“What am I looking at?” The voice belongs to Seattle resident Kiana Hall, and the object of her astonishment is a raccoon hurtling across a pavement and up a flight of steps with the lolloping gait of a creature whose spine seems to have been compressed by a careless hand. In the few seconds of shaky phone footage she uploaded to Instagram this month, the animal — soon christened Jimothy and thought to have short-spine syndrome — crams into a single frame the off-kilter, unpolished, instantly shareable magic that the internet’s content machine now runs on. Half a continent away, in the cavernous Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center, Hollywood was staging a very different kind of virality: the tightly orchestrated Comic-Con panels that can make or break a studio’s next quarter. This year, however, the schedule hinted that even the blockbuster assembly line is feeling the pull of something less formulaic.

The marquee slot on Saturday afternoon went not to a costumed hero but to Apple TV’s horror-comedy “Widow’s Bay,” showrunner Katie Dippold’s 19-time Emmy nominee, marking the streamer’s Hall H debut. Alongside it, Netflix gave a big-room push to Brad Bird’s animated neo-noir “Ray Gunn,” and A24 promoted Adam Wingard’s thriller “Onslaught.” Veterans of the convention floor saw a disturbance in the force. “There is no new ‘Star Trek’ in development, no new ‘Doctor Who’,” noted writer-producer Marc Bernardin, a longtime Comic-Con attendee. “‘Star Wars’ doesn’t have its footing.” The underwhelming recent box office of “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” and “Supergirl” suggests recognisable intellectual property is no longer a dependable annuity. An anonymous studio source described the shift in succinct terms: “The fandom is shifting from franchises to creators.”

Far from any convention centre, the Jimothy phenomenon was rewriting the terms of mass attention. Hall’s reel has tallied more than eight million views, and the raccoon’s spindly silhouette has since appeared on murals in Seattle’s Ballard neighbourhood, in fan-art and, inevitably, in opportunistic brand posts. Even the White House’s social-media team tried to hitch a ride, posting an image of Jimothy wearing a “Trump was right about everything” cap — a move that drew swift blowback for what critics in the United States described as cringeworthy meme appropriation. The reaction exposed a fault line that cultural analysts say is increasingly familiar: online communities chafe when organic, user-generated fascination is co-opted by institutional messaging, however digitally fluent. “In today’s fast-moving, saturated feeds, that footage can become a meme almost instantly,” said Dr Idil Galip, a digital-culture researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Jimothy, like Moo Deng before him, thrives because his oddity feels unmanaged.

That taste for the unscripted bled into a smaller but equally telling episode captured by a traffic camera in Jonesboro, Arkansas. As a man in a wheelchair struggled to cross a six-lane intersection, a red Jeep stopped, its door swung open, and out hopped a young man dressed head-to-toe as Spider-Man. Christopher Hellenthal, 20, had been working a superhero-themed event at a trampoline park and, seeing the pedestrian in trouble, acted on what he later described as a surge of adrenaline. The police department’s Facebook post — “Whether it’s a red light or green light, there is always time to do what’s right” — turned the footage into a local fable. Coming days before the release of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” it felt less like a marketing hook and more like a reminder that costume-wearing kindness can cut through the noise just as effectively as a meme raccoon or a director’s passion project.

Jimothy, for his part, has already slipped beyond the confines of social media into the interactive worlds where much of contemporary culture now unfolds. Modders have added him to “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and “Stardew Valley”; Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft” team hinted he may appear in the next expansion. Meanwhile, in San Diego, the Avengers were preparing their own return to Hall H, with Marvel using the convention to build anticipation for “Avengers: Doomsday.” Standing at the intersection of these currents — the handcrafted indie game mod, the billion-dollar franchise reveal, the seconds-long video of an unusually shaped raccoon — is a public whose appetite seems to be widening, searching not just for polish but for moments that feel human, organic, and just strange enough to be true.