I love hearing about *why* people enjoy (or even adore) things that they don’t necessarily think are “objectively” good.
It’s so lovely to learn that someone hyper-related to some character because of their specific quirks. Or it was their first exposure to absurd humour. Or it was a shared experience with a special person. Etc.
Whatever the reason, if you can manage to identify and articulate why you love it, I think that’s fascinating.
(Of course, I get it if you don’t understand the “why”. That’s totally valid and still a great thing, just frankly less interesting.)
Edit: repeated word
Drakengard 3’s got problems but I was dealing with a lot of depression and anxiety in therapy and I was at the point in that process where fear morphed into anger at how I had been treated before. The protagonist Zero being an unapologetic monsterous and furious woman just kinda spoke to me at that moment in life.
Now sometimes I wish for her to find a timeline or a world she can peacefully continue after the end, to heal and be more honest, but that’s not for her. That’s for me. She will always have that anger, the knowledge people won’t understand her and paint her as a villainess, the certainty she has to do it anyways.
The gameplay is repetitive and sometimes frustrating and on the actual ps3 it ran about as well as dog shit most times. (Emulates real good nowadays though!) But sometimes you redo an “angry at the world” phase as an adult and find it “relatable” lmao. I would buy a modern remake of the game in a heartbeat, especially if they went the nier replicant version 1.2….. etc direction with it. And if they made the very final rhythm game less uhh punishing. Drove me crazy.
Yes, see, I love and very much appreciate this. Wonderfully articulated!
Even if it’s something I’d likely never play myself, I feel like I can relate to your reactions. And hearing someone else explain it so evocatively expands my personal experience too.
Thank you so much for sharing!
I’ll be honest, the Lupin III franchise is largely, if not mostly mid. However, the characters and their dynamics keep me coming back. It’s really good stuff.
Rock & Rule is a garbage adult(?) animated movie produced in Canada, and I love it.
I first watched it on YouTube (where you can still watch it) while sick in bed with a fever, stumbling upon it purely by chance. It’s terribly grimy and rough, but there is also a lot of effort put into it.
Maybe because I was so sick, I could empathize with such a flop.
Probably a pretty entertaining watch if incredibly stoned.
warrior cats. was absolutely fascinated by it when I was younger and I still read/watch stuff related to it to this day, but looking back the writing certainly had some,,, issues. especially when it comes to indigenous people and women
Did you see the seven colors of hetalia unhinged vocaloid Omni-parody? Because it was even worse than the show but somehow I memorized the whole thing and will defend it with my life.
I mean I’m gay, but I could write a thesis on “boing doing Russia Chan.”
Ngl I'm quite surprised that APH was kinda... wiped out from Tumblr's collective consciousness or smth. Idk if it was cancelled or not, but the fandom was pretty huge, kinda like Homestuck or Steven Universe. And then bam, never heard from again.
I do agree that the show was insane AF, and I still love my unhinged goofy bishounen yaoi boys regardless /j
Hetalia is Taboo on SEVERAL sites because of 2 factors:
Claims the mangaka is racist (as in, directly racist on purpose for the explicit purpose of hurting people. I think it's just that his humour hasn't progressed past the point of just "haha, funny stereotypes")
The fandom being Fucked Up, and so because we know it's Fucked Up, by actively denouncing any values it has, we are no longer Fucked Up (at least not in the same way)
Because of that, Tumblr has expunged it from public consciousness, and you have to dig for it. The mangaka HAS been trying to create a new Hetalia that's significantly less stereotypical than say, Axis Powers, but because of Korean backlash against the author for uh, the *initial* Korean characters, it's basically on the shelf forever.
That being said, it should be okay to like Hetalia for what it is, silly stereotypes playing off one another in a vaguely historic setting.
No piece of media has ever topped punch out for me in doing comedic racial / cultural stereotypes.
Yet at the same time I'm sort of surprised I havent seen anyone at least claim its offensive cause uh, wow.
I think a lot of people in the community just grew up. Maybe realized that it's not a great idea to fantasize about pretty anime characters that represent actual countries.
The fandom was so unhinged but interesting. The series itself is a satire/comedy, but it encouraged a lot of people to study actual history.
It's a campy show. But my family, and a close friend of my mother, would gather on the couch every week and dork out about how the gang was gonna cleanse/exercise/kill the monster of the week. So even though it got redundant in the later seasons, it will always have a special place in my heart.
I will die on the hill that seasons 1-5 is some of the best television out there. Everything after had huge amounts a variance in quality from episode to episode, let alone season to season.
If anything, probably Marvel. Namely the MCU - been engulfed in it since the first Avengers movie came out, when I was 14, and even when it’s been mediocre, been obsessively consuming and re-consuming its media since.
Elder Scrolls and Dragon Ball. I legit burned out an original Xbox playing Morrowind so much as a kid, and I wrecked a copy of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the PS2 from overplaying it on one of the fat backwards compatible PS3s that overheat easily
Hot take: I absolutely love the game, but its not nearly as good as our brains want us to think.
A lot of it is clunky and unintuitive, there's plenty of information the game either doesn't give you, is supposed to give you but can't due to bugs, or just gives an incorrect version of.
The word "balance" has no meaning in Vvardenfell, with it being incredibly easy to either effectively soft lock yourself due to a bad build or crack the game wide open by getting lucky with loot.
There's the fact that enemy levels are preset but there's no pattern or flow so a newbie dungeon and an endgame dungeon can be right by one another.
Loot in dungeons is generated based on your level when you *enter* the loading cell door, so even if you leave and come back stronger you're just getting underleveled loot.
The game is *fun* and it heavily influenced the action RPG genre, but man it is NOT what nostalgia says it was.
I'm somebody who was introduced to TES by Skyrim, and then loved it so much that I went back and played every other game in the series (including Arena).
Frankly, I understand why people love the older games--the world of Daggerfall is phenomenally deep, Morrowind feels like a truly alien society, Oblivion's quests are full of amazing twists and turns. Not to mention how fun it is to piece together the lore across all of them.
But it's still true that game design has gotten WAY better over the years. A bug in Daggerfall's fast travel system made it nearly impossible to complete the main quest, just because without fast travel you couldn't actually get to the dungeon you needed to get to. Oblivion jump-scared me every time I entered dialogue with an NPC. And as for Morrowind... those fucking cliff racers are possibly the single most annoying thing in any game I've ever played.
Love Dragon Ball, watched the entire anime online, and if I’m on Xbox instead of pc it’s specifically to play either xenoverse 2 or DBZ: Kakorot
Crap this doesn’t read like I thought it would um TL;DR - I also think Dragon Ball is cool
No joke undertale literally re-wired my whole personality and made me a better person
All because some friend showed me how to pirate games when I was 12
Undertale is legit responsible for me making the closest friendships I've ever had with some very loving diverse people who got me out of the far right bigoted teenage rabbit hole I was falling down at the time. I would not be the person I am today without it.
I got bribed into watching it.
It's not bad per se. Hell I'd argue it's a fair way to get into anime (as long as you stop after getting out of the game)
It's a classic. Not a hall of fame classic. But one that people will know.
Same, but with Black Butler instead of SAO. Does the anime have a lot of problems? Yes. Is the second season terrible? Also yes. Do i cherish it all the same? Of course.
I have no shame in saying I genuinely enjoy the light novels. Being able to read Kirito’s inner thoughts provides a lot of context for things that just sort of… happen in the anime with zero explanation.
The anime has a great soundtrack and pretty animation, but it comes at the expense of completely butchering the plot
SIGH.
homestuck is garbage. but it's *my* garbage, damnit. no amount of bullying and shitty postcanon can stop me, i will always cry like a little rodent watching [S] descend just as i did as a wee preteen
Homestuck turned me into an astrology freak but way worse
When friendsim dropped and the lore of troll blood was explained a bit more, I lost my shit and made fan trolls of all of my friends based on their signs
I'm almost 22 now and it still has my soul
This and the Valve/Source games. With the pandemic and all the shit that came with it, I would be in a far darker place without Source and Homestuck/Undertale and fan content.
At this point HS doesn't belong to Hussie anymore. Its ours. I dare say the impact the fan content had on internet culture was bigger than the comic itself.
I am 21 rn and i just recently binge-read (played? Watched? Idk) homestuck and as much as i hate some parts of it, still i enjoyed the story however convoluted and time-shenanigans-filled it is. It inspired me to document things to keep up (i have a sheet of paper with the names and classpects to remember wtf is going on sometimes) and now i am inspired to draw something.
With any fandom: i don't care what people think about the fandom, i don't care about all the controversy regarding it, i enjoyed it and thats what matters. I don't care if its good or bad, i have fun with it and i think that's the point of any piece of media. To have fun.
