Pieces of media that changed you?

[Memory]

That's quite easy for me !

First of all was... Mighty Max ! I went super crazy with these as a kid and kept asking for them until it wasn't sold anymore. I cried for days and my parents did their best to make some kind of damage control, saying "perhaps it'll come back later", "you know toys come and go, it'll be cool in 10 or 20 years don't worry". It was really my first huge interest. Then I went on with Dinosaurs as a general theme for many years but with less interest than Mighty Max.

Life goes on and I discover Daria on MTV and my world is ansolutely blasted to pieces. She's witty, sarcastic and intelligent. Beside the acid approach to people, I could relate a bit to her and Jane (her best friend) but this show carried my sould for many many years.

Then the 2010 era comes up and I discover TransFormers comic-books and I end up reading "Last Stand of The Wreckers" and it's my favorite comic-book of all time, you can't even imagine. If I had billions on my bank account I would probably buy thousands of copies and gift them to random people in the street. I want it as a mandatory read in school. I'm super obsessed with IronFist/Fisitron character and I think art and writing are top tier.

Daria is great and it still holds up - as does Beavis and Butthead, which is what it is a spin-off from    Beavis and Butthead is deffo one of my all time faves and Daria was always great when she'd appear in episodes!

[apricior]

Hiii

There's so many pieces of media that changed me as a person.

• Adventure Time. I feel like watching it when I was 12 influenced my sense of humor a lot. I keep this show very close to my heart just because of how many years I spent with it, I don't think I would have gotten into cartoons after becoming a teen if it hadn't been for AT.
• Gravity Falls. I rewatched it somewhat recently and realized "damn, this really explains a lot about me, huh?". The sense of humor (again), the aesthetic, the plots and character dynamics... I was so deeply invested when I was a teen and it was coming out, I think I would be a very different person without it.
• Welcome to Night Vale. The Night Vale brand of weirdness truly switched something in my brain, and I don't think I can go back. There's so many elements about this podcast that have shaped me into who I am today (especially the main character, Cecil, for being the first openly gay character I saw depicted in a positive light), and it also introduced me to the world of podcasts.
• Wolf 359. It might sound corny, but I feel like this podcast has a piece of my soul, and I would not be myself without it. It changed so much how I perceive character arcs and dynamics, and to this day it still brings me a lot of comfort to relisten to episodes.
• Dungeons and Daddies. Yes, it's a stupid name. Yes, it's an even stupider podcast. But it's the fandom in which I've been most active in ages, and it helped me rediscover the joy of creative online spaces, fandom, fanfiction and writing. I've met a lot of cool people and close friends, including my partner, thanks to this dumb D&D podcast, and I've also gained a lot of confidence in my writing, so I wouldn't be the person I am today without it.

[Capybara]

I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence surrounded by media...

Playing the OG Ace Attorney trilogy in high school blew my mind, the localization is brilliant and it holds up well even today. I've overdue for a replay of both, but I adore the balance of humor and serious moments. Ace Attorney also pushed me to start socializing online way back, although I don't really interact with its fandom now.

Wonder Showzen and other edgy offensive political comedy also completely blew my mind when I was 12 and is a huge influence on my sense of humor and politics. I've been crawling back to it as a cope for this current political climate, since so little has changed in the last 20 years.

My Little Pony wasn't a part of my childhood, but Friendship is magic also was what finally pushed me to do art again when I was very close to just giving up and dropping it in my late teens.

Educational content was awesome in the 90s. I'm not interested in revisiting most of it since it's out of my age group, but Amazing Animals and Zoboomafoo stick out to me. The latter show was the first time I saw a capybara.

[Nova]

Oh boy there's a lot that changed me...

I think in my honest opinion, when I finally got Kingdom hearts for the PS2, it blew my mind how well done the story was. Sure it's basically a Final Fantasy style game mixed with Disney but... when you think about how much of an impact it has now on those who grew up with it (myself included) it SHOWS.

