I am watching Severance and playing Hades 2 lately, and I noticed that ‘respawn’ as a plot device has really increased in last few years.
It’s not just respawn, but it’s the mechanism where each spawn helps push the narrative further.
The Good Place was similar. Mickey 17 seems to be doing the same thing from what I can tell in the trailer.
Am I just cherry picking or is this a real trend? And does this reflect some other underlying phenomenon?
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You might be cherry picking. I think what’s happening here is more, this is a new kind of plot. I don’t think it’s dramatically different from what has come before, but stuff like timeloops and respawns are a really recent concept compared to something like say, reincarnation. So even though it’s not actually overrepresented, it feels more represented, because it’s recently gone from 0% of all stories to 2% of all stories.
Probably makes sense yeah.
It’s groundhog day with a different coat of paint
You have me thinking about the time in South Park where Satan killed Saddam Hussein in hell. He comes right back, “where was I going to go, Detroit?”
What respawn happened in Severance? I can’t think of anyone that died and came back.
Also the episode explaining Kenny’s respawning.
Not really death but going in and out of Lumen kind of resets things and they have to figure their way out. It seems similar.
Ah, gotcha.
I feel like the respawn mechanic in media is often used for social commentary about capital treating labor as a disposable commodity. I think severance is definitely a commentary on corporate life, but also on the nature of consciousness and identity.
We have a generation of filmmakers that grew up playing video games, as has much of their audience, so I think that’s why it’s become such a trope lately.
Yeah i was wondering if these shows are channeling some kind of anxieties around futility/hopelessness of the system.
Also Mickey 17 is by Bong Joon Ho, so the class system analogy makes sense too.