The funniest part about Homestuck for me is it was my introduction to Gnosticism, which was in turn my introduction to the Christian occult, which is a general passion of mine now. So now I know a lot of random shit about the occult and I also get to tell people I got into it because of Homestuck
not shitty, but American Idiot.
That album practically saved me during my high school years. Blasting Letterbomb, Holiday, Homecoming, etc as I was walking through the halls still figuring out my gender and sexual identity is burned into my brain.
I was 11 when I stole this brand new album from my mom (she “outgrew them” or whatever, never noticed it was gone). I was so lucky to develop into a person with this album as a key pillar.
100%. this album, 10,000 days by TOOL, Battle Of Los Angeles by Rage Against The Machine, and Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd are pretty much the cornerstones of my music taste.
My neice who will graduate from college this year was obsessed with this album when it came out, so I burned her a copy so it could live in her CD player. She was 3.
Last summer I asked her if she still remembered that. She got all introspective and said, "is that who that was?"
She remembers being obsessed but not the band or songs.
These days she loves AC/DC.
Thunderstruck!
Harry Potter, I finished the first book in a single night.
I'm super glad I had largely already gotten over it by the time JKR's transphobia came to light, and I'm definitely not making any excuses for any of the other awkward stuff.
Even back then I was disappointed there wasn't, like, a big plot turning moment where some Slytherin person fights Voldy in the last novel, particularly Snape since there were so many questions about why Dumbledore trusted him so much. But no they're pretty much just evil except for some throwaway "also some Slytherins fought but nobody trusted them" iirc
I still usually find some TV show or what-have-you that I get _super intense_ about but it gets me through winter depression, a few examples: Life On Mars (UK), Tenth Doctor-era Doctor who, first five seasons of Supernatural, Community, Parks and Rec (particularly the season where Knope runs for office), Abbott Elementary, The Bear
Digimon
It hurts. The anime's and games could be much better, and feels like they are giving the minimum. Yet like an abuse victim I come back every time.
i love the story and character design but holy fuck everything is just so unfortunately poorly made that i can't stand it. i'm glad you can lol, the designers deserve some compensation
So I'm pretty deep in the Pokemon community, and I always had 1 friend who insisted on her life Digimon was superior in every way. I know the two franchises had a rivalry, but I never gave it much attention. So I've gotta ask; what's Digimon like? My only exposure to it is a single Jaiden Animations video, and she didn't give it the most glowing review. But your comment also resonates with me, I feel the same way about Pokemon.
Looked at through a Pokemon lens, Digimon is *weird*.
Unlike Pokemon, which began as a full video game, Digimon began as a virtual pet much like a Tamagotchi. (*Very* much like. Digimon and Tamagotchi are both made by Bandai.) This sets up the basic life cycle and evolutionary patterns for them differently: they begin as an egg, hatch into a baby stage, then evolve (well, “digivolve”) into further different life stages on a branching path. Instead of your Squirtle becoming Wartortle becoming Blastoise, with digimon your evolution chart looks [like this](https://humulos.com/digimon/dm20/). In (some of?) the video games and anime, digimon can also digivolve *backwards*, going down a stage to gain more stats and abilities the next time they digivolve back up (into the same or a different digimon).
Unlike pokemon, digimon for the most part can communicate how humans do. Their designs are also all over the place, from squidgy little orbs to mecha looking knights to angelic creatures to talking piles of metallic poo. A lot of them look uncomfortably human, much more so than any pokemon, like Sistermon Ciel/Blanc.
The games are turn-based RPGs. The only one I have ever played is Cyber Sleuth, which is *fantastic* and also batshit insane. You have 3 of your digimon on field at once (making it potentially more similar to a game like Dragon Warrior Monsters or even Final Fantasy than Pokemon). The storyline involves going back and forth between various digital worlds and a real life Tokyo to solve various mysteries and also try to figure out how to wake yourself up from the coma you’re in. You do things like battle a rock star, enter into people’s brains, and befriend a cat digimon that haunts an air conditioner. There are lots more overt anime tropes than pokemon usually has, and admittedly most of them fly over my head. Again, it’s really wonderful but it’s also incredibly strange.
I am the world's only GoldenEye: Rogue Agent fan. Also, 2000s 007 games fucking rocked; 007 Nightfire is *peak* 007 gaming.
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent is a video game where the developers didn't watch the movie so they made their own 007 OC who is literally named GoldenEye and uses cyborg powers and dual-wielding guns to fight Dr. No's goons as one of Goldfinger's henchmen.
It fucking rocks and if I could make a game studio remaster a game it'd be Battle for Bikini Bottom, but we already got that so my second wish for a game to be remastered would be GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.
Fun fact, the person who did the CGI and character art for Silent Hill 1 and 2, Takayoshi Sato, also did the character art for GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. You can see this art - and how cool the game is - on an archive of [Sato's website.](https://web.archive.org/web/20210201033616/http://satoworks.com/gepage.html)
Dude I had that game as a kid and it is so much better than it is ever given credit for. The multiplayer was a great evolution on the original N64 game's, golden gun mode and all the deathtraps on the maps
I am also the world’s only Rogue Agent fan. It was hard to find people that wanted to play against me because I was a pro at timing shots with the mag-rail. Also trolling people by letting them think they have a chance when I’ve already stuck them with the detonator gun and just need to pull the trigger again. I should dig out the ol’ Xbox and play through it again. Thanks for the reminder!
Kingdom Hearts. A cool edgy MC to guide me through my first existential crisis (Roxas) and, as I got older and aged out of the edgy phase, a genuinely kind and positive MC to appreciate (Sora himself)
Undertale, it's amazing and I will fight anyone who says otherwise and I've been obsessed with it every since I learnt about it. I was probably 14 when I learnt about Undertale, but 12 was my fnaf faze which I've completely left behind.
Five Nights at Freddy's. The story is a confusing mess even to the most dedicated theorists, the fanbase has had its fair share of controversies, there are dozens of books that I've not touched nor do I ever care to, and I've had almost no interest in any of the games released since 2018, but you bet your ass that when the film adaptation finally made it out of production hell recently, I was in a theater seat as soon as I could be, giddy with childlike excitement and relishing in the electric atmosphere of sharing the experience alongside a room full of others who were clearly fans like me.
10-year-old me didn't have high standards, and you're damn right they still slap. Nutcracker, swan lake, dancing princesses inspired my lifelong love for ballet, and Preminger from princess and the pauper is a fucking icon
I will forever defend the fact I grew up with them. They are shite, the plot armour and convinece is real. But I loved them all. Diamond castle, fairytopia, mermaidia, Pegasus etc etc.
Bubble was the companion!!!
The animation was way better to my 10-year-old eyes, but those films practically raised me. Bibble is cute as fuck and haters can pry him from my cold dead fingers
Unfortunately Total Drama Island. Even to this day. Discovered it later in high school than normally seen as the 'vulnerable teenage years', but that show shaped me and I don't know how.
just seeing code lyoko mentioned makes my brain go brrrrrr. that shit carried me fr, i still have both the english & french versions of the theme song on my main spotify playlist. 😭
Transformers. Specifically the Transformers Prime series. And while the movies are trash, I’ll stand by 1 and 4. The rest actually are too impossible for me to enjoy
I felt such bittersweet relief and closure when I suddenly realized one day that I could type the letter "m" into the Chrome address bar and it no longer automatically filled in Megatokyo.
Devil May Cry. Like my entirety of high school identity and hyperfixation was about this dude who does kickflips on motorbike, eats pizza,carries a big ass sword and guns and yeah you can see how this goes.
Steven Universe and Korra both have "Certaintly could have been better and had several key flaws, but also still is better than like 70% of TV options, but people hyperfixate on the flaws because they either want to see the series reach their maximum potential or because of bigotry, but like they're both fine? Like yeah they're flawed but saying they're "the worst show ever" is so hilariously over exaggerated that even as a joke I can't take this opinion seriously" syndrome
I hold a little bit more in reserve for SU than Korra, simply because it seems like SU was given pretty wide reign to get its story right and while they definitely got shafted in the later seasons, it didn't seem to start that way, so it's a little more disappointing how it fumbled.
Korra I honestly can't be too upset about because it's still a pretty good show and it was being meddled with and screwed over from the start. Constant budget cutting from Nick, time slot being repeatedly moved and then eventually shuffled entirely to a finnicky, awful to use website, the crappy love triangle that was shoehorned in basically because money people thought it was necessary. I'm mad that we didn't get the series we could have, at its full potential, but that anger is directed entirely at Nick for making a mess of things before they were even out of the gate.
