Theorizing Stupid Media

Book excerpt: This book explores the stupid as it manifests in media—the cinema, television and streamed content, and videogames. The stupid is theorized not as a pejorative term but to address media that “fails” to conform to established narrative conventions, often surfacing at evolutionary moments. The Transformers franchise is often dismissed as being stupid because its stylistic vernacular privileges kinetic qualities over conventional narration. Similarly, the stupid is often present in genre fails like mother!, or in instances of narrative dissonance—joyously in Adventure Time; more controversially in Gone Home— where a story “feels off” It also manifests in “ludonarrative dissonance” when gameplay and narrative seemingly run counter to one another in videogames like Undertale and Bioshock. This book is addressed to those interested in media that is quirky, spectacle-driven, or generally hard to place—stupid!