Late teen, young-adult thing. Exactly. Kids.
But more specifcially, the "next gen" of players who may be joining 5e for the first time because they loved Neverwinter Nights 2. Or some such.
I don't think
anyone particularly loved NWN2 so that seems a little implausible.
You didn't say "kids", though, you said "children", which is much more specific, and extremely demeaning if applied to
adults, like, say, late-teens and young twenties. Or to imply that anyone who likes such a thing is such.
38, actually.
Anyone younger than half my age is a kid to me, by comparison. You must not have been around for the dark-is-cool... oh wait, yes you were... or rather, are. Just look at all of the gritty reboots and how "darker, edgier" stories have come to the fore. A PC Drow is basically the New Batman. *lol*
Dude.
You really don't get it. This is
not a "kid" or "child" thing. You are describing a late '90s and early '00s thing. How old, EXACTLY do you think the writers of "the New Batman" are? How old do you think most of it's audience is? What about our new, neck-snapping Superman? How old are the people involved in that, directors, writers, fans? Yeah, they're 30 and 40 somethings, or even older, for the most part. How old do you think Frank Miller is, exactly? He may be utterly obsessed with juvenalia, but he's 57...
What about the New BSG, the poster-child for "dark-is-cool" and "dark reboots"? You think that was huge largely with teens and young twenties? Nuh-uh. It was huge with the entire 18-49 market. And it's from a decade ago! I could go on and on - virtually all mainstream TV has an element of "dark is cool", with the possible exception of some of the cheesier detective shows, but they go with "dark is salacious and thrilling" instead, which isn't hugely different. I feel like you're completely suck in the past here, in a really spectacular way.
So let's not pretend dark-is-cool is either:
1) New.
or
2) Popular solely or even mainly with people half your age or less (let alone actual children).
Plenty of people of all ages like such stuff, and plenty dislike such stuff. We should not be calling anyone "kids" or "children" because they do.
Exactly how it was meant to be. If you were THERE to absorb all the Driz'zt love and hate in its heydey, you must have been able to see the sarcasm in my other post. :3
Sarcasm? Wrong word. Irony, I think, is what you're trying to say, but really, to me it read nasty, not intentionally ironic, so you may have messed that up.
We all did it. Don't pretend you didn't.
No, no "we all" did not. A small, devoted, cult-like minority did that, and jesus, they were a problem, in my experience, because they were ten times more obsessed than the fan-iest Drizzt fan (who could easily be diverted to making "A Highlander" or "A Jedi" or whatever - anything as long as it was cool and had a sword). I remember my first reaction to this Elf-obsession (my early D&D PCs largely being human) was "What is wrong with you guys? This is creepy." - especially because there was a lot of quasi-racial-superiority stuff with elves.