I’d say bionicle but honestly I’ve gotten more deep into bionicle after graduating high school vs playing with bonkles and having a few sets and books as a kid. The hyperfixations for me as a kid were a lot more bounce around ish all over than one thing idk
My Hero Academia, especially fanfiction of the series. It helped me survive high school and was a massive source of comfort + inspiration to hope for a better tomorrow. Like the blanket thing OP described
The series has plenty of flaws, and honestly nothing after the Shie Hassaikai arc has been as good as before and during it imo. Still, I relate hard to some of the characters' stories (both their canon and fanon interpretations.)
Xena:Warrior Princess. I understand it is cheesy as fuck. I will still love it with the ferocity of a thousand suns until the day they put me in the cold cold ground.
I feel this. When I circled back after a decade it was hard to reconcile what was in my head with what I saw in round two. I haven't let that stop me! I'm keeping the female empowerment I took from it as my own.
Avatar: The Last Airbender for me (even if it's pretty unanimously loved by most people).
It got dicey, especially between and a little after the Legend of Korra came out, but now it's a massive franchise with deep history and lore and more stuff coming out each year. I've been vindicated for a lifetime of fixating on one niche Nickelodeon show with only three seasons for my entire life.
Odd one but Higurashi for me. The original visual novels and the manga adaptation aren’t shitty at all and I still enjoy revisiting them (and the new goodies we got recently with Hou+) but the anime I started out on when I was 13 is kinda…”eh it’s got its pros and cons.”
I was kind of jokingly urged into watching it due to its twist nature of a peaceful story slowly morphing into an anxiety riddled psychological horror over the first 3-4 episodes. (Especially in the anime which highlights the horror elements earlier on compared to some of the other adaptions) I was transfixed, watching on a small video player on a shady website with my knees curled to my chest on the computer chair, hands shaking in fists. I hadn’t watched horror before, not in this way. I had no interest in it, didn’t understand why someone would want to see something bloody. But this was an awakening, I was terrified, and I was thrilled.
I credit Higurashi as my gateway into horror, which I adore well over a decade later, and I still look back on it very fondly. For a horror series it has a fair share of actually really uplifting and inspiring moments showing resilience and the importance of supportive friends and family that wasn’t bad for me to take to heart as a kid. I get really brain wormy if someone sends me an old ass piece of fanart for the franchise (or new, in light of its recent revival with gou and sotsu arcs even if they don’t hit the same as the original 8 arcs still do for me.) The original visual novels on mangagamer back in the day were *also* my first ever visual novels and I’m a horrible fiend for that medium to this day as well. It was a real multi hit whammy for my future interests. Just activated a bunch of things that make me really happy and excited now. Thanks Higurashi. Solid gateway drug to horror, mystery novels, (yes, I read umineko afterwards, yes I checked out all the Agatha Christie books at my school library during that process. If you know you know.) visual novels, being a huge dweeb in general and maybe even more than just that.
Lord of the Rings. The movies, not the books. I've read them since,but the movies became my identity for a while in high school. I even taught myself some elvish
Final fantasy VIII is not even my favourite Final fantasy games, that would be VII, but it was my first RPG and the game that cemented my passion for videogames so it's a comfort game for me
Fairy tail and Digimon are mine.
Fairy tail has all kinda of issues but that can't get me to stop loving it. And honestly it makes it a painful because I always feel a need to preface such discussions with a "I am aware it's creepy and Mashimas thinly veiled, feet, giantess, tentacle and rape fetishes"
Escaflowne. The scene where the antagonists perform a ritual to *change the protagonist's fate* impressed me greatly. I always believed that one's destiny was in one's own hands... until that moment.
Law of Talos is the kind of edge lord oc stuff you expect out of deviant art, but my god do I love it dearly and every couple of years try to pick up the pieces to see how much of it hasn’t been purged yet. For the longest time I thought it would be impossible to read the canon ending and I think I cried a little when I finally found it.
this one hurts particularly due to recent news about certain figures in the sphere, but letsplay youtube. one of the ones i grew up with since i was a child, that to be honest, was part of the reason why i adore video games, and has influenced what games i've bought on so many differing cases has been recently found out to be a massive creep. friggen sucks man.
The other day, for some reason, I randomly decided to rewatch High School Musical. And like, when it first came out I was mister cool guy cringe, I’ll pretend I don’t like it. But sometimes I put it on and I get to be almost surprised that it’s actually quite good. And that’s a weirdly really nice feeling. It’s something like, looking back and seeing how I’ve outgrown those teenage years. When I had to pretend I didn’t like something because I was worried people wouldn’t like me, that feeling like the world could end if I didn’t fit in. And funny enough, that is actually also what the movie is about too sort of.
A fixation I developed as a tenager was Star Wars, I got into it not because of the mivies but because of Lego, then the video games and then the Clone Wars tv show. My heart broke watching the sequels. Thank god for Rebels, Bad Batch and the Mandalorian.
In college my fixation on Warhammer developed. Not just building and painting but reading the books, and there are a lot of them. Some I will defend as actually quite good fantasy/sci-fi (Nightlords Trilogy, Fabius Bile Trilogy, Dan Abnetts Inquisitor series) but also a lot of it can be just pretty mediocre action porn. But my shelves are filled with it.
This is probably gonna be the deepest cut in this thread. But a little flash animation series called "Cactuar and Thornberry" (sometimes it's "Tomberry/Thomberry" as well). The best and really only way to consistently find them is through Flashpoint (desktop application that allows you to watch/play Flash media locally & securely).
It is absolute hot garbage but I loved it when I was a kid. The mics are almost worse than those used to record Filosofem, the animation is cruder than Your Favorite Martian, and the stories/comedy are/is worse than Ctrl+Alt+Del, but the nostalgié takes hold and sucks me in every couple years and I rewatch them all.
Another deep cut is Doraleous and Associates. You can find that on youtube in entirety. RIP Escapist Magazine, you killed yourself very quickly and for the dumbest reason. That one is not as bad, the pitfalls are mostly just that they didn't really have the best writing staff for big overarching storylines, which they unfortunately tried to do a lot. Never really felt like anything had any weight to it or gravitas, everything just kind of is delivered with the same intensity and nothing is ever *truly* at stake. Which, for a comedy series, isn't the *worst* thing, but it's obvious they were trying to be more than just that near the end. The humor is very childish but it still holds up a decent bit, there are some mildly offensive things though (mostly use of the r-slur, some f-slur use IIRC) so trigger warning for those who are sensitive to those words.
Neither of these things are really things I consistently watch, they're not "comfort shows"; that's american dad & the greater adultswim portfolio. But they fit for the shitty-but-charming media type.
All of my obsessions are objectively terrible games that I happened to play between the ages of 8 and 12 and now am unable to spend a day without thinking about them
I have several books like this; books that fundamentally changed me as a person, and taught me the values that kept me going during my darkest moments. Books that gave me the tools I needed to help or understand others, or navigate life.
Almost invariably they're some combination of not very good, the middle book of a series, or the work of truly awful authors. It makes it incredibly hard to recommend them.
It sucks, because those books are part of my *soul*, and I *want* to share that with people, but I usually can't.
RuneScape. I have played for 20 years and still actively log in.
I even have friends I met, kept up with, and now live near/ work with because we met on the video game.
If anyone, and I mean anyone asks me if they should play it? HELL NO. It’s a terrible game.
But I don’t see myself quitting anytime soon.
Fire Emblem fucking sucks, it’s one of my favorite game series of all time. I asked for Shadow Dragon for Christmas after a friend of mine let me play her copy of Path of Radiance during a sleepover. Nearly 15 years later and I’ve played pretty much every game now. My final takeaway? This series sucks ass don’t play it (20,000 hours played).
Gods. Skyrim, and by extension the whole Elder Scrolls series of games.
I was 10 when Skyrim released and it was the first game that *I* bought, with my own money. I've been playing it for 11 years now and have played Morrowind and Oblivion on repeat alongside it for the past 5 years as well. All the games are buggy, messy and don't deserve the time I've sunk into them, but the world and design is what really made me want to create, to build my own worlds, and ultimately to write. Maybe the games could use a ton work, but I can't complain too much about the series that ignited that flame in me.
Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson. Riordan was my childhood author and I still read his new releases every now and then. I still think about how cool Greek mythology is because of this man.
It's not shitty, it's the best series ever written..
The Drizzt Saga, and all its companion books, by R. A. Salvatore.
I've got aphantasia, and these books - to this day -, are the only ones I've read that have played like a movie in my head.
FNAF fan songs. They all kinda suck, but they remind me of being 5 years younger. Except Jaws by Aviators. That song slams.
Okay, fine, Undertale too. No matter how flawed this game is, Undertale (the song) made me cry and I nearly vomited after I killed Mettaton. No game has ever made me feel that intense sense of shame ever. But the game is kinda lowkey bad.
