I feel sorry for children because they never had the experience of playing games or watching things for free. It’s why I think a lot of them don’t hate ads as much as people older then them do, they just accepted them as a necessary part of their reality and deal with it because the ads have always been there for them.
When I was 14 and started using wattpad it was still a shitty little fanficiton app and everything on that app was free. E v e r y t h i n g.
You only needed an account and you could download countless books and read them offline whenever you wanted. You could write offline and publish and edit whatever and whenever you wanted. There were no ads, no premium no money involved what so ever. It was the reason why I used it, I used to download (well save to my library) 200 fanfics before my summer vacation because I knew I wouldn’t have internet and I wanted to entertain myself, I wrote 7 books and published them for fun because I could write and save while offline and then publish them later if I wanted.
When I opened wattpad after a few years I was first met with “upgrade to premium to download and read unlimited books” and then I was met with an ad in between chapters. I didn’t continue I deleted my account and haven’t even wanted to download it again.
What capitalism and consumerism did in the last few years has had an affect on everything in such a way that cannot be explained unless you’ve seen the before. Because now you have these platforms crying and begging you not to use an ad blocker, but that means nothing to me because I know they can function without ads, because I’ve seen and experienced it. Which is why I do not understand people who pay for these things, but if I grew up in an environment where all of these things were already this obsessed with getting money maybe I wouldn’t complain either.
Tldr. children do not have spaces anymore where they’re not bombarded with ads and it’s sad because they were born into this.
If your show has time to let a character just sit and pet a tortoise for a scene–no matter how brief–it’s a Good Show and you’re well-paced. It’s just a brief moment of pleasant comfort, it doesn’t have to move the plot forward or provide crucial exposition, but it shows that you have both some time to spare in the story and you’re letting your characters be Happy for a minute.
