jco
@jco

what media forms a "before/after" for you? that is to say, the person you were before watching/reading/etc was fundamentally different than the person after?

I think there are a few types.

  1. the thundercrack. you are not the same. this is the most dramatic
  2. more subtle. it provides a nice end to one chapter and transition to another, but maybe at the time you didn't even realize it
  3. the representative. maybe it wasn't actually that instrumental at all, but nicely represents some big change in your life I get too obsessed with proper ontologies so I am not married to the above and I think it's probably crude and bad and would be curious how other people think about this, because I bet there are more useful framings, I just don't want to psych myself out of posting.

though because I can't help but be pedantic I think that the size of impact can also vary. like a given piece of media can have a sort of extremely clear before/after affect, but that affect could be more constrained

I'm trying to think of pieces of media that form a before and after, though I won't commit to exactly what kind, I'd need to think about that more...god I wish I had a list of everything I've ever seen and read!!

Roughly in chronological order

  • Akira
  • Fushigi Yuugi
  • Sans Soleil
  • Sandman
  • MP3 by Jonathan Sterne
  • Swan's Way by Marcel Prouste
  • Infinite Jest by DFW (yes yes yes I know I know I PROMISE I'M NOT ONE OF THOSE PLEASE GIVE ME THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT)
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
  • Distinction by Pierre Bordeax/Let's Talk about Love by Carl Wilson (I read distinction first, but Let's Talk about Love was a lot more fun and presented a lot of the same ideas)
  • Hamefura (this is one of those smaller ones, basically just cemented my affection for ojou type characters, well that and having a badass bisexual character...ok I should probably post about my love of Hamefura sometime)
  • Symphogear? (I think so, still processing, it's too recent, but it feels like something)

I bet there's gotta be stuff from when I was younger, I just don't remember it well enough. I gotta ponder this subject.

I think of those, the "thunderbolt" type ones, and the age I first encountered them, would have been...Akira (10), Fushigi Yuugi (16), Sandman (22), MP3 (24), Swan's Way (24), Death and Life of Great American Cities (26), Distinction/Let's Talk about Love (28). And well I watched Symphogear earlier this year :)

But I feel like I've always really been affected by the things I watch and read, which is why I love good stories so much. I feel they really...get into me. Change me.


thewaether
@thewaether

probably not all the examples but there's been so many of these in my life and I love thinking about it

Thundercracks:

  • Outer Wilds: it was only last year but I felt myself be reborn when I came out the other side of this game. it was unpleasant and I went into a funk for a month. I'd write more about it but it can wait til I'm ready
  • Kingdom Hearts: Kingdom Hearts changed me. it changed the shape of the world as I saw it. It made the universe seem weird, colourful and fun. Despite its now-reputation for being an unintelligable mess, the first one is just an outstanding work of storytelling that blew my mind with its scale as a kid. Still a gold standard game for me to this day
  • Super Mario 64: Before I wanted to make games, I wanted to be an animator making movies like the disney movies I watched. Mario 64 changed that. I played it at our babysitter's house and realised in that instant I wanted to make video games. The world of this game and its secrets expanded my mind and made me aware of just how much video games were capable of doing.
  • Strapping Young Lad- City: This album was the heaviest thing I'd ever heard and in some ways still is. It had been around for well over 10 years by the time I listened to it, but it still sounded fresh. I stayed up until 3AM just listening to it over and over again for several days. I knew after listening to it that I wanted to make the heaviest music I could and nothing less
  • Public Enemy- It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
  • : Another album that changed my outlook. it felt like an album that took me somewhere else, introduced me to things I'd never heard of before, and felt like I was outdoors and listening to live music in a way a studio album hasn't really made me feel until that point. Had a big influence on me and I think could've been one of many albums (including Rage Against The Machine) that introduced me to leftist politics at just the right time
  • Iji: An indie game that was made by one person, and had a bit of a DIY feel, sorta like a webcomic, and it made me think simultaneously "I could do this!" but also "wow, this has made me realise I would much rather play things that felt like they had an AUTHOR behind them than play big-budget blockbusters"- this game was pure adrenaline and took itself just the right amount of seriously. It's a gold standard for how an indie game can be.