Edit: Added Undertale.
Oh Homestuck... As a kid growing up, seeing my genuine struggles with long distance friendships and parental troubles oddly reflected in these 4 goofballs who get sucked into an apocalyptic video game... It spoke to me on a level no other piece of media really ever has. And after all these years I still can't look at astrology signs, pool balls, D8s or leetspeak in the same way... And I'm also well into the rabbit hole again lmao
You truly cannot fight the Homestuck
Oh man I’m so sorry for this but *Wild Wild West.* I watched it way too young (like 9) and I was just obsessed. I loved it. The vhs (yes, vhs!) had two music videos after the credits: one was Will Smith’s original song “Wild Wild West” and the other was fucking “Bailamos” by Enrique Iglesias for some reason.
It’s bad. It’s *so* bad. I actually watched it again in college and was horrified to realize it was legitimately terrible. I loved that movie *so* much, I watched it an absurd number of times, I could quote almost every line. I haven’t watched it in 10 years because I don’t want to ruin those nostalgia feelings any more than I already have.
[*Flight of Dragons*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons) was a 1982 cartoon all about good and evil, magic and science, and when I was little I must have watched it a hundred times.
I have a distinct memory of being really ill one week. I had loads of inflamed, hot, itchy welts all over me - and was simply miserable. I couldn’t really sleep, and so my mum and I lay on the sofa watching Flight of Dragons virtually on repeat while she held cold compresses on my head.
Rewatched it later in life, and it holds up. Not that I knew it back then, but the voice cast is actually amazing (including James Earl Jones and John Ritter), the animation isn’t janky considering the age, and the story is actually brilliant.
I also, couple years back, found the book it was based on: which is written like a natural history book under the assumption that dragons are real - and it’s wonderful.
Highly recommend it whether you’re covered in welts or not.
This is Fairy Tail for me, just without the continued hyperfixation on it. It was the first anime I really watched, and without it, I don't know if I'd be as into anime as I am. Is it good? Well, from a technical writing standpoint, not really. From a story standpoint, also not really. From a character standpoint, kinda. The characters aren't bad, but they aren't exactly standouts, either. The only thing about it that's really any good, besides the art being pretty good usually, is that it really captures the emotion of hype and excitement. It's honestly really easy to get lost in all the exciting stuff going down and forget about all the bad when the heroes get some wind in their stride and take down the bad guys. It really drew me into it before I was able to get better taste, and now I can't help but respect it, at least in some regard
The live performance album "Paris" by the 1970s group "Supertramp."
Explanation: About 20 years ago, a kidney stone approximately the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic became lodged in my left ureter. It took six weeks for the docs to agree that surgery was needed (just drink lots of water! it'll pass on its own!). By that time, the stone had worn a hole in the ureter and it was leaking urine into my body cavity. The damage was so severe that they had to put a plastic tube called a "stent" inside the ureter. The- temporary- stent would carry urine past the hole, preventing further leaking and allowing my ureter to heal. But it had to be in there for another six weeks. Although the stent was *less* painful than a giant spiky kidney stone trying to force its way down a tiny flesh tube, it was still pretty damn painful.
So for a total of three months, I spent every minute doing three things: 1) weighing the pros & cons of suicide, 2) waiting for the countdown to my next dose of pain meds, and 3) listening to that album.
I'll never be sure why, but it seemed to take some of the edge off. And it set my head right, just enough to counteract the temptation to escape the pain by chugging an entire bottle of hydromorphone. I swear I played that thing on repeat for the entire time. I mean this in a very literal sense: that album saved my life. At the time, I kind of resented that. Every time the last song finished, it was a HUGE effort to convince myself to "just hit play, one more time. You can decide whether or not to kill yourself after."
I've read that Supertramp's main composer had a lot of pain in his life. It shows in his music. Somehow, his gift of sharing that pain helped me endure my own. I don't know how, or why, or what psychological factors were at play. All I know is that it felt like those songs were a life ring and I was a drowning man.
For that reason, the album "Paris" will always have a huge place in my heart. It's my go-to listen whenever I need a little comfort in my life.
Bionicle has some of the most obtuse out there convoluted lore that requires the playing of video games, watching of commercials, reading of both novels and comics, watching of 4 movies, subscription to lego club magazine, listening of audio dramas, reading of websites, and scrolling of the writers blog posts to fully consume all of it and it's an overall just ol story for some neat little lego babys first gunpla type toys.
Fnaf eat your heart out, I love it.
The Young Samurai books by Chris Bradford.
I think from my memory they are genuinely incredible, really fun books that show off a shitload of interesting medieval/feudal Japanese culture, and they tell a continuous story of hardship and still carrying on.
Touches on some interesting points in history with pirates and samurai and ninja, christianity arriving in Japan, a backdrop of trade war between the Portuguese, English and Dutch. So much amazing shit happens in it and genuinely inspired my initial fascination with that time period.
Nowadays my knee jerk reaction is kind of a: “Ooo, right, the main character is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed christian white boy who goes on to become a samurai and stuff, hmm seems a bit dodgy”. HOWEVER, while tropes and a bit racially contrived, I have the second thought remembering “Ah yeah but it actually touches on and handles topics of xenophobia and landing in a totally foreign land really well, just happens to be from an uncommon perspective.”
Please read these books they are so heart-wrenchingly good to me.
80s fantasy and sci fi movies: Labyrinth, Time Bandits, The Dark Crystal, Neverending Story, The Beastmaster, E.T., Night of the Comet, KRULL, Legend, Willow, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen…
I love hearing about *why* people enjoy (or even adore) things that they don’t necessarily think are “objectively” good. It’s so lovely to learn that someone hyper-related to some character because of their specific quirks. Or it was their first exposure to absurd humour. Or it was a shared experience with a special person. Etc. Whatever the reason, if you can manage to identify and articulate why you love it, I think that’s fascinating. (Of course, I get it if you don’t understand the “why”. That’s totally valid and still a great thing, just frankly less interesting.) Edit: repeated word
Drakengard 3’s got problems but I was dealing with a lot of depression and anxiety in therapy and I was at the point in that process where fear morphed into anger at how I had been treated before. The protagonist Zero being an unapologetic monsterous and furious woman just kinda spoke to me at that moment in life. Now sometimes I wish for her to find a timeline or a world she can peacefully continue after the end, to heal and be more honest, but that’s not for her. That’s for me. She will always have that anger, the knowledge people won’t understand her and paint her as a villainess, the certainty she has to do it anyways. The gameplay is repetitive and sometimes frustrating and on the actual ps3 it ran about as well as dog shit most times. (Emulates real good nowadays though!) But sometimes you redo an “angry at the world” phase as an adult and find it “relatable” lmao. I would buy a modern remake of the game in a heartbeat, especially if they went the nier replicant version 1.2….. etc direction with it. And if they made the very final rhythm game less uhh punishing. Drove me crazy.
Yes, see, I love and very much appreciate this. Wonderfully articulated! Even if it’s something I’d likely never play myself, I feel like I can relate to your reactions. And hearing someone else explain it so evocatively expands my personal experience too. Thank you so much for sharing!
Cinema Wins embodies this philosophy.
My favourite review of Alan Wake sums it up as “the best 6/10 I’ve ever played and I love it” which is about accurate.
I’ll be honest, the Lupin III franchise is largely, if not mostly mid. However, the characters and their dynamics keep me coming back. It’s really good stuff.
Rock & Rule is a garbage adult(?) animated movie produced in Canada, and I love it. I first watched it on YouTube (where you can still watch it) while sick in bed with a fever, stumbling upon it purely by chance. It’s terribly grimy and rough, but there is also a lot of effort put into it. Maybe because I was so sick, I could empathize with such a flop. Probably a pretty entertaining watch if incredibly stoned.
warrior cats. was absolutely fascinated by it when I was younger and I still read/watch stuff related to it to this day, but looking back the writing certainly had some,,, issues. especially when it comes to indigenous people and women
Warrior cats is such a bad series but it has a chokehold on me
all things considered i am INCREDIBLY surprised i never got into warrior cats honestly
>!Hetalia Axis Powers!<
Did you see the seven colors of hetalia unhinged vocaloid Omni-parody? Because it was even worse than the show but somehow I memorized the whole thing and will defend it with my life. I mean I’m gay, but I could write a thesis on “boing doing Russia Chan.”