I think it's safe to say it's what kind of ah, inspired me to create colorful characters and intricate stories where something seemingly irrelevant all comes together in a "holy shit it makes so much sense now!" moment.

[solbeth]

if i could recommend one game to someone who wants to try to understand me better, i would point them towards 'the beginners guide'.

it's a quite short (maybe an hour or two) walking simulator made by the same dev who made 'stanley parable'. in it, you are being led through a series of small, often unifished gaming projects by a narrator who claims that he 'wants to show his friend coda's games to the world'. by experiencing these small projects, you soon learn the backstory behind the whole project a little bit better.

first of all, it inspired me to keep all of my small and weird ideas close. not everything needs to be a big project, not everything needs to be polished. sometimes just the ability to present an idea is enough to make you feel happy about sharing it. also, it invited me to embrace more abstract kind of art as well. other than that, i deeply resonated with the melancholy and struggles of an uninspired artist throughout the whole gametime. it presented many feelings i didn't know how to name not only as a visual medium - but also as an experience. i have never felt so seen and understood while playing a game before and i've never been the same since.

[musicobsessed107]

Honestly, I think there are quite a few pieces of media that have had a significant impact on me throughout my life so far.

Ages 6 - 7: Winx Club. I remember this show coming onto Nickelodeon circa 2012 - 2013 right around the time seasons 4 and 5 were airing in the United States and the "We Are Believix" song came on during every commercial break, and needless to say, I became crazily obsessed with this show. I would constantly daydream about this series and the online games from the series in the middle of class and be reprimanded by my teachers for doing so instead of focusing on doing my work. I was already a daydreamer prior to this, but ever since I began watching Winx Club, I could really feel something setting off inside my brain that made it even more active during times of boredom than it had been previously. Naturally, of course, this shortly led to me getting into other shows about fairies, such as The Fairly Oddparents, as well as leading to me pretending to be a fairy quite a few times during recess (and desperately wishing to be able to transform into a fairy with cool powers shooting from my hands like the 7 Winx girls can).

Ages 6 - 10: Boomerang. Yep, that's right, Boomerang, as in Cartoon Network's sister channel. It started with me getting into reruns of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) before I got into other older Cartoon Network and Hanna Barbera series as well such as What's New Scooby Doo?, The Flintstones, The Garfield Show, Dexter's Laboratory, Codename: Kids Next Door, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and more.

Ages 7 - 11: TeenNick. A little bit of channel surfing led to me discovering the TeenNick channel and its nightly programming block, The 90s Are All That. My mother explained to me how the shows I fell in love with were on the main Nickelodeon channel in the 1990s and I thought that was super awesome, yet I was admittedly a little bit jealous that I wasn't there to see them during their original runs on the main channel. Still, I spent many weekday nights watching shows like Hey Arnold, Rugrats (1991), and CatDog right before bed if I wasn't watching The Powerpuff Girls (1998) or The Flintstones on Boomerang. I would also catch reruns of older Nick sitcoms such as Zoey 101 and Drake and Josh if I finished my homework early enough while I was waiting for the 90s Nicktoons to air their reruns for the night.

And then of course, there was the TeenNick website, where I spent a good amount of my time logging into the family computer to play the games up on that website, from their newer games such as What I Like About This Game, to their older classics from the days of The N such as Avatar High and Avatar U (the 2 I played the most of them all) as well as others like Samarang.

This of course, also led to me starting to act like a teenager and fantasize about being one. I started routinely wearing Teen Spirit Pink Crush deodorant at the age of 7 (even though I didn't even hit puberty until a few years later when I was 9 and didn't have to deal with armpit sweat just yet), wearing makeup everywhere I could (not to school, though, due to some arbitrary rule against makeup that my elementary school had with the exception of Halloween), wearing my pink Disney Princess heels on short walks outside the house (I thought those made me feel really grown up and also like a member of the Winx, which also eventually led to me getting my first proper pair of heels at the age of 8 shortly after that and wearing my mom's around the house, which I was really excited about), and for some time also led to me not playing in the dirt for fear of getting my clothes a little dirty and therefore making me look less mature than I was trying to be. Needless to say, I thought that being a teenager in high school totally ruled and wanted to be one so badly as a kid in elementary school. Oh, and I also had a green Disney Princess Ariel toy flip phone that I'd pretend to make calls on.

