Built-In Narratives
One of things I was reaching for the other day was to do with people who don't necessarily want to actually engage with concepts or media or whatever but want to have The Thing That They Say About Them To Sound Smart. There's a cousin to this—not sure how close a cousin, but it's something that I find frustrating even as I'm sure I do it all the time: repeating back the narratives that things come prepackaged with.
The reason I react badly to these is largely that they feel like I'm being fed a line. The direct-to-consumer razor company Harry's, which used to advertise on podcasts a lot, had a section of their ad read about how they bought a factory in Germany. If you listened to podcasts back when Harry's was advertising, you will have heard about this factory in Germany a lot. Because it's an advert, you can clearly see that they've just come up with a catchy, semantically dense way to say "it's good".
There's a game that I enjoy called Outer Wilds which was released quite a while back. One of things about it that I remember people saying is that in order to make the game work, they had to make it so that the world of the game moves around the player, rather than the other way around. This is interesting, but it's kinda just a little fact, not something that tells you that much about the game itself.
A counterexample: something people like to say about Dark Souls is that one of the inspirations for Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's Japanese director, was his childhood experiences reading and half-understanding fantasy novels in English that he got from the library, filling in the blanks where he didn't understand with his imagination. I think that's different because if you've played Dark Souls, you might well find that it gives the disconnected and dreamlike nature of its narrative more resonance.
It's not just confined to media, either—people very often seem to have memorised these pat phrases that they can say about something in order to have something to say should the topic come up (once you've spotted people doing this in a professional setting, it makes some meetings even more annoying). You don't have to do that! I'm reminded of something Josef said about David Lynch: there are some things he says across the years in interviews, but rather than just repeating the same thing over and over he says them differently enough that it seems clear he's effectively thinking it through and arriving at the conclusion afresh every time.
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