A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: “The Minecraft Movie”
Popular culture for children has become so fragmented these days that what is familiar to one 14-year-old may be completely foreign to another. But progress towards everyone having their own personal culture is not yet complete. So, I’m looking at some things that all (well, most) kids enjoy, including the movie Minecraft , Labubus, and the literary devices developed by Spanish writer Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s (really).
Will the Minecraft movie become a generational touchstone?
I’m writing this on the day of the Minecraft movie’s release, and signs point to its release becoming one of those vanishingly rare events that captures the collective imagination (and disposable income) of a generation. This is a cultural event that everyone (up to a certain age) will experience and remember. But probably for a different reason than you expect.
The main audience of the film is young children (and their bored parents, who, of course, are dragged to the cinemas). Six-year-olds will love seeing Minecraft on screen for real, but many teenagers ironically watch the movie. It’s like that time a few years ago when the kids put together a team and put on costumes for the movie Minions . The Minecraft movie didn’t get good reviews before its release , but it did get some good pre-release memes. And there’s no better marketing to hard-to-reach kids than their peers creating TikToks.
I love how all the memes tacitly acknowledge that the movie is going to be bad, like this one, which cuts the trailer down to just words from the video game:
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Or a video like this with one banal phrase:
or this with a bunch of stupid phrases:
Or this video of brain decomposition:
If I had any money at all, I’d bet everything that the filmmakers made it that way on purpose. They know that young children will enjoy the Minecraft movie , despite the poor computer graphics, standard “catchphrases” and formulaic plot; Children have terrible critical thinking. They should also know that older children will not accept the children’s version of Minecraft if they take it seriously. Minecraft is so open-ended that the teenage version is very different from what a small child would experience: it’s impossible to “stay true” to the source material the way Super Mario can, so the film’s producers didn’t try. Instead, they leaned toward the corny in hopes of catching an ironic wave, because there’s nothing older kids love more than laughing at things they used to enjoy (even though we adults know that deep down they still love it).
Or I may be wrong and the business may fail; What am I, Nostradamus?
What’s up with Labubus?
Parents: If you haven’t heard of Labubus, I predict you’ll know everything you can about them before Christmas. The slightly adventurous-looking plush dolls with vinyl faces are destined to become a must-have holiday toy for 2025—we’re talking Beanie-Babies-in-1997 levels of hysteria here, so be prepared.
Labubus, created by Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung, was first introduced to the market in 2015 by Pop Mart. Over the past decade, they have taken over Asian markets, spread to Europe and America, and recently reached critical mass worldwide.
The popularity is partly because the characters are undeniably adorable and cool, but also because they are collectible. People love to collect things. Labubuses are available as keychains, dolls and decorated with other products. There are over 300 variations of this toy, with more to come, so you ‘ll never run out of Labubus to buy. The main difference between Labubus and Beanie Babies is that Labubus are sold in black boxes, so the buyer doesn’t know exactly what they are getting before purchasing. Some are rarer than others, so if you want to collect them all, you’ll end up with a lot of duplicates.
As you’d expect, there’s a ton of content about Labubu on social media , and a thriving secondary toy market has emerged, full of collectors and artists making a quick buck. Normally I would advise would-be Labuboo millionaires to look at what happened to the people who “invested” in Beanie Babies and invest in an IRA instead, but I’m not sure that advice applies: if you invest in Laboobus rather than a mutual fund, at least you’ll have some cool dolls to hug.
The yarn face makeup trend is both frightening and intriguing.
The yarn face makeup trend on TikTok hasn’t taken off yet, but I’m hoping it catches on: Wearing makeup for reasons other than “to make me look prettier” is the kind of subversion of expectations that the world needs more of. It’s scary and weird, but I want to see people walking around looking like they’re crocheted every time I go outside.
The technique was invented by the extremely talented SFX makeup artist @annamurphyyy in this video that has been viewed over 52 million times:
It wasn’t long before other beauty influencers responded to the trend with their own take, resulting in videos like these:
Viral Video of the Week: My Craziest Video [Amanda the Adventurer 2]
This week’s viral video, “My Craziest Video [Amanda the Adventuress 2],” was viewed more than four million times in its first day online. It’s from gaming streamer CoryxKenshin and it works on many levels. Here’s some explanation:
1) Game streaming . It’s not entirely new, but young people love to watch other people play video games, often for long periods of time; This video is over two and a half hours long.
2) CoryxKenshin: This streamer has over 20 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He mostly plays horror games, a popular genre among streamers, probably because watching people get scared is fun.
3) Reaction Video: CoryxKenshin can be described as a combination of a game streamer and a reactor. His video is half about the game he plays and half about his reaction to it.
4) Amanda the Adventurer 2 : A sequel developed by indie studio MANGLEDmaw Games, Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a challenging horror/puzzle game about an early 2000s children’s TV show dealing with something supernatural and sinister involving missing children. This is an example of “analogue horror” and horror revolving around childhood nostalgia, popular among young people.
5) Analog horror. Popular among young people, this analogue horror subgenre is not typically gory or overly violent. These aren’t usually adult horror films. The idea is to create a confusing and terrifying atmosphere, highlighting the limitations of older forms of media, and then break the tension with the occasional scare. You play Amanda the Adventurer 2 as a character who watches old VHS tapes of a children’s TV show. Amanda, the main character of the show, invites viewers to communicate. Somehow she’s alive on the VHS tapes, and you progress through the game by figuring out what Amanda wants and giving it to her (or not giving it to her), thus revealing the history of the tapes and the missing children. Like many popular horror games, Amanda’s fears are based on references to media that the audience remembers from childhood – in this case, Dora the Explorer.
6) Multi-layered, nested storytelling . The creation of complex fictional structures that distance the reader from the story was popularized in horror literature by House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, but you can go back further and mention Philip K. Dick or Jorge Luis Borges if you like. What’s most interesting to me is how artistic conventions that were once the preserve of pointy-headed intellectuals are now being fully embraced by 14-year-olds who have never read a book. Think about what you’re doing right now: You’re reading the description of a YouTube video of a person playing a game in which a “real” person watches videotapes of a fictional character based on the “real” fictional character Dora the Explorer. Like I said: there are many levels.