- JacobGRocks
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- Heroic Member
This is the definition of Nostalgia Goggles:
There is a tendency for adults to see newer material in a medium (be it music, film, animation, or comic books) as inferior to the older 'classics' that they knew in their youth.
There are three levels of this. The first involves a person enjoying modern material, but preferring older classics instead. People subject to the first level are perfectly willing to accept newer material, even admitting certain material to be better than a classic. The second level involves a person believing that most material produced during modern times is greatly inferior, however, they are willing to admit that there are exceptions. The third level is a full-on despising of all modern works (which may or may not be limited to a single medium) and the absolute refusal to believe that anything could be even close to the level of the classics they used to enjoy.
There are many causes for this. First, people's tastes are generally based on the art they knew as they grew up and they continue to inform themselves on this basis. Second, tastes refine as one matures; what may have seemed brilliant to a child or teen would seem crude or laughable to most adults, but the memories of how great something from one's youth seemed linger long afterward, making the familiar examples seem better than more or less equivalent modern ones in comparison. Third, change in most art forms comes in waves, rather than developing continuously, and the transition from one wave to another can be jarring and unfamiliar - while the periods between waves tend to be uninspired across the board.
However, it is likely that the most important cause of this nostalgia is a consequence of Sturgeon's Law combined with the passage of time: As new material is released, the vast majority will be of mediocre or worse quality, but over time, a powerful selection pressure causes all but the best material (and in some infamous cases, the worst) to be rapidly forgotten, leaving an increasingly inaccurate impression of the overall quality of the genre over time. This is known as "the nostalgia filter", and can be easily demonstrated by a careful review of the period works that are not remembered today.
The distance of time also compresses the memories of past eras, causing the best work to seem more continuous than it was, whereas "new" is a continually moving frontier: between this memory compression and the selective memories of "the good stuff", the past of the genre is remembered as a time when "it all was good"
One final possible reason: most developers/authors/artists/musicians/etc. create whatever is popular at that day and age. This means that what was popular last year isn't being produced in the same density. If a person's preference is for something that is out of fashion right now, they may have little choice besides 'hang onto the older version' or 'give up on it completely'.
Of course, just because a person prefers an older work to more modern things doesn't mean they only like it because of nostalgia. Sometimes the older work is better, or at least has it's own appeal that the present things don't - even beyond "Charm", which is often thrown around to describe stuff mostly to just mean "It's nostalgic".
Sam Viviano, art director of MAD Magazine, has a saying which defines the Nostalgia Filter: "Mad was at its best whenever you first started reading it." A corollary to that is that, if you didn't like Mad, it was at its best shortly before you started reading it.
You'll notice that this trope sometimes overlaps with the Periphery Hatedom - Almost all the time people trashing about how the new stuff sucks brings up stuff that was marketed towards the youth of our generation, and the stuff that's considered a "classic" and is an example of "good" works? The stuff they enjoyed when they were younger. Never mind that 20 years ago, when it was being marketed towards them, the 14-30 year olds of that generation were saying the exact same thing we are today. It's a neverending cycle.
Source: TVTropes