No. I would say a large portion of us do still want a good story, but few people are interested in being creative or taking risks. I guess I need to understand what you mean by Iconography. You mean political messaging?

[quote]They want iconography, they are the reason so many franchises are doomed. Jmann was right, we're all screwed and it's our fault... My depression arc begins.[/quote] A stopped clock is right twice a day, which is more often than the aforementioned fellow is right. Depends on what he’s talking about. If it’s Star Wars the sequel trilogy he’s dead wrong. Those stories were objectively awful and everything about them should be erased from canon.

Yes they do. The problem is, what quantifies a "good" story changes from person to person, and furthermore, the vast majority of any given audience are going to be a casual audience--people who don't study storytelling. First and foremost, what quantifies a good story. Everyone's opinions are shaped by the lives they've led, and the experiences they've had, and this results in them relating to certain parts of a story some people might find distasteful, and vice versa. There is no objectively good story, because people aren't a hive mind. There are somethings that can help, of course. Voice acting is a big one for me--a good voice actor can draw me into a story insanely well, and nothing rips me out of one faster than a bad voice actor. But, even on that front, what does or doesn't matter to any given individual is going to shift. To some people, for instance, a voice actor might not matter in the slightest. What people are looking for in a story varies from person to person, but people do want good stories. It's just that what's "good" isn't black and white. Secondly, the casual audience. There's nothing wrong with engaging with media casually, but when you engage with media on a casual level, you're often only engaging with surface level themes. A person might look at a story from a surface level and miss the deeper themes that made a character arc good, or didn't have the life experiences to properly put it into context. Or, on the flipside, they might be easily impressed by something big and flashy, but ultimately shallow, because they simply don't have the knowhow to dig any deeper. And again, this is a perfectly valid way to engage with media. "Casual" and "shallow" get negative connotations, but I don't think it's a bad thing. I, for instance, engage with music on a very shallow level. A good song can be very deeply moving, and there have been occasions where I started up Kingdom Hearts, only for the menu theme--Dearly Beloved--to make me start crying. But, it's all very shallow. It made me feel deep feelings, but I wasn't engaging with the media on a different level. Yet, despite this, I'd still firmly say that Dearly Beloved is a beautiful song, despite my shallow understanding. All that said, you aren't entirely wrong. People like familiarity. They like seeing the same tropes they've already seen before, they like seeing their characters and worlds remain the same, they like seeing the same names on the books and movies they consume. New tropes could bring about conflicting, and hard to swallow world views. Characters changing can make us feel like we've lost a dear friend. A familiar movie franchise getting supplanted by another can make us long for the "good old days", without really giving the new title a chance. But, people do still want good stories, and people do still appreciate good stories when they come around. Some people just have a hard time accepting that getting good stories requires change, especially the casual crowd. But don't let that discourage you. You just need to find the right people to talk to. People who branch out, and study storytelling techniques. If you want to engage with stories on a deeper level, find people who want to do that too. Something, something, the hard part isn't getting there, it's letting go, something something, fun shooty shooty pew pew game reference.