Ages 11 - 13: Avril Lavigne. It was Independence Day 2018 and I was browsing YouTube when I happened to notice a lyric video the song "What the Hell" by Avril Lavigne from 2011 in my homepage, so I decided to check it out, and as soon as I heard the first few verses, I immediately recognized the song from some random Binweevils tutorial video I had seen a few years prior to finally finding the full version and the name to to the song that I had a melody stuck in my head but couldn't find where it was from up until then. Soon, of course, I became madly obsessed with Avril Lavigne right as I started middle school shortly after turning 12 in August of that year. I explored tons of her songs (though most of the ones I liked were from her first 3 albums released circa 2002 - 2007 with the exception of 2011's "What the Hell").

Additionally, she was my awakening and I developed a crush on her, although it took up until I was around 17 years old to finally tart coming out of the closet (I haven't told my family yet and I'm not sure if I ever will, as I'm not sure how they'd react if I told them about how I swing more than 1 way).

Ages 13 - present: I'm Not a Vampire by Falling in Reverse. It was the early morning of Thursday, 1/2/2020. It was towards the end of my 8th grade winter break, with me doing nothing but watching some videos on YouTube. I was watching this lyric video for "Alone" by Avril Lavigne (I found that song, along with some other songs from her, oddly soothing as an angry, depressed, young teenager dealing with a crazy, borderline paranoid, helicopter relative who loathed the idea of me gaining some reasonable independence and growing up to become a functional adult, who upon looking back, seems to have really pulled the trigger for me back in September 2019).

Anyways, I just so happened to look through the uploader's channel out of curiosity and then I saw that there was a lyric video for a song by a band called Falling In Reverse. I checked the song out and fell absolutely in love with it. It quickly became my new favorite song and I could feel some of the lyrics really resonating with me given my circumstances at the time (particularly the line "if home is where my heart is, then my heart has lost all hope").

That of course led to another lyric video, for the song "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance, to be recommended to me and the rest is pretty much history from there (it was a slow transition at first, but soon enough, I discovered other bands, changed my wardrobe, dyed and started straightening my hair along with moving it into its current side part down the right side of my head, and slowly but surely also made other related lifestyle changes as well, mostly relating to living like it's still the 2000s, rawr).

[Nott]

God...there's been a lot of them throughout the years. But I don't really feel like talking about all of them right now so I'll just go with two recent ones that have been on my mind.

I got big into Digimon 2021-ish so I was excited to play Digimon Survive and- god that VN changed my life forever. Just in so many ways- it's not even that spectacular (it has some Incredible Highs but some ehhh lows and structural issues.) But it's something so dear to my heart. I found a really important friend through it, and had my taste in characters uh- irrecoverably altered forever (or really restored because I used to pretend that I didn't like horrible women for some reason because I Have Autism Rigidity Issues where Something must Always Be That Way No Matter What for arbitrary and vague reasons.) and then my friend proceeded to talk about Plutomon for forever because their still talking about her 'till now lol.

And then last year I got lured into playing Reverse 1999 due to a different friend and I liked it quite a lot for many reasons, but when it's first anniversary came around they gave out this character, Semmelweis for free, and her story was in the new roguelike mode they had. So I went to play it just to see how it was like and get rewards and...I want to be vague here since it's still something I have trouble coming to terms with, but Semmelweis is written to be dissociative (alongside her uh- 34287948324 other mental illnesses lol) and how they portrayed that and how it was written just really mattered to me during that time. She became very special to me as a result. She's getting an update to her story soon and I'm really excited to see that.