This shift seems to have happened from the mid-90s on, arguably, but it is very noticeable since maybe the mid-2000s. And you see it in everything, from kids’ shows to adult series to films.
What I mean is, in classical literature and fairy tales, generally supernatural beings want to become human. Gods and demigods don’t, I guess, but most other beings, and indeed most anthropomorphic animals, do.
This carries over into most early and mid-Disney stuff, from The Jungle Book through to Tarzan and The Little Mermaid. Obviously most of that is based on earlier stories. And then..? Shit went the opposite way.
First we had Felix the Cat and Brother Bear, and obviously “mutants” in comic series, and it seems to have ever-expanded from there, to the point where vampirism and lycanthropy for example are seen as less a curse or punishment, and more “a gaining of powers”…
One good example, perhaps, is to compare the original Grimm fairytales to the ridiculous tv show they made, supposedly “based” on those stories. Or Supernatural, similarly. Or Prometheus vs Alien. Or, for another slant, Bicentennial Man and AI vs something like Humans or Deus Ex Machina…
To me, at least, this is a very noticeable trend, across both fantasy (in particular) and sci fi, and it seems to carry with how obsessed people are now with mutilating their bodies, “transcending” gender and race and all that sort of shit…
Also noteworthy that we’ve gone from curing disabilities, in fiction, to portraying becoming disabled as a positive thing, and a form of “superpower”, rather than the thoroughly net-negative experience it usually is…
They even do that shit in kids’ programming, now, too…
So yeah, just something else be noticed and have been thinking about…
Bran Stoker be rolling in his grave…
I guess you could argue this all ties back in to our desire, now, as a society, to feel “special” and “different”, and to be “recognized”, but I do not see it as the sign of a healthy, self-respecting civilization, imho…
The elite in charge hate humanity. Every action they take and the media they promote and consume suggests this.
Take Jewish author, Yuval Harari, who wrote the book Sapiens. That book is promoted everywhere and Yuval has been invited out to speak at very significant events including the UN and WEF, etc... if you've read the book, it's clear that Yuval has a total and complete disdain for humanity. I have never read something more soulless in my life. Yet our elite celebrate this.
Another great example of the total disdain for humanity is the theology surrounding the Frankfurt School whose ideas were mostly founded by Carl Grünberg, a Jewish man, which was that the forefather of modern Social Justice and Critical Theory. The ideas at the core essentially being that all differences among humans is due to oppression from one group to another thereby ignoring all innate differences between groups of humans and pitting all humans against one another as oppressor or oppressed. This ideology is seen by our elites as ideal who've enshrined it into law by way of "Human Rights" which makes it illegal to make decisions to your own benefit which considers differences between groups of humans as being due to the nature of humans rather than due to oppression. The elite absolutely despise the fact that there are differences between humans because that is what being human means and they push this ideology on everyone that essentially makes it illegal to recognize differences as anything different than being caused by oppression. So when people point out what it truly means to be human, the elite get angry because they dislike humanity.
It would seem the elite have an ideal of what they want humanity to be that is actually in opposition to what humans truly are and because of this the elite hate humanity and anything that recognizes the truth of what humans are.