The right media at the right age
Feb. 21st, 2021 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantTumblr is no place to have a conversation about anything, but in passing I saw tatsuuya.tumblr.com (whom I don't even know) say:, "I also like to think about media that you consumed at the Exact perfect time in your life for it." And I've been thinking about it all day.
For me:
MASH: Ages 10-15, on the couch, with my parents and my brother, in a weekly ritual that also included Coke (which we normally didn't get) and buttered popcorn. My mother was a bit worried that we were too young for the blood and the moral complexity, which made us really appreciate the blood and the moral complexity. Nobody in my family, including my veteran dad, had a word to say against the anti-war message; I was much older before I learned that there was any controversy about the concept that war was bad.
Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and Babel-17 and Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand and assorted autobiographical essays, and Mary Renault's The Persian Boy: age 16. I already knew I wasn't straight, but these books gave me a bit of the vast complexity of desire and the necessity of figuring it out for yourself, and then figuring it out for you--plus-this-particular-partner, over and over again. It was very good for me to have experienced all that in fiction before I ever got involved in a real romance.
(Also I read Dhalgren four times between ages 16 and 18 -- this is a book that the cover blurb described as "an 800-page Joycean tour de force" -- and I have to wonder whether I would have stuck with it if I had picked it up when I had more things competing for my attention. Or when I had easier access to stories with sex in them that wouldn't have made me work quite so hard.)
By the time I finally got around to seeing Buffy, long after the show ended, I was probably too old to properly appreciate it as stories. It was immediately after I read Save the Cat, though, so it was perfect timing for my education in How Plot Works.
My best friend is very firmly atheist, but when her kids were small, she worried that by not taking them to church she was depriving them of the opportunity of learning moral reasoning*. So in her household they never missed an episode of Star Trek. So you could never say those kids didn't get the chance to talk about morals, even if the conclusion they came to was that that episode's approach was kind of screwed up.
What about you? What did you see/hear/read at just the right time?
For me:
MASH: Ages 10-15, on the couch, with my parents and my brother, in a weekly ritual that also included Coke (which we normally didn't get) and buttered popcorn. My mother was a bit worried that we were too young for the blood and the moral complexity, which made us really appreciate the blood and the moral complexity. Nobody in my family, including my veteran dad, had a word to say against the anti-war message; I was much older before I learned that there was any controversy about the concept that war was bad.
Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and Babel-17 and Stars In My Pockets Like Grains of Sand and assorted autobiographical essays, and Mary Renault's The Persian Boy: age 16. I already knew I wasn't straight, but these books gave me a bit of the vast complexity of desire and the necessity of figuring it out for yourself, and then figuring it out for you--plus-this-particular-partner, over and over again. It was very good for me to have experienced all that in fiction before I ever got involved in a real romance.
(Also I read Dhalgren four times between ages 16 and 18 -- this is a book that the cover blurb described as "an 800-page Joycean tour de force" -- and I have to wonder whether I would have stuck with it if I had picked it up when I had more things competing for my attention. Or when I had easier access to stories with sex in them that wouldn't have made me work quite so hard.)
By the time I finally got around to seeing Buffy, long after the show ended, I was probably too old to properly appreciate it as stories. It was immediately after I read Save the Cat, though, so it was perfect timing for my education in How Plot Works.
My best friend is very firmly atheist, but when her kids were small, she worried that by not taking them to church she was depriving them of the opportunity of learning moral reasoning*. So in her household they never missed an episode of Star Trek. So you could never say those kids didn't get the chance to talk about morals, even if the conclusion they came to was that that episode's approach was kind of screwed up.
What about you? What did you see/hear/read at just the right time?
* Given the way most churches are, they dodged a bullet there. And I say that as a person committed to attempting to practice Christianity.