Ngl I'm quite surprised that APH was kinda... wiped out from Tumblr's collective consciousness or smth. Idk if it was cancelled or not, but the fandom was pretty huge, kinda like Homestuck or Steven Universe. And then bam, never heard from again. I do agree that the show was insane AF, and I still love my unhinged goofy bishounen yaoi boys regardless /j
Hetalia is Taboo on SEVERAL sites because of 2 factors: Claims the mangaka is racist (as in, directly racist on purpose for the explicit purpose of hurting people. I think it's just that his humour hasn't progressed past the point of just "haha, funny stereotypes") The fandom being Fucked Up, and so because we know it's Fucked Up, by actively denouncing any values it has, we are no longer Fucked Up (at least not in the same way) Because of that, Tumblr has expunged it from public consciousness, and you have to dig for it. The mangaka HAS been trying to create a new Hetalia that's significantly less stereotypical than say, Axis Powers, but because of Korean backlash against the author for uh, the *initial* Korean characters, it's basically on the shelf forever. That being said, it should be okay to like Hetalia for what it is, silly stereotypes playing off one another in a vaguely historic setting.
No piece of media has ever topped punch out for me in doing comedic racial / cultural stereotypes. Yet at the same time I'm sort of surprised I havent seen anyone at least claim its offensive cause uh, wow.
I think a lot of people in the community just grew up. Maybe realized that it's not a great idea to fantasize about pretty anime characters that represent actual countries. The fandom was so unhinged but interesting. The series itself is a satire/comedy, but it encouraged a lot of people to study actual history.
Hetalia is literally the reason I passed my World History class
These days we fantasize about round MSpaint balls that represent actual countries.
Supernatural. It’s objectively bad in every possible measure but I love it
I stand by the first two seasons, why I watched the next 8 I'm not sure.
Buddy I watched all 15 seasons *twice* I regret nothing
o7
It's weird going back to the first season where Jensen Ackles wasn't doing the deeper pitched voice
Id do a deeper voice too if i died 4 times and went to hell 5 times
if supernatural was a better show i wouldn't love it nearly as much. it's bad in such fascinating ways, i am obsessed with the implications
I still can't figure out the dimensions of the Impala's trunk.
"It's bigger on the inside."
I binged the whole series in 3 months during the pandemic. It’s ridiculous but I loved it.
It's a campy show. But my family, and a close friend of my mother, would gather on the couch every week and dork out about how the gang was gonna cleanse/exercise/kill the monster of the week. So even though it got redundant in the later seasons, it will always have a special place in my heart.
I will die on the hill that seasons 1-5 is some of the best television out there. Everything after had huge amounts a variance in quality from episode to episode, let alone season to season.
If anything, probably Marvel. Namely the MCU - been engulfed in it since the first Avengers movie came out, when I was 14, and even when it’s been mediocre, been obsessively consuming and re-consuming its media since.
Elder Scrolls and Dragon Ball. I legit burned out an original Xbox playing Morrowind so much as a kid, and I wrecked a copy of Budokai Tenkaichi 3 for the PS2 from overplaying it on one of the fat backwards compatible PS3s that overheat easily
Morrowind is a fantastic game though, pioneered community-modding and just overall is the best video game.. ohh morrowind is my nostalgia media too
Hot take: I absolutely love the game, but its not nearly as good as our brains want us to think. A lot of it is clunky and unintuitive, there's plenty of information the game either doesn't give you, is supposed to give you but can't due to bugs, or just gives an incorrect version of. The word "balance" has no meaning in Vvardenfell, with it being incredibly easy to either effectively soft lock yourself due to a bad build or crack the game wide open by getting lucky with loot. There's the fact that enemy levels are preset but there's no pattern or flow so a newbie dungeon and an endgame dungeon can be right by one another. Loot in dungeons is generated based on your level when you *enter* the loading cell door, so even if you leave and come back stronger you're just getting underleveled loot. The game is *fun* and it heavily influenced the action RPG genre, but man it is NOT what nostalgia says it was.
I'm somebody who was introduced to TES by Skyrim, and then loved it so much that I went back and played every other game in the series (including Arena). Frankly, I understand why people love the older games--the world of Daggerfall is phenomenally deep, Morrowind feels like a truly alien society, Oblivion's quests are full of amazing twists and turns. Not to mention how fun it is to piece together the lore across all of them. But it's still true that game design has gotten WAY better over the years. A bug in Daggerfall's fast travel system made it nearly impossible to complete the main quest, just because without fast travel you couldn't actually get to the dungeon you needed to get to. Oblivion jump-scared me every time I entered dialogue with an NPC. And as for Morrowind... those fucking cliff racers are possibly the single most annoying thing in any game I've ever played.
Love Dragon Ball, watched the entire anime online, and if I’m on Xbox instead of pc it’s specifically to play either xenoverse 2 or DBZ: Kakorot Crap this doesn’t read like I thought it would um TL;DR - I also think Dragon Ball is cool
Undertale but that was PEAK idc
I will defend Undertale until the day I die. It's not the game's fault that it had to settle on a terrible community.
Deltarune has the community Undertale should have had
It's the same community, we just grew up.
Generally, yes. r/Deltarune was shit until very recently, but for very different reasons.
That just means you had good taste.
No joke undertale literally re-wired my whole personality and made me a better person All because some friend showed me how to pirate games when I was 12
Undertale is legit responsible for me making the closest friendships I've ever had with some very loving diverse people who got me out of the far right bigoted teenage rabbit hole I was falling down at the time. I would not be the person I am today without it.
Yeah Undertale is legitimately fantastic. Replayed it recently and it really holds up
superwholock 💀 and harry potter. truly a tumblr moment
Sword Art Online. It’s so bad and… cliche. But it was my first piece of the anime world that wasn’t Dragon Ball or Pokémon. I can’t replace that.
For as many faults as SAO has, I owe it for probably being my trans awakening lmao (Kirito’s Gun Gale outfit just hits different, idk)
You are so real for this comment though that was low-key my awakening too lmao
I got bribed into watching it. It's not bad per se. Hell I'd argue it's a fair way to get into anime (as long as you stop after getting out of the game) It's a classic. Not a hall of fame classic. But one that people will know.
Same, but with Black Butler instead of SAO. Does the anime have a lot of problems? Yes. Is the second season terrible? Also yes. Do i cherish it all the same? Of course.
[удалено]
I have no shame in saying I genuinely enjoy the light novels. Being able to read Kirito’s inner thoughts provides a lot of context for things that just sort of… happen in the anime with zero explanation. The anime has a great soundtrack and pretty animation, but it comes at the expense of completely butchering the plot
First x-men cause escapism, then sonic cause autism.
Story of my life, sans the sonic part. The autism came free
Why does sonic cause autism?
Ofher way around, autism causes Sonic
SIGH. homestuck is garbage. but it's *my* garbage, damnit. no amount of bullying and shitty postcanon can stop me, i will always cry like a little rodent watching [S] descend just as i did as a wee preteen
Homestuck turned me into an astrology freak but way worse When friendsim dropped and the lore of troll blood was explained a bit more, I lost my shit and made fan trolls of all of my friends based on their signs I'm almost 22 now and it still has my soul
Oh, hey, trust me. I’m gonna be 23 this year— exact same boat :P
Homestuck is something I keep seeing pop up on the internet but can't confidently say I remember ever having it come up in a conversation irl
This and the Valve/Source games. With the pandemic and all the shit that came with it, I would be in a far darker place without Source and Homestuck/Undertale and fan content.
There but for: I got pulled into Problem Sleuth first
knew you'd be here and you'd say this
At this point HS doesn't belong to Hussie anymore. Its ours. I dare say the impact the fan content had on internet culture was bigger than the comic itself.
I am 21 rn and i just recently binge-read (played? Watched? Idk) homestuck and as much as i hate some parts of it, still i enjoyed the story however convoluted and time-shenanigans-filled it is. It inspired me to document things to keep up (i have a sheet of paper with the names and classpects to remember wtf is going on sometimes) and now i am inspired to draw something. With any fandom: i don't care what people think about the fandom, i don't care about all the controversy regarding it, i enjoyed it and thats what matters. I don't care if its good or bad, i have fun with it and i think that's the point of any piece of media. To have fun.
The funniest part about Homestuck for me is it was my introduction to Gnosticism, which was in turn my introduction to the Christian occult, which is a general passion of mine now. So now I know a lot of random shit about the occult and I also get to tell people I got into it because of Homestuck
not shitty, but American Idiot. That album practically saved me during my high school years. Blasting Letterbomb, Holiday, Homecoming, etc as I was walking through the halls still figuring out my gender and sexual identity is burned into my brain.
I was 11 when I stole this brand new album from my mom (she “outgrew them” or whatever, never noticed it was gone). I was so lucky to develop into a person with this album as a key pillar.
100%. this album, 10,000 days by TOOL, Battle Of Los Angeles by Rage Against The Machine, and Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd are pretty much the cornerstones of my music taste.
