Most artists are obsessed with their craft, thinking about it constantly and drawing strange connections between disparate points of data to arrive at new conclusions. I am no exception to this rule. A long term study of the art of storytelling has led me to an interesting conclusion – there is more to the strange distortions that have felt through American culture than just a loss of skill or a growth of a particular ideology.

In some ways this was not a huge revelation to me. While there are real signs that ideology has taken over vast swaths of the people who produce most of America’s modern stories, that cannot explain things on its own. Sure, overpowering ideology creates blinders that get in the way of storytelling. It hampers the development of key storytelling skills and distorts the sense of truth and beauty that all the best art relies on.

Ideology is a very limited thing. In and of itself it creates a framework for viewing the world and if that framework is detached from what makes a good story that’s an issue. But if the ideology has good grounding in truth then steeping in that ideology can actually be beneficial. Ideologically driven stories can also succeed if they are tempered by other contributions from people with less ideological commitment, or at least equally significant commitment to artistic merit. So long as the ideology has a grasp on the true and beautiful there is hope for good art to come from it. So I have always found the ideology excuse for modernity’s bad art insufficient to explain the situation. That’s not to say the ideology driving much of modernity’s stories is good, I don’t think it is, I just don’t feel that alone explains the issue. That leaves lack of skill as a possible reason for bad stories.

It is harder to pinpoint what exactly could cause an artistic community’s skill to slip away and thus harder to tell whether or not it has happened at all. Many once great creators like Ridley Scott or James Cameron have produced films that fall far short of their best efforts. Is that because they have aged, as we all must? Or is some other factor at work? It’s hard too tell in an objective, testable way. The creation of art is not a scientific process, nor are the intricacies of creating it as measured and precise as science demands. I have only my intuition and a handful of data points to work from.

However over the last few months I’ve started to wonder if there might be a third explanation I’ve overlooked. What if modern storytellers are just too insular?

Indulge me in a brief digression. One of the greatest English language authors to ever live was a Regency era British woman named Jane Austen. All six of her novels were about the lives of minor, upper class British women juggling their social standing, family obligation and personal ambitions. They are wonderful studies of character and human nature. Like all art they grasp very true ideas and present them to the audience in fascinating ways. They also come from a very specific historical and cultural context.

If a Jane Austen novel were presented to the people of the British Raj or West Indies who lived at the time they were published there is a good chance they would not find it engaging or entertaining. While the basic character archetypes of, say, Pride and Prejudice are universal to the human experience the situations those characters find themselves in are very specific. That very specificity would make the entertainment provided by the narrative harder to receive for those unfamiliar with British life. Even those living in a theoretically British culture. There is just no point of cultural connection between the far flung cultures of the Empire and the culture of Jane Austen.

The purpose of this rather lengthy analogy is to undergird my theory on why so much of modern storytelling (and art in general) fails to resonate with so many people. Most modern stories, particularly in America, are seen through the filter of a small group of people in Southern California. Yes, publishing houses are mostly headquartered in New York but few Americans read stories anymore so, for the purpose of a broad discussion, publishers are sadly irrelevant. The rest of America’s modern storytellers are in Hollywood and the gaming industry. Even if these industries are not headquartered in SoCal the people who write for them come out of schools thought and schools of education that are exclusively focused on the Hollywood frame of mind.

The reason SoCal is important here is that it has a very unusual culture compared to the rest of America. It is demographically diverse, urban, childless, full of people who have spent a large chunk of their lives in “higher education” and share an extremely permissive attitude to sex. This culture is foreign to the rest of the nation. Perhaps more foreign to the majority of other Americans than British Regency culture would have been to the Indian and Caribbean cultures they ruled over.

The people of SoCal create stories steeped in their own, insular values and seem shocked when the rest of the world find these stories inaccessible to them. They are much like the oft depicted, out of touch British visitor to some far flung Imperial holding who doesn’t understand why everyone looks different, speaks oddly and eats with their hands. I have come to this conclusion lately specifically based on events around the gaming industry. For the sake of being thorough, some examples:

The game Black Myth: Wukong was criticized for lacking “representation” for black and Latino characters even though the game is based on Chinese myth. This demonstrates that the resident of Imperial SoCal cannot conceive of any culture being represented that doesn’t have the ethnic make up of the world right outside their widow. The point of the game was to represent ancient China, not modern California, so the American storytellers were scandalized.

The game Dragon Age: The Veilguard features an entire storyline about a character’s pronouns. This is a bit of linguistic drudgery born of too much useless college education, the kind of thing so detached from reality only the ultra wealthy in the entertainment and tech sectors really pay attention to it. The audience found it tedious and stupid yet Imperial SoCal cannot understand why no one cares about it.

The game Dustborn features entire mechanics built around shaming and verbally abusing other people to defeat them in “combat” using the social standards of South California’s Empire. The results range from sad to unbearably cringe inducing. The game flopped horribly. Yet the creators insist the basic system is both interesting and narratively insightful.

Audiences do not connect with the stories or critiques above. They are based in a context we do not take part of and don’t really want to understand. Modern storytellers don’t seem to understand that because they are so deeply embedded in their own insular culture. Does it explain why they struggle to create anything that resonates with the rest of the world? It could.

How is the problem to be solved? That’s harder to say. But with the problem diagnosed we are one step closer to that goal. Til next time, friends.