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Audiovisual in the streaming era: Millennials’ and centennials’ perspectives on cruelty and historical truthfulness

The current audiovisual landscape via streaming is characterized by images loaded with aesthetics and violence. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to decipher the audience’s feelings about the violent and dystopian plots that saturate the current panorama of audiovisual entertainment through a survey aimed at millennials and centennials in Spain and Mexico, who are the viewers who consume the most streaming platforms of the two countries. The results show that viewers do not feel that these series, contrary to what it might seem, cause them sadness or low spirits, and, likewise, these viewers consume these products without having a specific idea of whether the audiovisual should show cruelty, historical accuracy or the vicissitudes of the world. In conclusion, this research provides a current map of the feelings of the OTT audience about the shocking, bloody, and visceral images that are so present in the routine of young audiences.

The cinema of cruelty in streaming: elements of perversity in Chernobyl and years and years

This study aims to diagnose how the cinema of cruelty has been inserted into mainstream culture through the current streaming series, analysing the elements of the eroticism of perversity and the cinema of cruelty in the series Chernobyl and Years and Years (HBO: 2019). This is done with the design of a content analysis sheet based on the interpretation of theoretical constructs, validated by expert judgement. The results diagnose an excess of trivialised cruelty, evidencing the spectator’s desensitisation to the images, as well as their fascination with them. In this sense, the growing audiovisual success of misanthropic, entertaining, and pornographic narratives is evident. It is concluded that discomfort, fun, horror pornography, and their respective prestige, are installed in contemporary popular television culture, reproducing a relationship between the depressing and the entertainment.