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's ending implicitly casting Rey as someone who watched the original Star Wars films

storytelling that isn'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'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't as self-aware as Kojima (or aren't self-aware at all)

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