The Media that defines you

[RODAN]

If you are on twitter you may have seen the hashtag #FlimStruck4 or #GameStruck4 which are basically just ways to show the world the pieces of media that defined who you are as a person.

So I thought I'd bring it here.

If you would like to make a handy little chart you can use this

I'll start this off

Movies that defined me
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From top left
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- Milennium Actress: Most of you know that I am super into anime, and less of you know that satoshi kon is my all time favourite director. I almost decided to put 4 kon movies on here, but ultimately decided against it. The way this film presents the main characters life as a series of vignettes shown through the lens of the films she created is a really inspired move. and the ending is sad as all hell.

- No Country for Old Men: my favourite live action movie, and the movie that got me to start noticing cinematography a lot more. the way every shot in this movie is framed is beautiful, if not eerie. there is a real unsettling tone to this, and it makes for one of the most gripping viewing experiences I've had.

- Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: this one is mostly nostalgia, but also just truly a great movie. there are so many memorable moments and performances in this film.

- Coraline: this fucking movie. this is the movie that made me fall in love with animation. i grew up watching nightmare before christmas all the time (because my mom absolutely loved it) so stop motion has always been very near and dear to my heart. i honestly can not name a bad stop motion film. coraline, is not, a bad stop motion film - in fact it is one of the most ambitious animated films ive ever seen. there is so much detail and intricacies to this, not to mention the killer soundtrack and creepy aesthetic. this movie should be like 100x more remembered and loved than it is. it pains my heart to see it being forgotten to time.

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Games
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- Marvel vs Capcom 2: This is my favourite game ever. I have played over 5000 hours of it. it is what spawned my love of fighters and since I haven't found a fighter I truly love as much as mvc2.

- Pokemon Red: we are on a pokemon forum, so this is to be expected. but maybe slightly unexpected? I was born too late for red to really be the cultural phenom it was when it first came out (born in 95) but the thing is. my family was extremely poor when i was young, so pokemon red was the only game I had. all my friends were playing RS and I was sitting there with my lvl 100 charizard with fissure/fire blast/fire spin/slash. this story has a sad end as i let a 3rd grader (two years older than me at the time) play my red version, and he caught missingno on my cart and saved. losing all the data i had. epilogue: my family started making more money and i was able to get pearl on release. hell yes gamer win.

- Katawa Shoujo: Don't judge me on this one. I played this game whilst in a deep depression and the way the characters were written in such a realistic and nice way really helped me get through it. You never forget your first playthrough of KS. BTW Lilly is the best girl and i will hear nothing otherwise. thank you

- Okami: this game is the best zelda game ever released. i put so many hours into this game as an early teen, i thought it was just the coolest fucking thing. using a paintbrush as a weapon.. how absurd! also you get to play as a dog, and i love dogs.

Albums
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I'll do this later


anyway! feel free to post your own, i'd love to see what you've got

 

[internet]

Pokémon, Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering have pulled me into communities I have great friends in. Finally hollow knight is a great game that has insects so it's my fourth i guess. With any of the first three missing my life would have been on a drastically different course, I would likely have a vastly different friend group. It's crazy how much a piece of media can really influence your life in this day and age through the power of fan communities.

 

[Ortheore]

Pokemon, duh. Crystal was my introduction to the series. Probably the next most important game to me is Final Fantasy X, as I loved it from the start and it was probably the first game where I truly got invested in the story. I can't remember which game was the first one that really made me think the way most classic novels do, but I'm going to highlight Deus Ex Human Revolution here, as I think it does an excellent job in making you think about science, the future of humanity and various other things. Lastly, Journey, because imo it's the single greatest work of art ever made.

Music is a funny one. Coming into high school I literally had no idea what music I liked. Didn't listen to music at all. Then I heard The Only by Static-X (album: Shadow Zone) and decided I liked metal (I no longer like Static-X lol). This lead me to get into the typical trash bands people listen to before they get into actually decent stuff (Slipknot, Breaking Benjamin et al). Then I ended up in a class where a few of the people I sat with were into music, in particular prog rock/metal. That's how I came to love the album Sound Awake by Karnivool, which lead me into a lot of prog stuff, with that album in particular standing out as possibly my all-time favourite (it's hard to say because I've listened to it too much over the years, so it's no longer fresh). This also precipitated a shift away from music with harsh vocals, leaving me focussing on an incredibly narrow spectrum of music, stuff that's right at the borderline between rock and metal. That all changed when I accidentally clicked on a link to Flying Whales by Gojira (album: From Mars To Sirius), which blew me the fuck away. It had all the aggression I was after while Joe's harsh vocals are just incredible. Since then my taste is steadily getting heavier. Lastly, Terminal Redux by Vektor is the only album that really competes with Sound Awake as my all-time favourite

 

[Martin]

This is a really interesting thread idea, but DAMN this is hard as hell. I'm gonna do one for anime and one for western media (books, TV, and movies; still images don't really move me that much though (HAHA get it?), and neither does music really) because it's easier to pinpoint these things when I separate them by culture.

