I happen to think that Chara has appalling tastes in media and music, sometimes, but I have to admit (a little grudgingly) that they seem to have gotten hold of a certain...reality principle, let's call it (yes I'm quoting Naked Lunch) that has worked for them. One of the important things they achieved, that I wasn't so successful at during my previous life, was breaking away from our RL mother's oppressive fixation on reading just the Good Books™. For her the world was a grim and serious place, and she wanted us to be grim and serious to meet it—like young revolutionaries with their eyes always on el pueblo unido. It wasn't going to happen, not the way she wanted anyway; her children were both far too broken.
She couldn't stand that Chara was drawn to stuff like fantasy literature and comic books, but I can see now that these things ended up protecting them; meanwhile I immersed myself in history and investigative journalism (and grimmer things, like compulsively reading about "abnormal" psychology) and it played the devil with my mind, and lashed me on towards despair. I may have hated Chara's apparent frivolity in the past, but perhaps it was right that they should have escaped from the "real world" until such a time as they were readier for it. And now it seems impressive to me that Chara was so fiercely determined to find value in "garbage"—our RL mother literally consigned Chara's fantasy books to the garbage, more than once—that they succeeded in rebelling and breaking free from our parents' deadening influence. Because of fantasy books! Stuff I never would have touched in my old life.
~Frisk