some undeveloped thoughts:
-- Kingdom Hearts as paradigm of consumerism-as-storytelling
-- that one (positive???) review of TROS that said the space horses reminded them of being a kid and playing with my little ponies and GI Joes along with their Star Wars action figures

-- multiple layers of metanarrative supplanting narrative, eg the emotional climax of "all the Jedi" is being the kid in a commercial, that tweet about TROS& #39;s ending implicitly casting Rey as someone who watched the original Star Wars films

storytelling that isn& #39;t just aimed at a consumer audience, but is more and more about the emotional journey of being a consumer/audience member who vicariously experiences stories

this isn& #39;t always a bad thing, Death Stranding was an incredible metanarrative game about gaming culture? but I see it done more and more, especially in large franchise properties, and by writers who aren& #39;t as self-aware as Kojima (or aren& #39;t self-aware at all)

Scorsese called the MCU the equivalent of a theme park, and he was right, and that& #39;s not an inaccurate way to describe this kind of storytelling that& #39;s more about giving the audience nostalgic encounters with pop culture iconography than stories that have internal emotional logic