Pop-Culture

Pop culture is a good thing. It is an ever-changing culture, developing based on what is popular at a given time. Pop culture can create communities and subcultures within pop culture. Creating these communities while still defining generations is quite the feat. With each generation, there are new defining parts in pop culture. Anime is definitely a subculture of pop culture that has taken off with generation z. I remember when people were made fun of for watching things like anime and now it's cool. These subcultures are one thing that sets pop culture apart from other cultures. 

One of the biggest things in pop culture is superheroes. More specifically Marvel movies have made an incredible splash in pop culture. Although comics have been pretty relevant in pop culture having many comic book conventions worldwide. Just like pop culture superheroes have changed and developed to fall into current popular opinions. The Marvel cinematic universe has been creating its slice of pop culture since 2008. Marvel has evolved movie making from a coherent story given to an audience in an hour or 2; into an intertwining story over the course of 27 films and quite a few shows.  Although there are other cinematic universes that have come before none made the impact that Marvel has created.

Pop culture is fluid and changes in a way that other cultures can not change. Pop culture or popular culture does not belong to a specific country or generation. I would say that pop culture is highly influenced by the most recent generation. Oftentimes the recent generation will set the trend of popular culture. However, with newer generations, the change and shift of pop culture also happens. This helps society to set new ideals. During the time of war, the pop culture of comics and movies at the time reflected the patriotism society changed too. Just like how now we see more acceptance and diversity across platforms and pop culture helping society be accepting as well.

So to me, pop culture is a good thing. It affects the development of creativity by pushing creators of all types of art to push to have bigger and better things. Anime and comics/ Marvel were just two examples but there are many more; some of the biggest are the social media platforms we use and video viewing. This includes Youtube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok. We consume things differently and it all plays into pop culture. The development of our society as a whole might be seen as a stretch but what is popular highly influences society and as things are accepted by pop culture the more it will become normalized in society. When we have characters in shows that are not treated differently because they aren’t straight or transgender I think it is great. Some shows try too hard to say it is ok to be this other thing but just amplify and point out that this character is not “normal”. As it becomes normalized it shows and pop culture translates over to real life and that is how Pop culture also plays a significant role in society.