Anime grid:

Jesus christ I need to learn how to not write big paragraphs for everything…

From top left:
- Madoka Magica — If I were to pinpoint one show which I'd spent more time thinking about and reshaping my thoughts about, this would have to be it. I've rewatched it four times (I own the box set on DVD and I can watch the whole show in one sitting, so I usually end up rewatching this from start to finish whenever I'm ill) and every time my thoughts and opinions about it have shifted drastically to the point that I think I can say with more authority than most other people on the site what it is and what it isn't both within the boundaries of itself and within the grand scheme of anime history and, more specifically, the history of the concept of magical girls in both the east and west (a history that Bewitched, one of my favorite American TV shows from when I was a kid, plays a massive role within).

- ERASED — I can say with total certainty that watching ERASED was when I fell in love with animation. This isn't because it's a particularly good-looking show—sure, it definitely looks good, but only as good as any other "standard A-1" show would look—but rather it's because it was the first time I developed an interest in exactly what you could and couldn't do with the difference in medium from live action, the first time I realised that I actually preferred traditional animation to both live action and 3D computer animation, and the first time that I actually find myself looking for more in a show than just something to purely entertain myself. It also marks an important point in time for me as a consumer of media in that it was the first time I watched an anime series as it was airing, and I totally fell in love with it as I was watching it.

- Cardcaptor Sakura — If I'd have watched this before I did my GCSEs I wouldn't have got an A in my graphics course or a B in my business studies course; this is because watching it totally inverted the way that I think about demographics and product targetting. I stopped thinking of targeting as an absolute projection of who would use a product and rather as a construct that only exists within underinformed discussion and "outsider viewing." Of course, this shifted opinion is also a very shallow interpretation of its role in the consumer society—arguably equally as shallow as the assumption that targeting is absolute—and is something that I've broadened and better informed my opinions about since, but it ultimately drastically changed the way I think about everything from media to my own personality (it confirmed to me that I am very childish in spite of my physical and intellectual age (as if the fact I still play Pokémon and Super Mario wasn't enough proof already), and it made me realise that I'm a little tomgirlish, among other things). It also came at a rather important time in my life because I watched it not long before I went in for the first of a number of meetings that ultimately ended in me being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and watching this definitely had an (admittely small) impact on the way I answered a handful of the questions that I was asked.

- YoriMoi — OK, this one is because it's an important moment for me as a consumer moreso than because I think it's particularly changed me as a person, but it marked one of the moments that you a person ever gets once: it was the first time a piece of media ever made me cry. Yup, that's right; in all 19-and-a-half years of my life before watching episode 11 of YoriMoi, I'd never cried at a TV show, book, movie, play, picture, landscape, piece of music, or sculpture (there must be someone who cries at sculptures somewhere…); it wasn't the scene in the picture BTW, I just couldn't find the scene I cried at on google images (and this image seems more appropriate anyway).

Western media:

More overly-long explanations

From top left:
- Arrival / Story of Your Life — This one's probably the most complex one to explain out of both grids; this story has completely revolutionised the way that I think about adaptation; it made me realise just how different you can make something with the same story and characters just by changing some of the key elements and the themes that are actually explored by the work. If I were to say what Arrival was about, I'd say that it's a story about the importance of good foreign relations and argues that we should function in a world (and universe) which is fundamentally interconnected. It does this by taking the concept and turning it half into a story about politics, showing the way that different nations approach the same issue (America trying to learn to speak with the aliens, China playing games with them and getting confrontational) and kinda as a result the linguistics side of the story, as well as the idea of "viewing all aspects of the life of both writing and people" that dominates the book, get sidelined in favor of something which is better suited to film. By contrast, the book Story of Your Life (what Arrival was adapted from) aims to explain the ins and outs of the heptapods' language and fleshes out the "seeing the past" story that felt kinda tacked on and unexplained in the film and explains how learning the language would allow you to remember all aspects of your life, including those which haven't happened yet, while also approaching the dilemma of what would happen if you knew he future as a central theme rather than as a passing line. Honestly it's really interesting and makes me appreciate this film more than I already did, although this newfound appreciation isn't quite the type that improves my opinion of it (if anything it does the reverse by highlighting flaws with the film's structure and presentation that I didn't notice before). Oh, also this movie marks the point in time where I feel I was beginning to mature in the way that I judged media critically, with it kinda marking the point at which I went from a terrible critic to a passable one.

- His Dark Materials — This, like YoriMoi and ERASED, is something that's here mostly because it marks an important point in my development as a consumer; His Dark Materials is the first time I've ever fallen in love with a story and its world to the point of obsession; while I've become obsessed with things since then (just within anime it's happened for ERASED, Cutie Honey, YoriMoi, Shinsekai Yori and Cardcaptor Sakura, for instance), but aside from maybe in the case of Shinsekai Yori and, more recently, Story of Your Life and Others, I've never fallen in love with a story or, indeed, another world in quite the same sense that I fell in love with Lyra's Oxford and the worlds that she explores throughout the duration of the trilogy. Phillip Pullman is a prodigy who absolutely deserves all the celebration he gets as a writer.