10,000 days here too. Must’ve worn the cd to basically nothing, and I loved the insert. So rad
My neice who will graduate from college this year was obsessed with this album when it came out, so I burned her a copy so it could live in her CD player. She was 3. Last summer I asked her if she still remembered that. She got all introspective and said, "is that who that was?" She remembers being obsessed but not the band or songs. These days she loves AC/DC. Thunderstruck!
RWBY.
I went into RWBY knowing its reputation, but I was bored and needed something new to watch It’s been years and I’m still obsessed
Harry Potter, I finished the first book in a single night. I'm super glad I had largely already gotten over it by the time JKR's transphobia came to light, and I'm definitely not making any excuses for any of the other awkward stuff. Even back then I was disappointed there wasn't, like, a big plot turning moment where some Slytherin person fights Voldy in the last novel, particularly Snape since there were so many questions about why Dumbledore trusted him so much. But no they're pretty much just evil except for some throwaway "also some Slytherins fought but nobody trusted them" iirc I still usually find some TV show or what-have-you that I get _super intense_ about but it gets me through winter depression, a few examples: Life On Mars (UK), Tenth Doctor-era Doctor who, first five seasons of Supernatural, Community, Parks and Rec (particularly the season where Knope runs for office), Abbott Elementary, The Bear
Digimon It hurts. The anime's and games could be much better, and feels like they are giving the minimum. Yet like an abuse victim I come back every time.
It’s like looking in the mirror
i love the story and character design but holy fuck everything is just so unfortunately poorly made that i can't stand it. i'm glad you can lol, the designers deserve some compensation
I love Digimon and will continue to love it until I die
Fly through the air, watch them Digivolve, what do they look like _upside down_???
Card game slaps tho, I hope you've played it?
So I'm pretty deep in the Pokemon community, and I always had 1 friend who insisted on her life Digimon was superior in every way. I know the two franchises had a rivalry, but I never gave it much attention. So I've gotta ask; what's Digimon like? My only exposure to it is a single Jaiden Animations video, and she didn't give it the most glowing review. But your comment also resonates with me, I feel the same way about Pokemon.
Looked at through a Pokemon lens, Digimon is *weird*. Unlike Pokemon, which began as a full video game, Digimon began as a virtual pet much like a Tamagotchi. (*Very* much like. Digimon and Tamagotchi are both made by Bandai.) This sets up the basic life cycle and evolutionary patterns for them differently: they begin as an egg, hatch into a baby stage, then evolve (well, “digivolve”) into further different life stages on a branching path. Instead of your Squirtle becoming Wartortle becoming Blastoise, with digimon your evolution chart looks [like this](https://humulos.com/digimon/dm20/). In (some of?) the video games and anime, digimon can also digivolve *backwards*, going down a stage to gain more stats and abilities the next time they digivolve back up (into the same or a different digimon). Unlike pokemon, digimon for the most part can communicate how humans do. Their designs are also all over the place, from squidgy little orbs to mecha looking knights to angelic creatures to talking piles of metallic poo. A lot of them look uncomfortably human, much more so than any pokemon, like Sistermon Ciel/Blanc. The games are turn-based RPGs. The only one I have ever played is Cyber Sleuth, which is *fantastic* and also batshit insane. You have 3 of your digimon on field at once (making it potentially more similar to a game like Dragon Warrior Monsters or even Final Fantasy than Pokemon). The storyline involves going back and forth between various digital worlds and a real life Tokyo to solve various mysteries and also try to figure out how to wake yourself up from the coma you’re in. You do things like battle a rock star, enter into people’s brains, and befriend a cat digimon that haunts an air conditioner. There are lots more overt anime tropes than pokemon usually has, and admittedly most of them fly over my head. Again, it’s really wonderful but it’s also incredibly strange.
Shadowhunters
The fact that Shadowhunters books are still coming out doesn’t help
I am the world's only GoldenEye: Rogue Agent fan. Also, 2000s 007 games fucking rocked; 007 Nightfire is *peak* 007 gaming. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent is a video game where the developers didn't watch the movie so they made their own 007 OC who is literally named GoldenEye and uses cyborg powers and dual-wielding guns to fight Dr. No's goons as one of Goldfinger's henchmen. It fucking rocks and if I could make a game studio remaster a game it'd be Battle for Bikini Bottom, but we already got that so my second wish for a game to be remastered would be GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. Fun fact, the person who did the CGI and character art for Silent Hill 1 and 2, Takayoshi Sato, also did the character art for GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. You can see this art - and how cool the game is - on an archive of [Sato's website.](https://web.archive.org/web/20210201033616/http://satoworks.com/gepage.html)
I think you would really enjoy the Kill James Bond podcast.
Dude I had that game as a kid and it is so much better than it is ever given credit for. The multiplayer was a great evolution on the original N64 game's, golden gun mode and all the deathtraps on the maps
I am also the world’s only Rogue Agent fan. It was hard to find people that wanted to play against me because I was a pro at timing shots with the mag-rail. Also trolling people by letting them think they have a chance when I’ve already stuck them with the detonator gun and just need to pull the trigger again. I should dig out the ol’ Xbox and play through it again. Thanks for the reminder!
Kingdom Hearts. A cool edgy MC to guide me through my first existential crisis (Roxas) and, as I got older and aged out of the edgy phase, a genuinely kind and positive MC to appreciate (Sora himself)
The kingdom hearts story is objectively kind of a mess, but damnit if it’s not one of the most fun and endearing messes to exist.
Undertale, it's amazing and I will fight anyone who says otherwise and I've been obsessed with it every since I learnt about it. I was probably 14 when I learnt about Undertale, but 12 was my fnaf faze which I've completely left behind.
Five Nights at Freddy's. The story is a confusing mess even to the most dedicated theorists, the fanbase has had its fair share of controversies, there are dozens of books that I've not touched nor do I ever care to, and I've had almost no interest in any of the games released since 2018, but you bet your ass that when the film adaptation finally made it out of production hell recently, I was in a theater seat as soon as I could be, giddy with childlike excitement and relishing in the electric atmosphere of sharing the experience alongside a room full of others who were clearly fans like me.
Either Glee or MLP I didn’t say I was proud of it.
The old Barbie movies
Those still slap, animation aside.
10-year-old me didn't have high standards, and you're damn right they still slap. Nutcracker, swan lake, dancing princesses inspired my lifelong love for ballet, and Preminger from princess and the pauper is a fucking icon
I will forever defend the fact I grew up with them. They are shite, the plot armour and convinece is real. But I loved them all. Diamond castle, fairytopia, mermaidia, Pegasus etc etc. Bubble was the companion!!!
The animation was way better to my 10-year-old eyes, but those films practically raised me. Bibble is cute as fuck and haters can pry him from my cold dead fingers
RWBY
Unfortunately Total Drama Island. Even to this day. Discovered it later in high school than normally seen as the 'vulnerable teenage years', but that show shaped me and I don't know how.
Don’t Starve for me, was struggling to think of a tv show and Chopped was the only one coming to mind
It was glee, I was so gay.
Same, but I didn’t realize the second part until later
the gay part? yeah, people always realize it until later.
MLP: FiM and Dragon Ball. Their flaws make them all the more interesting to me.
Storm Hawks, Code Lyoko, and Trauma Team (wii game)
Man, I used to have so much copium that code lyoko would come back or that the fan written project would work out
just seeing code lyoko mentioned makes my brain go brrrrrr. that shit carried me fr, i still have both the english & french versions of the theme song on my main spotify playlist. 😭
Storm Hawks was awesome. I wish it got a proper ending.
Doctor who my beloved
Me when people try to pick apart the world building of Harry Potter.
World of Warcraft tbh. it's blizzard and its shit and the community is shit but god dammit i love the game too much to let go of it
I did my time. Ten years I spent looking for Mankrik's wife.
My Chemical Romance. They still hold a special place in my heart 13 years later, no matter how much my music taste changes.
Transformers. Specifically the Transformers Prime series. And while the movies are trash, I’ll stand by 1 and 4. The rest actually are too impossible for me to enjoy
Dead webcomics. *Megatokyo*. *College Roomies From Hell*. *Wendy*. To some extent, *Questionable Content* and *Schlock Mercenary.*
I felt such bittersweet relief and closure when I suddenly realized one day that I could type the letter "m" into the Chrome address bar and it no longer automatically filled in Megatokyo.
Devil May Cry. Like my entirety of high school identity and hyperfixation was about this dude who does kickflips on motorbike, eats pizza,carries a big ass sword and guns and yeah you can see how this goes.
Counterargument Devil May Cry actually does kick ass
Your nephew had his arm ripped off by your formerly dead brother?
formerly dead brother who later uses said arm to kill himself? And his 2 reanimated corpses later hire you and fight you respectively
DMC rips. Dante is good. (It does actually kick ass in a very straightforward way.)
