Green is Not a Creative Color: Merchants of Creativity

For those unaware, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared is a video series on Youtube that critiques different kinds of media. So far there are five episodes, and the sixth and final episode comes out in June (probably on the 19th, but that's just a hunch). I may do future videos on the 2nd-5th videos, but todays post is about the first one. Here's a link to the video. You should probably watch it if you want to understand this post.

The notepad opens with "What's your favorite idea?" then a very brief pause, then "Mine is being creative." It doesn't really want the characters to say their favorite idea, just to tell them they should be creative. Then, when it asks about the orange, it shows how to be creative by explaining that it sees a silly face in it. Once again, it's just telling them what they should think, not worrying about what the characters think. We see how the notepad controls their creativity when only after putting on the monocle, filtering their vision, do the characters see shapes in the clouds, and the same ones at the same time. Eventually, the characters start figuring out how to be creative, especially the yellow guy, the youngest of the bunch. He paints a picture of a clown. The notepad pours black paint on it, saying "it's time to slow down." The notepad clearly doesn't want them to learn to be creative. The most striking example is when they are spelling their favorite colors (or rather colours; this is a British series) and the yellow guy chooses green. The notepad tells him that "green is not a creative color." You should chooses your favorite color, but only from a small set of options.

It tries to tell the characters not just what to think, but how to act. "I use my hair to express myself." When the red guy says, "that sounds really boring, the response is "I use my hair to express myself." The notepad can't respond, just repeat what it is supposed to drill into the characters' minds, almost like hypnopaedia. Once they have been sufficiently conditioned, they are sent to let their "creativity" flow. They make art about death and eat flesh. clearly their conditioning has taught them to use their creativity positively. Perhaps that's a metaphor for them eating themselves, preventing themselves from reaching their potential.

There is one shot where the angle spins around and we see a camera and a sign that says "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared Take 1." It you hadn't figured it out already, this is evidence that the video is a commentary on children's media, and how it totally removes all parts of actual creativity. Nothing the notepad wants the characters to do is actually creative, it's all engineered by the notepad. The notepad, or children's media, is conditioning the characters to listen to it, not themselves.

The interesting part of this is how similar it all is to what's discussed in Merchants of Cool. It's not the teens who create teen culture anymore, it's the media. They're told how to express themselves, preventing any chance at actual self-expression. They look at themselves and others through the lens of the media, so when they make decisions about what to buy, they aren't really making a decision at all. Total Request Live is comparable to the part where they choose their favorite colors: it's a choice, but it's from a predetermined subset of options.

Even if there are some similarities, there's still one huge difference: merchants of cool have a goal of you buying their product, but merchants of creativity don't seem to have a goal. That's because their goal is much more long term. They don't want to make kids buy their product when they're young, they want to condition them to listen to everything the media says so they can get money out of them later. That's how much control they have, and their control of our lives is always proportional to the size of their wallets.