Parental Sacrifice Required
Iron Lung, anime, and other kid stuff
Kids are boring. I’m sorry, but it’s true.
Okay, fine, maybe it’s not the kids that are boring, it’s just their interests, Marty! I love my two boys and I enjoy spending time with them, but the sad fact is that I’m a middle-aged man and they are literal children (even my 15yo, despite what the Epstein Files may say), and let’s just say the ways we like to spend our free time don’t always align.
When they were little, my kids were into trains and trucks and going to the playground, but they’re new and cute and so you indulge them (and then they nap, thank God). As they’ve gotten older, it’s become LEGO sets and Minecraft and YouTube, and in my teenager’s case, anime and memes and YouTube. Give or take the occasional LEGO set, the occasional Mark Rober experiment, and the occasional meme I can tell my teen I’ve already seen, sucka!, I can’t say their favorite activities frequently overlap with my own.
Still, spending time with them is one of my favorite activities, so I indulge my 10-year-old as much as possible (before scheduling a playdate so he can talk Pokemon with someone who gives a shit), and I indulge my teenager whenever he allows me in his presence, which is increasingly rare. Because beggars can’t be choosers, I’m often stuck watching a show or attempting a video game I barely understand just so he can explain it and/or laugh at me.
Lately my 15-year-old has been making me watch Attack on Titan, a celebrated anime series that either has 80,000 episodes (we’re on like #23 HELP ME) or I’m being punk’d (I’ve never been more desperate to see Ashton Kutcher). Of course, after a decade of me force-feeding him my favorite movies and music and books and TV shows (I’ve made him an expansive rock music playlist, introduced him to many classic, and non-classic, films, and we’ve recently started watching Breaking Bad – his choice), it’s only fair that he gets to introduce me to stuff he loves too.
Which is why I recently found myself sitting in a movie theater watching something called Iron Lung.
I don’t know about you, but given everything that’s going on in the world, I could use the occasional distraction.
Things aren’t going great and it sure seems like it’s going to continue this way for a while unless, to paraphrase John Mulaney, everyone gets real pissed about a bunch of stuff really quickly (how everyone isn’t real pissed already is beyond me!). Plus, on top of the cascading flow bad news, it’s been crazy cold here in NYC, so when my teen’s bestie couldn’t make it to the movies last weekend, I wasn’t entirely put out by subbing in and sitting somewhere warm (that wasn’t my couch) for a few hours.
So we drove to the theater to watch a movie I knew nothing about (which is rare for me!), all because I love my son. I may have been his second choice, and the movie may have been my last choice, but at least we got to sit next to each other in silence for a while!
Real quick: Iron Lung is a sci-fi/horror flick written, directed by, and starring a YouTube creator who goes by the name Markiplier. He has nearly 40 million subscribers on his channel, where he made his name filming himself playing video games, because the modern world is a sad and desperate place (insert old man yelling at cloud). Thankfully, the movie isn’t two hours of someone playing the Ghost of Tsushima or whatever. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much more engaging that that.
If you want to know the plot of the movie, read the Wikipedia entry. If you want to know all the lore behind the movie (and the video game), I’ll give you my 15-year-old’s number; I hope you have three hours! If you want to know what I thought of it, here you go:
IT WAS BORING AS HELL.
It’s atmospheric and tense and confusing and weird and bloody (not in a violent way, really; the sub is literally floating in a sea of blood), but mostly it’s just boring. It takes place entirely inside a tiny submarine (the titular Iron Lung), with one (not particularly good) actor (and a few others who appear via screen or speaker), and very little happens.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not impressive as a project. My dude not only created the movie independently, he distributed it independently as well, completely outside of the studio system, which makes the numbers above even more impressive (and potentially pioneering). He mobilized his fan base to badger their local theater chains into showing it, and once they did that, he got them to actually pay to see it. A lot of them, as the movie has made 40 million dollars against a budget of just $3 million. So far.
As a “content creator” myself, I know how hard it is to mobilize your followers into spending money, especially when they’re used to getting your content for free (even when your funny book basically is free!). So I can’t help but envy Mr. Markiplier (not his real name) for pulling it off; I have trouble getting people to subscribe to this Substack, so more power to him!
But I don’t envy any other parents who are dragged to see his debut film, even though I suspect he’ll be back with something better (there’s nowhere to go but up!) soon. At that point, my son may be too independent to even consider asking his dad to go to the movies, which is what makes these kinds of outings so important, even when the subject matter isn’t quite my bag.
I was happy for the distraction, and happy to listen to a podcast discussing the movie on the drive home, and slightly less happy hearing him explain the backstory of the movie and the video game and borderline depressed when we got home from watching the big screen and he asked if he could chill by himself in his room and watch YouTube on a smaller screen. But such is life with kids in 2026.
Getting dragged to stuff you don’t care about is at least 70% of what being a parent entails, from awkward playdates and lame school concerts to chaotic little league games and depressing parent-teacher conferences. When you have kids, much of your independence and autonomy is sacrificed for the sake of those kids, and to add more indignity to the situation, you somehow end up wishing you’d sacrificed even more.
So I guess it’s a good thing that my 15-year-old has another 79,000+ episodes of Attack on Titan to share with me. I know that sounds like a lot but it’s actually not, if you compare it to how many times Trump is mentioned in the Epstein Files.
Social Media Round-up
Political Content
You may have noticed that these Substack posts (newsletters? articles?) have gotten more political over the past year or so. I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that parenting is political, so I don’t see a mismatch between my parenting content and my (recently more frequent) political content, and I hope you don’t either!
Because I don’t plan on shutting up now, not on Instagram and Threads or right here on this Substack. I’ve always needed an outlet for my outrage, whether it’s aimed at my children or at the criminals in the White House, and with all that’s happening in this country, I’ve got plenty to get off my chest.
That said, I can’t write about politics every week, because A) I would go insane and B) I’m not smart enough. Besides, I still have kids, and they offer me plenty of material to write, rant, and joke about, so I won’t be getting away from that any time soon either!
Whether you come for the political rants or the parenting rants, thanks for reading! And if you have any topics you’d like me to cover, hit me up on IG or shoot me an email.
I’m so grateful my daughter (18) and son (22) get along and enjoy all that stuff TOGETHER so I don’t have to. But seriously I’m inspired to try harder cause it is cool when they WANT us around them.
I struggled spending time with my daughter and enjoying what she liked, until she was in high school. And now that she's an adult, we are more alike than is probably good. We have the best time together.
But I have to say, I totally fall asleep at the movies. I guess I fail at being an alpha. 😁