personally i don’t feel like i’ve ever been in touch with ‘youth culture’. even when i was very young i always felt like i never understood what other kids were talking about, and this feeling of alienation from ‘the zeitgeist’ has persisted into my 30s. like, when i was a kid i liked ninjas and mecha. now that i’m 30 i like ninjas and mecha and communism. but i never liked the name brand IP stuff, Gundam is mid mostly (i especially disliked gundam wing, which was the hot shit when i was a pre-teen), and like 7/10 at its best (gundam IBO, haven’t yet seen witch from mercury but i hear good things). transformers is and always was poorly concieved garbage. power rangers were silly but normal IP-less anonymized ninjas were cool. naruto and DBZ were too impractical, even when i was like 6 i didn’t like their tacky orange outfits. i liked pokemon (or more accurately i thought pikachu specifically was cute) for like one year and got bored of it while the rest of the world went wild about it. and i never liked any music anyone else had ever heard of. i think assuming that these criticisms are always and necessarily just out of touch adults complaining about what they don’t understand is too simplistic, because ‘out-of-touch-edness’ is not confined to the old and the very concept might be kinda ableist towards the neurodivergent depending on the definition and related assumptions.