@PonyPanda @PhenomX6 @JSDorn @Tactical This isn't unique to literature. comics in the west have been a completely sterile and stagnant medium since lthe 50s, while the east has turned them into an artform surpassing the best we ever made.

There's a lot of reasons for this, but the biggest issue is that our culture has this bizarre expectation of what these media are: books are sophisticated, intelligent, boring. Comics are for manchildren who obsess about continuity over storytelling.

Comics have been synonymous with capeshit since forever, because that was easy to make conform to censorship codes, while the only unique literary genres in the last few decades have been YA and "romance" novels. That's because It's become a hollow shell they use to smuggle smut to women and mindless shonen bullshit to tweens while people think it's actually educational and/or cultured because people are READING.

I think the truth is we are just a "cinematic" culture. If there are great new storytelling techniques to be discovered, it makes sense that it would emerge where the audience is, where there's a demand for new experiences rather than an expectation to conform to a standard. It doesn't matter whether the medium is perfectly suited to it, that's just where the cultural, creative dynamism is.