I am watching Severance and playing Hades 2 lately, and I noticed that ‘respawn’ as a plot device has really increased in last few years.
It’s not just respawn, but it’s the mechanism where each spawn helps push the narrative further.
The Good Place was similar. Mickey 17 seems to be doing the same thing from what I can tell in the trailer.
Am I just cherry picking or is this a real trend? And does this reflect some other underlying phenomenon?
You might be cherry picking. I think what’s happening here is more, this is a new kind of plot. I don’t think it’s dramatically different from what has come before, but stuff like timeloops and respawns are a really recent concept compared to something like say, reincarnation. So even though it’s not actually overrepresented, it feels more represented, because it’s recently gone from 0% of all stories to 2% of all stories.
Probably makes sense yeah.