More Subtle:
  • FLCL: Gainax's weird 6-episode story bridges the gap between some of their earlier work (Evangelion) and upcoming work (Gurren Lagaan) and has just the right mood to fit a transitional work. It's about puberty. (I think). I watched it as I was going from school to college, so lots of changes were happening in my own life. It hit exactly right- something that was exploding with endorphins and ideas and wasn't quite easy to understand and just had this sense of fun to it. I felt like a different person afterwards- I took myself less seriously, embraced my weird/horny side, and wanted to make stuff that was like this
  • Homestuck: This work is now mostly associated with "fandom cringe" or whatever- but in its early days, it was just this website where... *something* was unfolding. this story felt like it was the germination of something that was about to change the world. I watched it update with baited breath, as it had this fusion between old-school adventure game humour and a story taking place on an unthinkably big scale for a webcomic. I read the fan adventures. I was obsessed with this. I think those early chapters are still the best, as I actually fell off it around the time it started being all about the trolls- but that early homestuck captures an energy you just don't see anywhere else
  • Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP: It felt like this game was talking to me. I remember seeing the scythian and thinking "hah, he has long hair, just like me!" And at the time I had kind of supressed the side of me that knew I was really a trans woman. (this was in the early 2010s) ....The moment I discovered the scythian was actually female, and then not long after, went into a heart-pounding boss battle, I remember coming to the realisation, "wait, I can... BE a girl character? I saw myself in this character?" My world opened up...
  • Psychonauts: Psychonauts is both just a good game but also a game that was ahead of its time. It was so ahead of its time that when Psychonauts 2 came out almost 15 years later, that game was ahead of its time too, despite being basically the same quality. I think this game felt like the future. It felt like a glimpse of the kind of thing games could do and I wanted to be a psychonaut myself so bad. That of course didn't happen, but wow this game stimulated my young imagination
  • Scott Pilgrim: The books but also the video game: just this really lively comic that came to define a few feelings I was having at the time. its clear parody of masculine expectations (fighting other boys to "earn" a girl) was told through a lens that to me was satirical (but to others not so much) and as a confused trans girl pushing up against male expectations I didn't want to live up to- I found that lens spoke to me. The kind of jaunty perspective it took on the whole thing. Also retro game references weren't completely old hat at this point

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @jco's post:

My clearest personal examples of this are usually like, the first time I was exposed to a sphere of media. I didn't know that I liked CRPGs until I played Planescape: Torment. A bit more nebulously, I'd watched DBZ, Pokemon, Naruto and such like any kid on the schoolyard, but I didn't know I liked "anime" until I watched Gurren Lagann. With the caveat of "I have well and truly abandoned the fandom, but I had fun for a good few years there", Fate/Stay Night was pretty formative; the visual novel's install has gone through three separate PCs.

"Before/After" might not be as much of a hard binary because we did it as a multi-year project, but watching/podcasting through Legend of the Galactic Heroes was a pretty changing experience. It gave me wider references for understanding things in reality.

I didn't know I had ADHD until I saw a PBS documentary about it in a hospital room recovering from an appendectomy. I suppose that counts.

A bit more nebulously, I'd watched DBZ, Pokemon, Naruto and such like any kid on the schoolyard, but I didn't know I liked "anime" until I watched Gurren Lagann.

yeah! this is totally the sort of thing I was mulling over with my half-baked ontology. like, which one made you "love" anime? Gurren Lagann? I don't think it's so straightforward, because DBZ, Pokemon, or Naruto have their magic too, their place in the story. @d12 called this "planting a seed" which I think is apt. Also, Gurren Lagann is great.

With the caveat of "I have well and truly abandoned the fandom, but I had fun for a good few years there", Fate/Stay Night was pretty formative; the visual novel's install has gone through three separate PCs.

