feelings i have about the world so i really do not wanna sit here and be reductive about it. like i’m literally thinking of jhonen vasquez and krystine kryttre and junko mizuno and cate wurtz comics and like horror games starring cute furry girls with mascot proportions and of yume nikki and lisa the joyful, not of making a 1st grade class watch Superjail lmao.
for as much as you’re talking of people projecting their own hangups into things you really seem to have a highly specific idea of what kind of media i’m talking about, who is making it, and what their motives are for doing so that comes off to me a lot more like you’re talking about something i reminded you of that you invest a lot of energy and stock into hating rather than any idea i’m actually putting forward.
media for like insulated 25 year olds who don’t want to think about anything is exactly what i’m talking about hating, if anything in my experience a lot of the white collar disengaged 20 somethings i’ve met absolutely love wholesome games and are like the primary demographic serviced by them, part of my consternation with wholesome games is how people my age USE them to escape into a bubbled mindpalaced reality and get hostile or dismissive or even accuse people of “wanting to be shitty” when they’re presented with a work that wants to be honest about it’s complicated interior emotions or in general just expects them to think about or empathize with something that isn’t perfectly at home in an Animal Crossing game.
it’s intensely frustrating to me that it’s more difficult than ever to just use familiar language to talk about adult things in my artistic and social worlds, so i really don’t understand what part of my post you’re referencing in the implication that this is about avoiding the material realities of the adult world.
i feel like it’s reductive towards a really wide swath of work to assume everybody making dark and cute shit is just doing it for Revenge or to poison our sweet society world with their immoral subversive dark artist energy that will Mislead and Corrupt the child youth.
(i hear some of these so called ““artists”” are even ““gay”” 
u see what i’m doing here? u see why this language bothers me so much?)
it’s funny you bring this game up because i absolutely despised a short hike lol, it and games like that are exactly what i was thinking of in my first post when i referenced assimilationist cottagecore media, it kinda anti-inspired me to never make a game that simultaneously service like in it’s unobtrusiveness and clunky in it’s emotional manipulation lol
