It's Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. That means a lot of people will be feeling this.

Food and cooking blogs have an intro paragraph where the writer describes how the recipe they are going to talk about is related to their life. This is a joke about trauma dumping and pivoting into a fun idea, this joke being about the vast emotional difference between making a lava cake and holding a loved one as they die.

Here's another version of this joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09W8bAUJD2Y

If you search for a recipe using a general purpose internet search engine, you'll invariably find a website that has a multi-paragraph story which falls into two general formats:

If the recipe would be considered normal and domestic by 30 year old American white women, it'll be a story about coming home from a wholesome day's activity or visiting grandma or something like that and baking this good old fashioned cake.

If the recipe would be considered foreign and exotic by 30 year old American white women, it'll be a story about traveling through exotic yet safe foreign nation and being served this dish at an authentic restaurant, occasionally lapsing into wikipedia-like fact dumping.

Either way it seems to be cynically designed to appeal strongly to middle class white chicks with wholesome, cozy stories, mentions of vacation, travel, family, colors and smells, etc. but in reality it's even more cynically designed to appeal to search engines which want to see keyword laden yet naturalistic paragraphs rather than abbreviated lists of words like everyone wants in a fucking recipe.

The specific joke in this post is replacing the wholesome cozy Hallmark story that precedes a recipe with one of grief and tragedy, still a family-oriented story meant to tug at your heart strings, admittedly in a different direction. You almost think whatever idea cancer system is in place that makes up this stuff might actually do this.

The title text refers to the growing trend of dreading Thanksgiving meals with family, which...

That's been a thing in American culture since I was a kid, but it seems to have changed a bit. When I was a kid, you'd often dread Thanksgiving or Christmas meals because Aunt Gerty is going to be passive aggressive about how the potatoes are cooked, and Grampa Joe is going to get into a whole goddamn thing about Josh's pony tail, and Dad and uncle Charlie are going to argue about sports the whole time, the kids really don't like boiled brussel sprouts but nothing about Grandma Jean's personality has survived except a need for the kids to eat the goddamned brussel sprouts, but at least everyone will shut up during the store bought pumpkin pie. This is done because we "have" to.

Nowadays you'd dread family gathering meals because some of your relatives are Democrats, some of your relatives are Republicans, and they vividly hate each other and at least some of them own guns. "I'm not going to your father's house, he said out loud he wants to kill our daughter."

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Also, I've noticed people on Lemmy are more willing to just come out and say "I don't get it" than other platforms; I saw one person just say "help" which is...interesting.