"}unpopular opinion: the general public has gotten significantly better at lit crit in general and understanding complex narratives in particular over the last 40-odd years
and things like TVTropes and r/nosleep directly contributed to that.
Like. In the original Back To The Future, Doc Brown has to sit down and spell out what time travel even is and exactly how it works. It’s a very simple time travel narrative by modern standards, but the writers did not trust a general audience to understand the concept of “going back and forward in time”. and time travel had been A Thing in fiction since the 1800s! it wasn’t like it was a brand new concept or anything.
the MCU casually dropped a time travel plot in Avengers: Endgame. they assume the characters- and the audience- have an idea of the basics of how A Time Travel Story works (and namedrop a bunch of them!) and all they feel like they have to explain is how their time travel differs from the standard narrative.
Back to the Future and Avengers: Endgame are aimed at the exact same general-if-slightly-geeky audience. But the writers’ level of trust in what the audience can understand has changed. Even writing for the lowest common denominator– the thirteen-year-old boy who hates reading!!!1!!!! and just wants to watch things explode– assumes that the audience can understand a plot with time travel, flashbacks that aren’t clearly marked with a sound effect and a fade, a narrative that branches depending on choices the characters make, and the like.
writers have also come to trust that the audience can understand- and tolerate- a certain amount of postmodernism. it’s more common in indie writing, dgmw- but like, look at anything out of the SCP universe, half of the fun of SCPs is the intertextuality and the meta wankery. House of Leaves is a common enough cultural touchstone that a meme about a pizza box looking like it gets spread all over the internet. The Southern Reach books got a film adaptation. (A dumbed-down one, but STILL.) and uh. the giant super-pomo injoke that was Goncharov (1973) took down Tumblr for three days and made it into the New York Times.
And I genuinely think that stuff like TVtropes, the vast accessible horror playgrounds of /nosleep and the SCP foundation, and even bullshit like CinemaSins has helped people get here. It’s common knowledge now that stories are made of tropes, that you can subvert and deconstruct tropes, and that stories can talk to other stories.
The DieHard trailer in particular is sort of wild in this regard.
Literally narrating what is going to happen as its happening for two minutes.