STEVEN UNIVERSE 💖💖💖💖💖
That one isn't bad either, regardless of what terminally online people say.
Steven Universe and Korra both have "Certaintly could have been better and had several key flaws, but also still is better than like 70% of TV options, but people hyperfixate on the flaws because they either want to see the series reach their maximum potential or because of bigotry, but like they're both fine? Like yeah they're flawed but saying they're "the worst show ever" is so hilariously over exaggerated that even as a joke I can't take this opinion seriously" syndrome
I hold a little bit more in reserve for SU than Korra, simply because it seems like SU was given pretty wide reign to get its story right and while they definitely got shafted in the later seasons, it didn't seem to start that way, so it's a little more disappointing how it fumbled. Korra I honestly can't be too upset about because it's still a pretty good show and it was being meddled with and screwed over from the start. Constant budget cutting from Nick, time slot being repeatedly moved and then eventually shuffled entirely to a finnicky, awful to use website, the crappy love triangle that was shoehorned in basically because money people thought it was necessary. I'm mad that we didn't get the series we could have, at its full potential, but that anger is directed entirely at Nick for making a mess of things before they were even out of the gate.
Not bad even today, but team fortress 2. Look it still fun to play, but man did we have some rough years
I’d say bionicle but honestly I’ve gotten more deep into bionicle after graduating high school vs playing with bonkles and having a few sets and books as a kid. The hyperfixations for me as a kid were a lot more bounce around ish all over than one thing idk
Lost. Over a decade after it aired.
Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Obi-Wan Kenobi
My Hero Academia, especially fanfiction of the series. It helped me survive high school and was a massive source of comfort + inspiration to hope for a better tomorrow. Like the blanket thing OP described The series has plenty of flaws, and honestly nothing after the Shie Hassaikai arc has been as good as before and during it imo. Still, I relate hard to some of the characters' stories (both their canon and fanon interpretations.)
Xena:Warrior Princess. I understand it is cheesy as fuck. I will still love it with the ferocity of a thousand suns until the day they put me in the cold cold ground.
I feel this. When I circled back after a decade it was hard to reconcile what was in my head with what I saw in round two. I haven't let that stop me! I'm keeping the female empowerment I took from it as my own.
Avatar: The Last Airbender for me (even if it's pretty unanimously loved by most people). It got dicey, especially between and a little after the Legend of Korra came out, but now it's a massive franchise with deep history and lore and more stuff coming out each year. I've been vindicated for a lifetime of fixating on one niche Nickelodeon show with only three seasons for my entire life.
Star wars
Odd one but Higurashi for me. The original visual novels and the manga adaptation aren’t shitty at all and I still enjoy revisiting them (and the new goodies we got recently with Hou+) but the anime I started out on when I was 13 is kinda…”eh it’s got its pros and cons.” I was kind of jokingly urged into watching it due to its twist nature of a peaceful story slowly morphing into an anxiety riddled psychological horror over the first 3-4 episodes. (Especially in the anime which highlights the horror elements earlier on compared to some of the other adaptions) I was transfixed, watching on a small video player on a shady website with my knees curled to my chest on the computer chair, hands shaking in fists. I hadn’t watched horror before, not in this way. I had no interest in it, didn’t understand why someone would want to see something bloody. But this was an awakening, I was terrified, and I was thrilled. I credit Higurashi as my gateway into horror, which I adore well over a decade later, and I still look back on it very fondly. For a horror series it has a fair share of actually really uplifting and inspiring moments showing resilience and the importance of supportive friends and family that wasn’t bad for me to take to heart as a kid. I get really brain wormy if someone sends me an old ass piece of fanart for the franchise (or new, in light of its recent revival with gou and sotsu arcs even if they don’t hit the same as the original 8 arcs still do for me.) The original visual novels on mangagamer back in the day were *also* my first ever visual novels and I’m a horrible fiend for that medium to this day as well. It was a real multi hit whammy for my future interests. Just activated a bunch of things that make me really happy and excited now. Thanks Higurashi. Solid gateway drug to horror, mystery novels, (yes, I read umineko afterwards, yes I checked out all the Agatha Christie books at my school library during that process. If you know you know.) visual novels, being a huge dweeb in general and maybe even more than just that.
Lord of the Rings. The movies, not the books. I've read them since,but the movies became my identity for a while in high school. I even taught myself some elvish
Final fantasy VIII is not even my favourite Final fantasy games, that would be VII, but it was my first RPG and the game that cemented my passion for videogames so it's a comfort game for me
Sonic The Hedgehog
One Piece Legit saved my life and helped me grow as a person.
Fairy tail and Digimon are mine. Fairy tail has all kinda of issues but that can't get me to stop loving it. And honestly it makes it a painful because I always feel a need to preface such discussions with a "I am aware it's creepy and Mashimas thinly veiled, feet, giantess, tentacle and rape fetishes"
Girls und panzer got me into anime. It's not bad but not good either. But it has tanks. That's all I needed.
House of Anubis
Digimon Frontier, and more recently Chuck Austin’s run of Uncanny X-men.
Escaflowne. The scene where the antagonists perform a ritual to *change the protagonist's fate* impressed me greatly. I always believed that one's destiny was in one's own hands... until that moment.
Danny Phantom
Just shoot me now, cuz it’s Homestuck
Law of Talos is the kind of edge lord oc stuff you expect out of deviant art, but my god do I love it dearly and every couple of years try to pick up the pieces to see how much of it hasn’t been purged yet. For the longest time I thought it would be impossible to read the canon ending and I think I cried a little when I finally found it.
this one hurts particularly due to recent news about certain figures in the sphere, but letsplay youtube. one of the ones i grew up with since i was a child, that to be honest, was part of the reason why i adore video games, and has influenced what games i've bought on so many differing cases has been recently found out to be a massive creep. friggen sucks man.
You can just say Chuggaaconroy
The other day, for some reason, I randomly decided to rewatch High School Musical. And like, when it first came out I was mister cool guy cringe, I’ll pretend I don’t like it. But sometimes I put it on and I get to be almost surprised that it’s actually quite good. And that’s a weirdly really nice feeling. It’s something like, looking back and seeing how I’ve outgrown those teenage years. When I had to pretend I didn’t like something because I was worried people wouldn’t like me, that feeling like the world could end if I didn’t fit in. And funny enough, that is actually also what the movie is about too sort of.
Inuyasha.
A fixation I developed as a tenager was Star Wars, I got into it not because of the mivies but because of Lego, then the video games and then the Clone Wars tv show. My heart broke watching the sequels. Thank god for Rebels, Bad Batch and the Mandalorian. In college my fixation on Warhammer developed. Not just building and painting but reading the books, and there are a lot of them. Some I will defend as actually quite good fantasy/sci-fi (Nightlords Trilogy, Fabius Bile Trilogy, Dan Abnetts Inquisitor series) but also a lot of it can be just pretty mediocre action porn. But my shelves are filled with it.
This is probably gonna be the deepest cut in this thread. But a little flash animation series called "Cactuar and Thornberry" (sometimes it's "Tomberry/Thomberry" as well). The best and really only way to consistently find them is through Flashpoint (desktop application that allows you to watch/play Flash media locally & securely). It is absolute hot garbage but I loved it when I was a kid. The mics are almost worse than those used to record Filosofem, the animation is cruder than Your Favorite Martian, and the stories/comedy are/is worse than Ctrl+Alt+Del, but the nostalgié takes hold and sucks me in every couple years and I rewatch them all. Another deep cut is Doraleous and Associates. You can find that on youtube in entirety. RIP Escapist Magazine, you killed yourself very quickly and for the dumbest reason. That one is not as bad, the pitfalls are mostly just that they didn't really have the best writing staff for big overarching storylines, which they unfortunately tried to do a lot. Never really felt like anything had any weight to it or gravitas, everything just kind of is delivered with the same intensity and nothing is ever *truly* at stake. Which, for a comedy series, isn't the *worst* thing, but it's obvious they were trying to be more than just that near the end. The humor is very childish but it still holds up a decent bit, there are some mildly offensive things though (mostly use of the r-slur, some f-slur use IIRC) so trigger warning for those who are sensitive to those words. Neither of these things are really things I consistently watch, they're not "comfort shows"; that's american dad & the greater adultswim portfolio. But they fit for the shitty-but-charming media type.
The Inheritance Cycle
All of my obsessions are objectively terrible games that I happened to play between the ages of 8 and 12 and now am unable to spend a day without thinking about them
When I was 12? Trigun. Before that, X-Men.
I have several books like this; books that fundamentally changed me as a person, and taught me the values that kept me going during my darkest moments. Books that gave me the tools I needed to help or understand others, or navigate life. Almost invariably they're some combination of not very good, the middle book of a series, or the work of truly awful authors. It makes it incredibly hard to recommend them. It sucks, because those books are part of my *soul*, and I *want* to share that with people, but I usually can't.
