@bravojohnson
It’s basically unsupervised gen X by proxy. If they made a Gen Z or millennial character “genuinely unoptimized,” it would almost automatically read as a pose, because both Gen Z and millennials has never existed outside the optimization apparatus. There’s no cultural memory of unsupervised development to draw from.
Hawke’s dysfunction isn’t an aesthetic choice or a brand—it’s just the natural outcome of someone who built their entire operating system in the analog era and never bothered (or managed) to update it. He’s not performing “I’m a mess”—he just never learned not to be one, because there was no infrastructure demanding he become legible as a type.
The show can explore what genuine unoptimization looks like by using someone from the last generation that got to develop one, letting current viewers see what the thing actually was before it became a curated aesthetic category to scroll past.
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