- Robot Wars — I love watching robots beat chunks of metal off of each other, and I loved it as a kid too. Robot Wars was probably one of my two central interests in younger childhood, alongside Super Mario, and as such it basically summarises why I like a lot of the things that I do now. It got me interested in the idea of creating things, and I doubt that I would be so much into the fantastic worlds and non-real settings you see within anime if I hadn't built this interest in things that go beyond humanity like this when I was little.

- The Sooty and Sweep Show — This is my ultimate nostalgia show. My Mum used to have a VCR with four or five episodes of this on it, and me and my sister watched it over and over and over, so much that I still remember some of the lines from that video tape now. "Sausage, bacon, egg, beans, chips, fried bread with… jam… on the top. Eugh. What about you Sue? "I'm on a diet you see; I'll have the same but without the jam."" That line got me going like nothing else when I was a kid. I also remember parts of Sue's song ("My name, my name, my name it is… Sue! And I'm a… sweetiepie! The cutest little panda something something something") and the tune of the song that was sung in the christmas episode, as well as the plot of the episode with the fry up lines (Sweep started sleep eating). I did a lot of bonding with my Mum when watching that tbh; shame my Dad never watched any kids shows with me, maybe I'd be closer to him than I am today. Probably the last time I watched it was when our VCR player broke when I was 8 or 9, which is a shame because I wanna revisit that tape at some point on the TV with VCR that I own ATM, but I don't know what my parents did with the tape after our old player became unusable.

I'm not gonna do a grid for these because I don't really have enough stuff to put on them to make specifically for either video games or for music, but Super Mario 64 basically solidified my continued interest in Nintendo once everyone else had moved to GTA, CoD, Halo, and other "grown-up" games; also a borrowed copy of Pokémon HeartGold was the first time I ever played Pokémon at around age 13 or 14 (the latter IIRC)—I know, I started suuuper late—and we all know how big an impact Pokémon has had on my life lol. I'm sure there's some music that's shaped me to an extent too, but I don't really think there's anything which has hugely affected who I am today other than when I discovered vocaloid through playing the Senbonzakura rhythm game in the Project Mirai DX demo (please don't judge me…), which is what got me interested in exploring Japanese pop culture as opposed to it happening through anime or manga like it did for most people, and it also totally flipped my then-ignorant view of "modern" popular music, which before that point was in the static and obnoxious "if it's not classical, OST, jazz, or from before [arbitrary year that's inconsistently applied] it SUCKS" mindset that I'd developed in early secondary school and never really grew out of. I guess I could throw in a nostalgia shout for Toploader - Dancing in the Moonlight and Scatman John - Scatman, and I could probably find some way of working the fact I played Birdland in my concert band and truly discovered that I like playing the french horn because of it, but beyond that I can't really say anything's had a big impact on myself or my thoughts. Anyway this post is already waaay too long so I'll stop now.

 

[Minwu]

 

[Gweebis]

Ayy, this seems like a very interesting thread and idea, so I'll throw in my two cents. May update later to add media that defined me.

Games that defined me:

Descriptions for each game

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky - Man, I still don't get why gaming magazines gave something like this a 3/10. Sure, it has its flaws, but the characters and the story really stand out. Being able to become a pokemon was something I always thought about as a wee little kid, so for a game to offer that opportunity made me so incredibly excited. I chose Sky because of the special episodes that add so much more to the game. It really helped me to think about the things in this world that we take for granted and got me to think about what I want to do with my life, what I want to become.
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest - This one holds a special place in my heart due to nostalgic reasons, but I've recently gone back and played it; it's still an incredibly designed game that I continuously enjoy. Even after all these years, Toxic Tower gives me so much trouble :T I used to play this a lot when I went to visit my grandma as she had a SNES; the only problem was that the batteries for her games ran dry, so my brother and I would often replay this game anytime we lost our save. It helped spark my love of gaming and even my interest in programming and coding (seriously, it still baffles me how they managed to get that good of sound as well as that amazing of visuals on the SNES).
LISA the Painful RPG - Oof, this game is definitely the one where I got the most invested in the story.... only to tear out my heart at the end ;w; I don't want to go into plot details as it's best to go into this game knowing as little as possible, but it lives up to its name. I have never been that invested in a story within a video game before, and I doubt if I ever will again. I highly recommend checking this game out if you haven't yet.
Animal Crossing: New Leaf - I got this game while I was an awkward as fuck teen trying to make my way through high school. It was fun to have a little slice of life in a cheery town with cute and quirky animal neighbors and just relax for awhile. I was also able to make some awesome friends through Nintendo's actually good implementation of online. It helped me to not be so hard on myself and to take things as they come, not stressing over things that I don't need to.