I realllly want to play the VN, but for physical reasons it's really hard for me to play VNs. One motivation for trying so hard to get literate in Japanese is so I can play VNs on automode, I just need to have rock solid reading skills (well, voice acting helps, but in most VNs the MC doesn't have voice acting!). Still, from what I know, it seems like something I would love.

"Before/After" might not be as much of a hard binary because we did it as a multi-year project, but watching/podcasting through Legend of the Galactic Heroes was a pretty changing experience. It gave me wider references for understanding things in reality.

This sounds so cool! LOTGH is at the top of my "this is very long but I want to watch it" list. Doing a project with a podcast sounds amazing, that's the sort of thing I aspire to wanting to do. You are cool, internet person.

I didn't know I had ADHD until I saw a PBS documentary about it in a hospital room recovering from an appendectomy. I suppose that counts

definitely

thank you for sharing!!

One interesting aspect of this is that sometimes the thing that affects you is like a seed, where you read a thing and without realizing it something is growing inside you and when it finally finishes (possibly years later) you realize how important it was.

For me, a list of stuff that comes to mind (and paints a caricature of me)

  • Lord of the Rings, especially the maps
  • "The Dispossessed" by Le Guin
  • AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, 1st edition
  • "Too Dark Park" by Skinny Puppy
  • "The Exorcist"
  • "Beyond Good and Evil" by Nietzsche
  • Reed Ghazala's writing on circuit-bending
  • "Pulse Demon" by Merzbow
  • "Mutual Aid" by Kropotkin
  • "Making It Explicit" by Brandom
  • "The Day the Country Died" by the Subhumans
  • "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Calvino
  • "Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos

Probably leaving out a lot of things but those are places where I can remember my life changing in some significant way, or discovering something about myself.

One interesting aspect of this is that sometimes the thing that affects you is like a seed, where you read a thing and without realizing it something is growing inside you and when it finally finishes (possibly years later) you realize how important it was.

yes! I think this is exactly why I struggled with an ontology. thunderclaps are amazing, but sort of teasing out those seeds is also amazing. that list is great. some books on there I've been meaning to read--in particular I need to read more Calvino.

I had this slightly anecdata logic for years that my life was measured by the flipflops I had at the time - as the losing/breaking of a pair was often roughly aligned with new people coming in/out, new environments, etc. Not sure how it works in the current time of multi-pairs - dual wielding destinies I guess

Seeing Hamilton live on stage was one of these moments for me! It felt like it unlocked my ability to cry at emotionally moving art. I don't know how much to attribute to the musical itself; maybe I was already poised to change. But I've cried consistently at every single Hamilton live performance since then (aside from one where obnoxious theater-goers ruined my experience) and wept through a lot more stories, including movies.

I love Hamilton so much and am so thankful I was able to see it live. That's so nice that it sort of opened that up for you. I definitely cry much more easily at stories these days, I don't attribute it to Hamilton (though I did cry!), but it's definitely interesting...I was so closed off when I was younger.

  • Assassin's Creed really got me to start thinking about philosophies that are more about "tends toward chaos" or "tends toward order" rather than any plain view of good and bad. Some of the greatest wars in real life were not driven by disagreement in the outcome, but the means to achieve that outcome. The writing quality of the franchise really fell off after a while, but it was good while it lasted.
  • Story Of Your Life (and its adaptation, Arrival) really showed me two different things at once: the capacity for sci-fi to be deeply intimate, emotional, and human, as well as the idea that in some ways, whether or not free will really exists does not materially matter. We all have a role to play in this world, and a huge bulk of life's journey involves forging or discovering this role and accepting it.
  • Annihilation was pivotal. Its visuals invited me to watch it multiple times under different kinds of influence. It very clearly gave us a core cast of characters with differing sets of trauma that form the cornerstone of their being. It also holds a mirror up at the audience and asks: what's your relationship with change itself, which is such a terrifying and unknown thing at times?