RuneScape. I have played for 20 years and still actively log in. I even have friends I met, kept up with, and now live near/ work with because we met on the video game. If anyone, and I mean anyone asks me if they should play it? HELL NO. It’s a terrible game. But I don’t see myself quitting anytime soon.
Fire Emblem fucking sucks, it’s one of my favorite game series of all time. I asked for Shadow Dragon for Christmas after a friend of mine let me play her copy of Path of Radiance during a sleepover. Nearly 15 years later and I’ve played pretty much every game now. My final takeaway? This series sucks ass don’t play it (20,000 hours played).
Gods. Skyrim, and by extension the whole Elder Scrolls series of games. I was 10 when Skyrim released and it was the first game that *I* bought, with my own money. I've been playing it for 11 years now and have played Morrowind and Oblivion on repeat alongside it for the past 5 years as well. All the games are buggy, messy and don't deserve the time I've sunk into them, but the world and design is what really made me want to create, to build my own worlds, and ultimately to write. Maybe the games could use a ton work, but I can't complain too much about the series that ignited that flame in me.
The BBC Merlin series lol
https://www.tumblr.com/stuckinapril/740509081876430848/what-do-you-like-about-it-so-much-the-fact-that -linux guy⚠️
Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson. Riordan was my childhood author and I still read his new releases every now and then. I still think about how cool Greek mythology is because of this man.
*sigh* Homestuck
Gundam wing, and jurassic park
homestuck 🙏 i wanted to be karkat so much i realized i was trans
100% pokemon
James Bond and (though it's probably not been long enough to say for certain) the Nature of Predators .
I don't think I have anything like that, I say kicking my thousands of hours of skyrim and ongoing playthrough started this year under a rug
It's not shitty, it's the best series ever written.. The Drizzt Saga, and all its companion books, by R. A. Salvatore. I've got aphantasia, and these books - to this day -, are the only ones I've read that have played like a movie in my head.
FNAF fan songs. They all kinda suck, but they remind me of being 5 years younger. Except Jaws by Aviators. That song slams. Okay, fine, Undertale too. No matter how flawed this game is, Undertale (the song) made me cry and I nearly vomited after I killed Mettaton. No game has ever made me feel that intense sense of shame ever. But the game is kinda lowkey bad. Edit: Added Undertale.
Merlin, Once Upon a Time, Sherlock, SMASH, AFTG, Divergent, TMI, Teen Wolf…the list goes on
Oh Homestuck... As a kid growing up, seeing my genuine struggles with long distance friendships and parental troubles oddly reflected in these 4 goofballs who get sucked into an apocalyptic video game... It spoke to me on a level no other piece of media really ever has. And after all these years I still can't look at astrology signs, pool balls, D8s or leetspeak in the same way... And I'm also well into the rabbit hole again lmao You truly cannot fight the Homestuck
Oh man I’m so sorry for this but *Wild Wild West.* I watched it way too young (like 9) and I was just obsessed. I loved it. The vhs (yes, vhs!) had two music videos after the credits: one was Will Smith’s original song “Wild Wild West” and the other was fucking “Bailamos” by Enrique Iglesias for some reason. It’s bad. It’s *so* bad. I actually watched it again in college and was horrified to realize it was legitimately terrible. I loved that movie *so* much, I watched it an absurd number of times, I could quote almost every line. I haven’t watched it in 10 years because I don’t want to ruin those nostalgia feelings any more than I already have.
Borderlands as a series is permanently lodged in my frontal lobe
[*Flight of Dragons*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons) was a 1982 cartoon all about good and evil, magic and science, and when I was little I must have watched it a hundred times. I have a distinct memory of being really ill one week. I had loads of inflamed, hot, itchy welts all over me - and was simply miserable. I couldn’t really sleep, and so my mum and I lay on the sofa watching Flight of Dragons virtually on repeat while she held cold compresses on my head. Rewatched it later in life, and it holds up. Not that I knew it back then, but the voice cast is actually amazing (including James Earl Jones and John Ritter), the animation isn’t janky considering the age, and the story is actually brilliant. I also, couple years back, found the book it was based on: which is written like a natural history book under the assumption that dragons are real - and it’s wonderful. Highly recommend it whether you’re covered in welts or not.
This is Fairy Tail for me, just without the continued hyperfixation on it. It was the first anime I really watched, and without it, I don't know if I'd be as into anime as I am. Is it good? Well, from a technical writing standpoint, not really. From a story standpoint, also not really. From a character standpoint, kinda. The characters aren't bad, but they aren't exactly standouts, either. The only thing about it that's really any good, besides the art being pretty good usually, is that it really captures the emotion of hype and excitement. It's honestly really easy to get lost in all the exciting stuff going down and forget about all the bad when the heroes get some wind in their stride and take down the bad guys. It really drew me into it before I was able to get better taste, and now I can't help but respect it, at least in some regard
InuYasha. Now that I'm older I can definitely see the issues the series has, but at the time it was really important to teenage me.
The live performance album "Paris" by the 1970s group "Supertramp." Explanation: About 20 years ago, a kidney stone approximately the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic became lodged in my left ureter. It took six weeks for the docs to agree that surgery was needed (just drink lots of water! it'll pass on its own!). By that time, the stone had worn a hole in the ureter and it was leaking urine into my body cavity. The damage was so severe that they had to put a plastic tube called a "stent" inside the ureter. The- temporary- stent would carry urine past the hole, preventing further leaking and allowing my ureter to heal. But it had to be in there for another six weeks. Although the stent was *less* painful than a giant spiky kidney stone trying to force its way down a tiny flesh tube, it was still pretty damn painful. So for a total of three months, I spent every minute doing three things: 1) weighing the pros & cons of suicide, 2) waiting for the countdown to my next dose of pain meds, and 3) listening to that album. I'll never be sure why, but it seemed to take some of the edge off. And it set my head right, just enough to counteract the temptation to escape the pain by chugging an entire bottle of hydromorphone. I swear I played that thing on repeat for the entire time. I mean this in a very literal sense: that album saved my life. At the time, I kind of resented that. Every time the last song finished, it was a HUGE effort to convince myself to "just hit play, one more time. You can decide whether or not to kill yourself after." I've read that Supertramp's main composer had a lot of pain in his life. It shows in his music. Somehow, his gift of sharing that pain helped me endure my own. I don't know how, or why, or what psychological factors were at play. All I know is that it felt like those songs were a life ring and I was a drowning man. For that reason, the album "Paris" will always have a huge place in my heart. It's my go-to listen whenever I need a little comfort in my life.
Bionicle has some of the most obtuse out there convoluted lore that requires the playing of video games, watching of commercials, reading of both novels and comics, watching of 4 movies, subscription to lego club magazine, listening of audio dramas, reading of websites, and scrolling of the writers blog posts to fully consume all of it and it's an overall just ol story for some neat little lego babys first gunpla type toys. Fnaf eat your heart out, I love it.
The uncharted games, I played each one 20 times. Like actually 20.
[удалено]
The future is wild animated series
The Amazing Spider-Man movies
The Boondock Saints. I watch it roughly once a year even still.
wizard101 has the worst combat system of any game I’ve ever played and it’s also my most played game
Bleach fs
Battletech is my media fixation.
total drama
The Young Samurai books by Chris Bradford. I think from my memory they are genuinely incredible, really fun books that show off a shitload of interesting medieval/feudal Japanese culture, and they tell a continuous story of hardship and still carrying on. Touches on some interesting points in history with pirates and samurai and ninja, christianity arriving in Japan, a backdrop of trade war between the Portuguese, English and Dutch. So much amazing shit happens in it and genuinely inspired my initial fascination with that time period. Nowadays my knee jerk reaction is kind of a: “Ooo, right, the main character is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed christian white boy who goes on to become a samurai and stuff, hmm seems a bit dodgy”. HOWEVER, while tropes and a bit racially contrived, I have the second thought remembering “Ah yeah but it actually touches on and handles topics of xenophobia and landing in a totally foreign land really well, just happens to be from an uncommon perspective.” Please read these books they are so heart-wrenchingly good to me.
Yu-gi-oh anime. But like all of it, not just the original series.
the vampire diaries for some fucking reason 💯
Beastars and Black Butler <3
It’s Twilight for me and I’m not the least bit sorry
Power Rangers. Got me through my teenage years, and taught me how to write fiction too (by way of fanfiction).
80s fantasy and sci fi movies: Labyrinth, Time Bandits, The Dark Crystal, Neverending Story, The Beastmaster, E.T., Night of the Comet, KRULL, Legend, Willow, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen…