Do anime fans fetishize other mediums?

IDK, I think that in my head I just interpret trying different media like traveling to a different country.

I think we might have talk past one another here, because I agree with you in that point... and in a way I was trying to say something similar.
I said Symphogear, but I'm mostly basing myself from a comment I read once about a guy that showed Ragna Crimson to some normie friends while they were all drunk and everyone had a blast: My point is that showing an anime to make the person understand why people LIKE anime, what anime has to offer, instead of trying to be a "stand-in" for something else.

Like I always mention that "when I recommend anime to newcomers, I do so under the philosophy of trying to make that person a lifelong fan, and not someone who'll watch it for three months then leave it", so in a way I would like if people from other mediums had a similar philosophy: Make me love your thing.


Beggars can't be choosers and you don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Though it's basically what I explained already: I don't wanna simply be the anime fan that watched 3 movies or watched 3 books (That were "safe for anime fans"), I want to be able o love the thing, the real thing, not merely an emulation of my anime taste.
I know that it comes "from a good place", but it feels like they're "Flanderizing" a person when people do that. Maybe that person would like movies/books that you could never imagined, maybe they'll like certain new things or genres because it's the first time they're having contact with them, etc.

Maybe I just have a weird way of thinking, but if I see someone who loves police dramas wanting to get into anime, I would likely not recommend them a police drama because I don't think they're tying to get into anime to get more of them. I would, however, give recommendations based on that person liking more "fundamental" things, such as preferring character-driven stories over plot-driven or liking in media res.

I explained more about it in this post:

TL;DR: It's like "lockpicking yourself", you try to calibrate things higher or lower until they "click".

A lot, actually.
If you want something "big", a large part of me becoming a progressive was part of a huge exercise in humility for me. I used to be arrogant towards certain people, then I start pondering "But what if I'm wrong about some things?" and opened myself to new experiences to them discover that, indeed, I was wrong about certain things, and that the new answers I discovered made my life a lot better.

If it's something smaller, I can talk to you about the last months since I went into the "weebshit identitarian persona": A couple months ago I made a thread on how hearing English anime titles or someone saying "animes" made me feel uncomfortable. I now know WHY that happens: It was a "dogwhistle" for me to find people who discuss anime the ways I like and distance myself for those who do it the ways I don't like. To find people with a certain "anime culture" that I like and distance myself from some with an anime culture that I don't like.
It also made me realize that I shouldn't participate in most culture wars, as a large part of anime exists outside of such dichotomy, and often offers "a third alternative".

It made me realize what I like in anime and why I like it, among other things.


It depends on the situation, really.
I guess what ended my tentative of trying to be a cinephile was alshu joking that he couldn't imagine me watching The Cabinet of Dr Calligari in 4K. I obviously knew it was a joke, but having someone tell you "Hey, I don't think that's for you" made me feel ashamed for not being the type of person people would assume would be into this kind of stuff, so I thought that maybe that wasn't for me after all and stopped trying.

Another situation is, because all my life I felt a sense of awe for people I see as knowledgeable or an authority on something, some of the posts of that guy in this forum with a Vash the Stampede profile picture that is an absolute bookworm made me feel the equivalent of a feeling of "emasculation", like I had somehow failed my father or something, lmao. Like thinking "Damn, if those are the powerlevels that people are operating at, then there's no way I'll ever be treated seriously instead of being seen as a kid. I'll never be respected or have people looking at me with admiration.".

The third situation was a post I made on a cinephile FB group asking for tips on how to get into cinema, and having me posting my anime 3x3s made me feel the same thing, like people would then treat me "with baby gloves".

The last in a thread I made on /tv/ asking the same thing.

The "I think it's a little too late for that if this>>208147277 (You) is you. Your post is straight out of satire lol
I would say embrace anime and don't waste your time on something to make yourself look more cultured in front of judgy people" comment broke me so much that it must have subconsciously influenced my decisions: In a way, yeah, I abandoned trying to make myself seem cultured of intellectual because it was a fool's endeavor that I would be able to achieve, and then went to the next persona seeing if that one would work.

So, for your answer: I think it's mostly my own feelings, the people likely don't care nearly as much as I think they do, but my mind has an irrational fear of having people hate me.

@thewiru

Nice, same.


I don't believe that suppressing some parts of yourself while faking/creating others is how to become a single developed person. Like you said, that's a "persona." It's not you. And only being accepted for the persona will probably make you happy in the short term but will always eventually bring up the complicated feelings you've described in one way or another. Becoming a "developed one" comes from exploring all the different aspects of yourself, how they relate to each other and integrating them, and experimenting with what to supress just sounds like various forms of self-rejection to me.


This is interesting to me. Isn't that shame completely self-imposed? Again you're chasing the status of "being a cinephile" and not being perceived as such was shameful, presumably because you were trying to appear to be so? Maybe you're right and it's for you, but if you want to become one wouldn't that necessitate progressing through the stage at which you would be assumed to not be one? Or even if you already were and people's assumptions were wrong, is that necessarily a bad thing? I've met a few people that have certain interests that I didn't expect and even assumed the opposite and found the discovery to draw me more towards that person after realizing they were more multi-faceted than I had originally thought.


This is something I struggle with as well. I believe the root is in comparison: "if this person is so much better how can I ever be good?" mentality which is 1) defeatist by nature and 2) relatively narrow-minded when you take a step back and realize the vast majority of people fall mundanely in the middle or, depending on the topic, know little to nothing. In fact just trying to learn probably puts you ahead of almost everyone, but you're so laser-focused on "the best" or "the authority" and putting yourself down for not being there that you can't see the oceans of people you've already passed.


I don't think that's the important takeaway here. You say it's a fool's endeavor and in a sense you're right, but I don't think it's for the reason you think. It's not that you wouldn't be able to seem cultured but rather doing so for people who are judgmental is a waste of effort. The last two replies in the image of your thread make the point. If you want to get into something then get into it, and draw your own conclusions. By worrying so much about what other people think (see above), you're devaluing yourself and the contribution you can make as a unique individual with your own experiences. Learning to embrace that is what authenticity is in my opinion.

I have two suggestions:
1) As others have suggested, talk to a therapist. Be aware that different therapists have different specialties and styles, and if something doesn't feel like it's working tell them and they'll either try to work with you to figure out a better approach or refer you to someone who may be more suited.
2) Self-reflection. Something happens? Write down how you feel. Read it back. Repeat. Ask yourself "where is this feeling coming from and what am I trying to tell myself." Sounds like you do some of this already.

Feel free to PM me about any of this (or anything else I guess) if you want since it's a bit off topic here.

@thewiru

Nice, same.


I don't believe that suppressing some parts of yourself while faking/creating others is how to become a single developed person. Like you said, that's a "persona." It's not you. And only being accepted for the persona will probably make you happy in the short term but will always eventually bring up the complicated feelings you've described in one way or another. Becoming a "developed one" comes from exploring all the different aspects of yourself, how they relate to each other and integrating them, and experimenting with what to supress just sounds like various forms of self-rejection to me.


This is interesting to me. Isn't that shame completely self-imposed? Again you're chasing the status of "being a cinephile" and not being perceived as such was shameful, presumably because you were trying to appear to be so? Maybe you're right and it's for you, but if you want to become one wouldn't that necessitate progressing through the stage at which you would be assumed to not be one? Or even if you already were and people's assumptions were wrong, is that necessarily a bad thing? I've met a few people that have certain interests that I didn't expect and even assumed the opposite and found the discovery to draw me more towards that person after realizing they were more multi-faceted than I had originally thought.


This is something I struggle with as well. I believe the root is in comparison: "if this person is so much better how can I ever be good?" mentality which is 1) defeatist by nature and 2) relatively narrow-minded when you take a step back and realize the vast majority of people fall mundanely in the middle or, depending on the topic, know little to nothing. In fact just trying to learn probably puts you ahead of almost everyone, but you're so laser-focused on "the best" or "the authority" and putting yourself down for not being there that you can't see the oceans of people you've already passed.


I don't think that's the important takeaway here. You say it's a fool's endeavor and in a sense you're right, but I don't think it's for the reason you think. It's not that you wouldn't be able to seem cultured but rather doing so for people who are judgmental is a waste of effort. The last two replies in the image of your thread make the point. If you want to get into something then get into it, and draw your own conclusions. By worrying so much about what other people think (see above), you're devaluing yourself and the contribution you can make as a unique individual with your own experiences. Learning to embrace that is what authenticity is in my opinion.

I have two suggestions:
1) As others have suggested, talk to a therapist. Be aware that different therapists have different specialties and styles, and if something doesn't feel like it's working tell them and they'll either try to work with you to figure out a better approach or refer you to someone who may be more suited.
2) Self-reflection. Something happens? Write down how you feel. Read it back. Repeat. Ask yourself "where is this feeling coming from and what am I trying to tell myself." Sounds like you do some of this already.

Feel free to PM me about any of this (or anything else I guess) if you want since it's a bit off topic here.

The problem is that I somewhat see myself as "a mishmash of a ton of undeveloped things", you know? And I feel that life would be easier if I was "a single developed one".
Using Twitter as an example: I'm both a progressive and a loli/shotacon. Whenever I see a nice post and see that the person blocked me, I think "Oh, if they're from this side, then they blocked me for being a loli/shotacon. If they're from that side, they blocked me for being a progressive". In the end, "being me" only ends up making all sides mad and making me end up alone.
That's why I talk about "developing personas", it's essentially making experiments for some months: "What if I suppress some traits of mine and exercise others more? Maybe I'm better off without them and I'll be a better person after that".
And I can say that "the persona I'm currently developing" is making me happier than the "intellectual persona" I was trying to develop.

In a way, I "explore personas" the same way you described how one explores new genres or medias: I give it a try and see if I like it, see if it "feels natural".
In the end, the "me" that preferred very "otaku-ish anime" felt more natural than the me that preferred "arthouse anime", and in the end that made me understand more about myself, what I feel and what I want.

I don't I failed to express myself properly here.
When I talk about "persona", I don't mean it as "I'm pretending to be someone else", but rather "I'm trying to explore certain aspects of myself by trying to pursue a certain 'ideal self' so I can know who I truly am".
For instance, last year I was a lot into intellectual video-essays and began to think "Huh, maybe that's who I am and what I'm supposed to be", so I began acting like one trying to see if it felt right or if things would "click" sometime, only to them be disappointed with myself that I couldn't be one after all after making this thread What's necessary to make an anime video-essay? and noticing that I didn't have nearly enough knowledge to make the type of stuff I wanted to make. It was that experience that I said made me "pivot" from "anime intellectual" to "2000's otaku" on what I was trying. You'll notice the difference in what I was watching around the same month.

But in a way you're also right: Me turning into a progressive was also partially that, I began researching about it, reflecting with my own thoughts and then trying to "perform it" firsthand and see how much of it "felt like I was still being me".
I would say it was a success, as it indeed bring me happiness and I do see myself as a progressive, but I also noticed that I wasn't and likely could never be a "stereotypical progressive". Granted, progressiveness is a position that allows such big disagreements within itself, but threads I made in the past such as Accidental progressivism in anime? explore my thoughts that many things that I think seem so idiosyncratic that it wasn't impossible for me to be something else.
In the end, I accepted it: I don't need to become "the stereotype" of a group, I can just assimilate into me the things that I agree (Which in this case I do still feel is most of it) and "be myself" for the rest.
The problem is that "being yourself" is harder than being "a cog in something bigger", because in the latter you always "know what to do and where to go", you know?

It's more that I'm asking myself "Is the 'evolved'/ideal version of me a cinephile? Is it the logical conclusion of what I am today?" and that such phrase seemed like "No, it doesn't seem to suit you".

Yeah, but there's is something that I call "The OnlyFans principle":
Do yo notice that every OF profile always says something like "Top 3%, top 0.8%, top 0.05%"? They're not lying, that's because maybe 95% of the website are profiles with less than 20 people paying, so they're irrelevant, only the top 5% (And I'm being VERY generous here) matters.
Like someone who is middle class in a very unequal country is better off than 80% of it, but doesn't have 1% the wealth of the top 1% of it.

Knowing more about anime than thousands of people who only saw Solo Leveling and Kimetsu no Yaiba doesn't bring me joy. Realistically speaking, 90% of the anime fandom has not seem more than 100 anime, but being in the top 10% doesn't bring me joy, because I feel that it's the top 1% what really matters, because I don't see "what I already passed" as remarkable, really, but was "the absolute minimum".



The thing is that deep inside I feel that EVERYONE is judgemental on the inside.
Not only that, but I think that part of me "internalized" that "judgement logic", as seen in Is the anime community like Dark Souls?

But that's not really the relevant part, the relevant part is that I seem to interpret it as "being able to have a profession".
The comment of "It's a little too late for you to be able to become a cinephile if that's who you are, just embrace that you're essentially a Disney adult" is the exact same, for me, as "It's a little too late for you to be able to become an engineer if that's who you are, just embrace that you're essentially a MacDonalds employee".
I feel that the the "connecting thread" in all of it seems to be that I'm not satisfied with the "current me" and I'm trying to become something that I would be proud of, that I want to become, which is why it hurts so much when I hear that many futures are simply not possible for me, and that some of the ones that are, are essentially things that I don't want to be, because I feel that I don't fit in with those who are that and I don't think that would bring me happiness.
That the type of people I usually end up liking, having good interactions and wanting to be together with are the ones closer to that top 1%, that THERE is where I'll find happiness and self-fulfillment. "If I just learn more about anime I'll be able to join the same circles as the people I look up to" (I'm using anime as an example, but it also applies to other things), meanwhile, if I don't, than most of what I learned more than "the bare minimum" would be useless, because my circle would be flooded with people who are superficial, which is the type of people I don't think I work well with. I'm essentially in a "middle-class" here: Exponentially richer than someone miserable, exponentially poorer than a billionaire.

I think that I put all this pressure in myself to be good because I feel that I must "earn my place somewhere".
In great part, me getting into anime was a bit of that: It's a hobby that allows me to distance myself from people and types of people I don't like, while getting closer to people and types of people that I do like.

BTW, that was the actual first time I thought about all of that. I guess that I make all those threads because they're "therapeutic", they help me understand more about myself.

Is it ever too late to become a Disney adult or McDonald's employee?

@SawronZXZ
BTW, if any part of my comment seems to be contradicting another part of it, always prioritize the latter part.
Some times, when answering questions, I just answer the first thing that comes to my mind, though minutes later I might reflect "Wait, do I REALLY think/feel that?". Just like with the "persona" thing, I sometimes think about many answers until I find one that FEELS right and that feels like "me".

For instance, I wrote "The thing is that deep inside I feel that EVERYONE is judgemental on the inside. Not only that, but I think that part of me "internalized" that "judgement logic.", and now I'm questioning myself "Do I REALLY feel that?".
All the paragraphs after it, however, were made with a lot of thought and reflection put into them.

I don't I failed to express myself properly here.
When I talk about "persona", I don't mean it as "I'm pretending to be someone else", but rather "I'm trying to explore certain aspects of myself by trying to pursue a certain 'ideal self' so I can know who I truly am".
For instance, last year I was a lot into intellectual video-essays and began to think "Huh, maybe that's who I am and what I'm supposed to be", so I began acting like one trying to see if it felt right or if things would "click" sometime, only to them be disappointed with myself that I couldn't be one after all after making this thread What's necessary to make an anime video-essay? and noticing that I didn't have nearly enough knowledge to make the type of stuff I wanted to make. It was that experience that I said made me "pivot" from "anime intellectual" to "2000's otaku" on what I was trying. You'll notice the difference in what I was watching around the same month.

But in a way you're also right: Me turning into a progressive was also partially that, I began researching about it, reflecting with my own thoughts and then trying to "perform it" firsthand and see how much of it "felt like I was still being me".
I would say it was a success, as it indeed bring me happiness and I do see myself as a progressive, but I also noticed that I wasn't and likely could never be a "stereotypical progressive". Granted, progressiveness is a position that allows such big disagreements within itself, but threads I made in the past such as Accidental progressivism in anime? explore my thoughts that many things that I think seem so idiosyncratic that it wasn't impossible for me to be something else.
In the end, I accepted it: I don't need to become "the stereotype" of a group, I can just assimilate into me the things that I agree (Which in this case I do still feel is most of it) and "be myself" for the rest.
The problem is that "being yourself" is harder than being "a cog in something bigger", because in the latter you always "know what to do and where to go", you know?

It's more that I'm asking myself "Is the 'evolved'/ideal version of me a cinephile? Is it the logical conclusion of what I am today?" and that such phrase seemed like "No, it doesn't seem to suit you".

Yeah, but there's is something that I call "The OnlyFans principle":
Do yo notice that every OF profile always says something like "Top 3%, top 0.8%, top 0.05%"? They're not lying, that's because maybe 95% of the website are profiles with less than 20 people paying, so they're irrelevant, only the top 5% (And I'm being VERY generous here) matters.
Like someone who is middle class in a very unequal country is better off than 80% of it, but doesn't have 1% the wealth of the top 1% of it.

Knowing more about anime than thousands of people who only saw Solo Leveling and Kimetsu no Yaiba doesn't bring me joy. Realistically speaking, 90% of the anime fandom has not seem more than 100 anime, but being in the top 10% doesn't bring me joy, because I feel that it's the top 1% what really matters, because I don't see "what I already passed" as remarkable, really, but was "the absolute minimum".



The thing is that deep inside I feel that EVERYONE is judgemental on the inside.
Not only that, but I think that part of me "internalized" that "judgement logic", as seen in Is the anime community like Dark Souls?

But that's not really the relevant part, the relevant part is that I seem to interpret it as "being able to have a profession".
The comment of "It's a little too late for you to be able to become a cinephile if that's who you are, just embrace that you're essentially a Disney adult" is the exact same, for me, as "It's a little too late for you to be able to become an engineer if that's who you are, just embrace that you're essentially a MacDonalds employee".
I feel that the the "connecting thread" in all of it seems to be that I'm not satisfied with the "current me" and I'm trying to become something that I would be proud of, that I want to become, which is why it hurts so much when I hear that many futures are simply not possible for me, and that some of the ones that are, are essentially things that I don't want to be, because I feel that I don't fit in with those who are that and I don't think that would bring me happiness.
That the type of people I usually end up liking, having good interactions and wanting to be together with are the ones closer to that top 1%, that THERE is where I'll find happiness and self-fulfillment. "If I just learn more about anime I'll be able to join the same circles as the people I look up to" (I'm using anime as an example, but it also applies to other things), meanwhile, if I don't, than most of what I learned more than "the bare minimum" would be useless, because my circle would be flooded with people who are superficial, which is the type of people I don't think I work well with. I'm essentially in a "middle-class" here: Exponentially richer than someone miserable, exponentially poorer than a billionaire.

I think that I put all this pressure in myself to be good because I feel that I must "earn my place somewhere".
In great part, me getting into anime was a bit of that: It's a hobby that allows me to distance myself from people and types of people I don't like, while getting closer to people and types of people that I do like.

BTW, that was the actual first time I thought about all of that. I guess that I make all those threads because they're "therapeutic", they help me understand more about myself.

I do, and that's part of the reason it's so difficult. Easy to walk the path others have tread before kind of thing.


What part of being in the top percentages would bring you joy? Is it the satifaction of a level of excellence in knowledge or ability or is it validation from being acknowledged as such?


It's never too late to become an engineer, my friend. But there's also nothing wrong with being a McDonald's employee if you're satisfied and happy doing that.
The "if that's who you are" part I think is what's important here.


The irony is for the upper levels of a lot of things you have to join them to get to that level. It's a lot like the "I'm terrible at this so I don't want to do it;" being terrible is the first step to improving.
Seems like the crux of the issue as I think was mentioned before in various guises may be some form of perfectionism: you want to be good enough first before you join those circles or do various things but if you want to actually reach that level you have to be willing to fail and be judged and learn, and through that process you rise. How do you become great at a sport? Practice with people better than you. You won't have as much knowledge or experience but the best way to get those is to surround yourself with those people. Humbling, and to the perfectionist terrifying, but invaluable.

I actually wonder because I thought about this myself, do you only feel this way in media/art communities? You mention it being "too late to become an engineer," what about other skills or hobbies? Take something you've always been bad at, for example. If you imagine doing that thing just for fun with other people, would you still be ashamed? Would you be willing to accept the "failure" as a condition to participate?

It's less about the percentages and more about "the people who are there".
My point with that argument is that dividing people into "percentages" is a bad metric.

Let me give you an example: In EVERY fantasy anime, the story is always about the top 1% strongest people in that world.
However, there's a catch here: Of course the number is so low when you remember that most people in that world would be farmers, non-combatants, etc. When we remove all that and focus on the groups "that do really matter", that "top 1% strongest" might become "top 50%", for instance.
It's why video views on Twitter and FB are WAY higher than on YouTube: The former counts watching three seconds of a video as a view, the latter doesn't.

Translating to my case, if we remove everyone that watched less than 100 anime (Which I'm using as an arbitrary metric to "the ones that don't matter"), then I'm likely on the top 50% (I'm assuming numbers here, don't take them too seriously). So I only see myself as having "climbed to the top 50% with my own effort", and not "climbed to the top 5%", because that first 90% doesn't matter to me.

So basically, TL;DR: Forget percentages, what I want to say is that I want to be in groups that are always talking about different anime, watched a lot of different anime and have interesting things to say about them. And it just so happens that there is a very big overlap between that and "having watched a lot of anime". When I see someone with, say, a Malice@Doll or Alien 9 profile picture, I feel a sense of "connection" with that people, like finding someone else with the same country as you in other country, get it?


Part of the point is that I really don't want to be a "McDonald's employee" because that wouldn't make me happy and I never felt I was comfortable with other McDonald's employees, while I always looked up to and enjoyed the company of enginners.

It's what I've said before: I never could befriend normies or relate to them, since my teenage years (If not my childhood years), I just couldn't coexist well with them, it was always bothersome and painful. Meanwhile I was always happy when I was next to people I considered "knowledgeable and interesting" which I found on the internet.
So basically this is all saying that I see things as "you need to do favors to others if you want them to do favors to you", so I feel that if I want to have such people as my peers and being seen as an equal to them, I must "earn" my position by also being noteworthy in something, anything. And if I can't, I'll have to go back to a life of unhappiness of having together with people I can't really relate nor connect to.
This "sense of superiority" was always a way for me to "deny them", so if such "sense of superiority" is false, then I no different from them, I would be the same as "the group I don't fit in", I would be a loser.


Maybe, I always felt I was very bad at dealing with failure/defeat.
So I would always spend a lot of time researching and preparing before doing so just to make sure things would work well and I had a lot of back-up plans.

The "engineer" thing was just an analogy.
I focus a lot in media/art because that's I have the most contact with, I don't actually know much about other things.

>what about other skills or hobbies?

I used to be very good at math during grade, middle and highschool. I actually liked math, I thought it was fun, but there wasn't much I could do with this skill, considering that advanced level math is nothing like solving math problems, and is actually something much more abstract.
Likewise, I got a degree on CompSci because I thought that coding was fun. The problem is that the coding you're expected to do in high-level jobs is nothing similar to the one I learned at college, and mostly involves using libraries.
I do have some friends that tell me that I have some very original and interesting ideas about certain subjects (A different way of thinking) and that I should probably have a blog or a YouTube channel.
And that's kinda it, really, other than knowing about anime.

>Take something you've always been bad at, for example. If you imagine doing that thing just for fun with other people, would you still be ashamed?

I don't think I would, but I would have to try it. Things are always more fun with friends, the problem is that I don't really have many, never did.



I would.

@thewiru
I get what you're saying. I don't think you need to be one of the people in the category to engage with them though.


Personally I've mostly found the people that others would typically classify as "normies" to be super boring, so I'm with you here mostly.


In this case, what constitutes a favor from them and why would do you assume a) you'd need to give something back or b) that what you could give wouldn't be meaningful or valuable as you are? Is it that you're trying to engage with snobbish people who don't take you seriously, or maybe that internalized judgment guiding you to thinking you aren't good enough? Exploring this is the kind of thing therapists are really good at in my experience.


I do this as well. I read someone say recently "it's important to balance theory with practice" and I think it's very accurate. You can read all you want about basketball but until you get out on the court you don't really know what it's like. Granted you can practice a lot alone to help the anxiety but you won't really know what you're doing until you play with someone else.


You can always do it for fun. A fun hobby can turn into work or you can keep it as a hobby. The two aren't mutually exclusive nor do they completely overlap.


There's also the possibility of meeting interesting people through trying things instead of getting people together to try a thing. But I guess that's kind of the theme of the discussion.

I also think it's great you'd be willing to fail if it meant gaining the experience. I wonder what that means for the other activities you mentioned?

Not sure if I ever told this story here, but if not, I'll tell it now:
When I was around 11-13, I talked a lot with millennials on the internet. I heard of the games they said "were the best ever made", and tried them in an emulator... it didn't go very well (Likely on the fact that my English wasn't the best at the time and that I used to be very impatient), so I got stuck in Earthbound, in Pokemon Gen 3, in Ocarina of Time, in Chrono Trigger, etc
So I began following walkthroughs, thinking that if I deviated from them one bit, I would "ruin everything".
This got so bad that after beating Chrono Trigger, I started Secret of Mana, and shortly later had to move houses and was without internet for a time, so I stopped myself from playing more since, without internet, I thought "that I would ruin my own experience".

Probably the worst instance of that was with Breath of Fire 4, where I indeed didn't engage with many of the game's mechanics and made my whole experience miserable with it (And eventually dropping the game in the last dungeon). At the same time, however, I would see videos like this and think "Wait, it's like this guy is playing a whole different game".
So at the time I developed a mentality of "I hope I can grow up to be smarter so I can enjoy those games".

Granted, a large part of my teenage years was me playing League of Legends, and I feel that the only reason I even got to Gold 2 (Let's just say that is objectively above average, you're on the top 30%, but considered bad when compared to actual good players) was because I had a guy coaching me (That further cemented the belief in me that people who are good at something just have some form of esoteric knowledge naturally. Since a lot of what he thought me was quite unorthodox and not what you would find in most generic guides out there).

I still had that mentality in 2020, when I made a thread on /v/ asking "Is Dark Souls for everyone or should I just watch lore videos on YouTube? I'm bad at videogames", of which I was answered "No game is for everyone lmao, just follow this and you'll be fine". And indeed I would then proceed to beat the entire Dark Souls trilogy, which really boosted my confidence at the time "Huh, maybe I can be good at games". I would also finally beat Breath of Fire 4 in 2023.
However, I still feel like making threads asking people what I should know before starting Daggerfall/Morrowind.


I feel that, historically, "lack of contacts" and "not knowing how to find something" were big problems of mine.
Often, not only I don't know a certain information, but I also don't know where I could find that information, nor where where I could find where I could find that information.
Even when sometimes the answer is "obvious" (From around ten years ago when a guy on the LoL forums told me "Have you tried watching YouTube videos on that match-up?" to around five years ago when I was doing poorly on a college class and someone told me "Have you tried a YouTube video-course on that subject?").
From time to time I ask my friends on FB "Does anyone know any subreddit where I could ask this / discuss that?". You'll notice that nowadays a make a ton of threads on MAL, those were all things that, before here, I had no place to really discuss or talk about. The reason that I'm finding things about myself as I speak with you is a further proof of that.

It's a problem being "the smartest person in the room" when you're not really smart enough. I'm currently having trouble with that right now but not knowing how to find a job (I thought it was something "automatic", the same way one gets into highschool or gets into college, turns out that I was wrong), the problem being that my parents don't know either (I'm telling about things like... making me do an in-person interview for the position of cashier at a super-market because they only read the "JOB INTERVIEW" part, or making me get into a telephone call for a professional course... in the state capital, because they didn't read that part either).

Around two years ago I was also thinking of building me a PC (All my life I just bought notebooks) (Also, to this day I haven't done it because I would rely in money from my parents to that, so I feel that I'll only be able to do that once I get a job). One of the reasons that made me lose months in this endeavor is that my parents would ask me "how much money is it?"... when things don't really work like that, it's the opposite: FIRST you must know how much money you're willing to spend, THEN you know which parts to buy. This essentially deadlocked me, because I couldn't ask internet people for advice for parts, because they needed to know how much I was willing to spend, and I couldn't know how much I was willing to spend because I couldn't know which parts to buy.
In order to try to solve this I had to literally put my parents in an online call with my online friends... and I still don't think they understood that fully.

@thewiru This was actually a "trap" I fell into as well, at a certain point I started using walkthroughs and guides for everything and I think it fundamentally changes the way you look at a game. "First go here, then do this" seems to be in line with a lot of your logic which I can understand and relate to. I still do this to an extent as it's useful for meta knowledge, theory and conducive to competitive play in large part, but when I thought back to when I was actually having the most fun, it was actually just fucking around having no idea what I was doing. I think, in large part due to the advent of the internet (and more recently the streaming boom) we get so goal-oriented and focused on "clearing" the game or being "good" that we miss having our own experience of something.

What the millenials (myself included) were probably telling you was that the experience they had was the best. Maybe they didn't beat it either, but they loved the art. There are games I have from 20 years ago I still haven't beaten. Maybe they understood intuitively and ended but being really good and clearing things fast and that was fun. In the case of the Souls games, I had a friend who very lovingly berated me every time I died but always made sure I thought about why it happened; it was a bit like coaching and then through my own experimentation and some minor input from others I found a way to play that both suited me and helped me succeed.

I also played a ton of Maplestory and because I knew so much about it decided to try writing a guide myself. My point is I think it's less about the success and more about the experience in general; it's as you say: for two people with different approaches it might look like a completely different game. Josh Strife Hayes speaks about this somewhat often from what I've seen. He's a student of phenomenology, the study of the experience of an event (location, sound, smell, etc) and how it relates to games (playing in grandma's living room on a crt for example) as well as the influence guides have had on the gaming space (and its followup video), I highly recommend checking it out.

There are some things which do require outside knowledge, liking building a pc in your example, but there are also a lot of things for which following a "guide" will essentially get you stuck. Sure, learning how to behave in a job interview is important, but if all you're doing is saying what a "what to say in a job interview" video, you may not be very successful anyway as these are things which require a bit of adaptation (you wouldn't write the same cover letter to a law firm as an accounting one, for example) so while you can learn from those things and you may even be successful in the interview, there are many many things that will require the flexibility and courage to try and adapt to new situations on your own.

You could argue this is the most important skill for success in the world, unfortunately most education systems and "guidance" does a great job of quashing this ability. It's the reason I teach in a very specific way: I always ask my students questions. I could easily tell them "this is how this works and you use it here," but I'll ask them "how could you use this" or "what would be useful here?" "You tried this already, what else could you do?" I believe this encourages them to adapt much better than would simply telling them the answers. It's also why I ask people a lot of questions in discussions such as this. As someone who appreciates math and engineering you may have heard this quote before:
"Knowing how will let you use it; knowing why will let you adapt it."

In the Souls games, simply asking yourself "Why did I die there?" Can be incredibly useful (even more if you record yourself). Got greedy? Didn't position well? Didn't have the mobility to dodge or the stamina to block? Backed yourself into a corner with too low health? Of course there are things like game mechanics that may require a guide to understand rather than countless hours of your own experimentation (like how poise works) and a guide is fine for those if you just need to know how to use it, but I think for most games, even if you get frustrated and put it down for a year, are more enjoyable and satisfying when you try your damndest to figure things out on your own.

Tl;dr I think guides are great, but only for what their name implies: guidance. If you use a guide or walkthrough, try to experiment wherever you can.

Also coming back to your past with those games, which part of the "experience" did you value for yourself? Presumably you played them because the people you talked to praised them, but did you ask what they liked about them? More imporantly, did you ask them what their experience was like? If you asked 5 people their favorite moment from the Dark Souls release, you'd get 5 different answers because nobody knee what they were doing and that made it unforgettable.

As for your concern of being the smartest in the room but not knowing enough, there's a very poignant quote: "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

I think I can relate to that to when I was in my single digits and played games such as RuneScape and PristonTale mostly just wondering around the world and exploring.

MapleStory might be a nice example: I likely have thousands of hours on it.
It was also one of those games that, when I was in my single digits, I mostly just wondered around the world in the Brazillian server.
I was playing a lot of it during late 2023 and early 2024, coppersan's "Zero to Hero" series at the time helped me a lot how to recall all of the game's systems and have a short of "roadmap" to myself, and I ended up lvl 263 before stopping playing due to getting burned out and other reasons (It started to become a second job).

A couple months ago, Artale, an official way to play oldschool (Pre-BB) MapleStory was released, but I ended up dropping it on the first week because, well... I ended up with the same experience as kid me: I found no guides for it at the time, so from my point of view all the veterans just seemed like "wizards" that naturally knew everything, I couldn't have fun because I didn't know what to do.

"Wizards" is the term that always comes to my mind, it did on the BoF 4 example, and it does in Daggerfall.
I mean, just compare those two experiences:



I likely have watched the first video already, but I guess a rewatch won't hurt.
Probably didn't watch the second one, though.


Here's a funny thing: At the time I had a somewhat "linear" understanding of reality and knowledge (Just like in a school you'll eventually learn cetain things when you get to certain grades).
In my childhood I once watched a cartoon that made a reference to Justin Timberlake (Which I had no idea who it was), I them asked my mother who he was, and she had no idea, and that let me confused, "How could a TV show reference something that not even my mother knew about?".
I had a "inferiority complex" in school, I thought that everyone knew stuff that I didn't, and if I ever learned something, I learned it after everyone else, be it movies, games or anything else. This eventually caused me me into late middle-school and high-school to start learning about EVERYTHING on the internet, from meme-culture, PopSci, history, politics, etc. Things were made easier now that the biggest interest of my classmates was waiting until a party in the weekend where they could drink vodka. I think it was around my first or second year of high-school where I made a reference that everyone in my internet circles would understand, but that people in my class never even heard of, that a "switch was flipped" in my head, I noticed "Wait, I know a lot more than then" and the inferiority complex became a superiority complex, and I entered my "I hate normies" phase.

So how is this related to the games? Well, when millennials talked about it, I didn't interpret that as opinions, I interpreted that as them talking about OBJECTIVE FACTS OF REALITY THAT EVERYONE AGREED. And it was hard for me not to do so, since if you googled "list of best games of all time" on the internet, ALL OF THEM would have the same games: Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time, Earthbound, etc.
What is funny, however, was that due to the people I was talking about being essentially American millennials or people that lived in big cities in Brazil, people in my class didn't know about them, they were likely playing Skyrim at that time.

Nowadays I would likely be able to beat all of them on my own (I mean, I literally did that for FF7 in 2023)... OK, maybe not Earthbound, that game gives you no clue on what to do at the start.
And that was my biggest problem: At the time I couldn't even progress enough to where those games "became good".

In a way, something similar happened when I completed Symphony of the Night in 2023: I actually dropped the game twice near the start before finally beating it. The first time was because the first boss fight was impossible for me without save states, so it left me very confused when people on the internet talked that they were some of the easiest bosses in all of gaming. Turns out that you need to grab the leather shield (Which you get from a breakable item that you could miss), and if you have that, indeed the fight is super-easy. I also dropped it because I didn't know the game had a mini-map, so traveling became a massive pain. All of that before the second boss.
Once I overcame those (Rather trivial) hurdles, I beat the entire game it was quite fun.

The main part here was me having contact with other experiences that didn't validate mine. Online you wouldn't find people having the same problems as me, they would all be talking about their nice experiences later in the game, this is what made me think "Huh, maybe I am doing something wrong".
This is different from, say, a game like Daggerfall, which has a lot of problems AND a large portion of people on the internet talking about those problems.
Or a game like Dark Souls 2, which doesn't really have that many problems, but has SO MANY PEOPLE talking about imaginary problems that most people go the opposite direction that I went with SotN: They start to think "I'm likely not doing anything wrong, it's the game's fault".

@thewiru
This is what was always fun for me in most games.

My knowledge of MapleStory is almost completely through just the experience of playing the game, getting to around level 55 on one character and 120something on a second then coming back for Reboot and going up to say 160.

This mentality is probably the reason. As my friends and I used to say at the time, "why is it called MapleStory when there's no story?" Pre-BB essentially there were 3 things to do: level grind, merch and chat. You don't need to know what to do because you can do whatever you find. Go exploring, find a cool thing. Teleport past enemies to an area way too high level for you and die. Memorize where all the Hidden Streets you find are. Basically, "just play the game."

Obviously there are ways to level fast and get powerful items, etc, but it sounds to me like you may also be falling into the "efficiency trap." You say one of the reasons you quit was that it was becoming a second job. I've quit many games because of "daily missions," limited time events, etc and let me tell you, if you're too focused on "progression," or "what to do for the best x" you won't have the mental freedom to relax and enjoy the experience.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." -Civilization Game Designer Soren Johnson

Now there are games that may require a ridiculous amount of knowledge in which to perform to your own expectations and all games will not be fit for all players nor are some of them well-designed. It depends on the game, it depends on the person. It depends on how much time and effort you're willing to put in before giving up or whether you believe doing so will be worth your time. If you want to follow a walkthrough for a Zelda game because you don't like exploring or don't want to take the time to figure out where to go next then do so (I would ask why you're playing an action adventure game with heavy exploration in that case, but still). I just believe that your experience is more memorable and enjoyable without one.

If I had to guess the reason why these people seem like "wizards" it's because by your own admission you got through most games with a guide, whereas we didn't really have guides so we were trying every button, weapon, spell, item, etc. It's a bit like boomers who don't know how computers work because they never spent time "tinkering," in a sense it's the same. It's a skill that can be developed that we developed through necessity, because some games themselves (looking at you Omega Stone, been stuck on that game for decades) are incredibly esoteric.

Someone had to have experimented with all kinds of combinations of strategies and items at their disposal before finding out the leather shield strat. If you're interested, I'd recommend watching streams of speedrunners routing a run no one's done before to see how they approach it.


Skyrim is also a great game, so I'm told.

Maybe you should? It's possible you were just bad and frustrated and it's equally possible that the goal was unintuitive. A few games I played and couldn't beat/progress were me being a stupid kid, and some of them just had incredibly obscure, how-the-hell-did-anyone-even-think-to-do-that puzzles that make no sense to me even now.


Nice. Symphony of the Night is pretty cool. I recommend Aria of Sorrow if you want to play more Castlevania.


Different audiences have different knowledge. It doesn't necessarily make one better than the other and together they know twice as much!


I understand. That is demoralizing. Were there times where you pushed through that anyway and ended up succeeding or having a good experience despite this?

Hadn't been looking at this thread so I'm aware I'm a bit late here, but anyways...



I haven't seen it but there's literally a Blade Runner anime.

I think it really is a show by show basis though, there's a lot of anime that feel uniquely Japanese and don't have real Western equivalents, I've heard multiple Japanese viewers themselves saying stuff like "these stories will bore Westerners, but are amazing for Japanese". But then you also have anime like Hero Academia that's obviously inspired by American super hero culture.

All of that said, totally agree with you on drawing parallels when getting people into anime, even if those anime aren't your typical "starters". Like I've talked about anime so much for decades now that my Mom is a bit curious in it, I know what types of movies she likes so I plan to show her stuff based on that. My Mom loves stuff like the John Wick movies, so I plan to show her anime with that same vibe and energy. These first recommendations are only someone's starting point, and I feel like it should be leave a solid impression on them, and appealing to their pre-existing preferences is an excellent way to do that. It works in other mediums as well, once got an old metal-head friend into electronica by showing them stuff inspired by metal.

Additionally, I feel like anime is so diverse that this concept of "definitive anime experience" doesn't really exist, it's like saying there's a "definitive reading/music/movie experience" -- these mediums are just far too vast for sweeping generalizations. Of course there's classics and standouts, but as long as the viewer enjoys it, any anime can be a good starter (like hell, one of my first non-kids anime was Popotan of all things, and I absolutely loved it, all of its blatant flaws included).



You have to acknowledge everyone starts somewhere, and even though they may not admit it, all those cinephiles, were once movie babies themselves. I feel with cinema, finding your niche really helps. Like I never cared for movies much for most of my life, then I started exploring low budget Japanese movies a few years ago, fell in love with them, and now have seen hundreds. I know you said somewhere else that you for whatever reason dislike being showed things curated to you, but sometimes curation is the way to go. Like when I first got into Japanese movies I asked a friend for some recommendations, and they went off of anime I like to do that. Although I personally found some of those movies not that great, they worked as a good starting point for finding more, and gave me some directors to explore, it served as a jumping off point into the medium. You also don't need to see all of these classics and stuff, like I love movies now but have seen barely any classic movies, I just stick to my borderline JAV gorefests and call it a day. Also, becoming an "authority" in something really isn't that hard, you just deeply explore whatever the niche is and consume a lot of it, and also be able to articulate ideas and concepts. Same goes for anime.



I agree with this

Artale has an issue that only 50 (Though I think they later increased that number to 60?) players can be in a single channel at the time, so you would likely not find someone in the wild. And that, for me, misses the point of playing an MMORPG: To have things happen organically.
Grinding while sharing a map with others is fun, grinding alone is not.
...meanwhile, I watch this video and the guy feels, once again repeating the term, "like a wizard".

Oh, I didn't.
It was during a time I was without internet, so I actually couldn't get a guide most of the times.
I did so for Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana and some Pokemon games, but I didn't have a guide for the rest (Which is one of the reasons I never ended up beating or playing them much), and that was around 2011-2012.
You're kind of inverting the order, though: First I got stunlocked, THEN I became dependent on guides by developing a mentality of "I'll screw everything up if I don't use them".
The games I did beat later, for instance, I did so mostly without guides (Save for completionism or reading how certain game mechanics worked).

Part of why I considered them "Wizards" was how they treated stuff that didn't seem obvious to me like it was the most obvious thing ever, it always made me think "How did you even learn that?".

Speaking about completionism, I did beat Breath of Fire 4 mainly without guides, but used them for the fishing mini-game that exists there. It was difficult even finding guides about that in specific, most of them were very old and contained unclear, incomplete and sometimes even blatantly wrong information, so I ended up learning a good part of it by myself regardless.


I played quite a bit of it some years ago, though never got very far because I would create different characters to try different builds and do a different batch of quests for each.

Don't really have any game in mind that I could try next (Other than maybe Daggerfall/Morrowind or maybe Ocarina of Time... though N64 controls are just, urgh, never could like Mario 64 because of them). I guess I should try anything except for J-RPGs, those are just WAY TOO LONG.

I did beat it later, together with Dawn of Sorrow (Aria was better, IMO), Super Metroid, Metroid Zero Mission and Metroid Fusion.

Yeah, but I didn't know that back then.
Like I said: I thought of knowledge as something "linear" at the time.

Not sure on what you mean by that.
Depending on how I interpret it, you could say Symphony of the Night, as those made me realize that I was doing some things very wrong, so it made me search further on how to do them correctly (In SotN's case, that was testing more buttons and exploring more of the map). If instead I just heard accounts of people having the same problem as me, it would result in either:

1. It being an inherent problem of the game, and therefore a lot of people must have already talked about how to "deal with it"/"work around it", so mine experience would've been the same as everyone else's.
   
2. It being an inherent problem of the game, but there being no solution to it, so my brain would likely "just shut off in trying to understand more of the game, and assume that everything that would go wrong from there further to be the game's fault".
   

Can you play the 3DS version? It controls much better, at least on 3DS. I've never tried to emulate it.

Keep in mind this is 170 hours. Haven't watched much of the video but from what I can tell he's using resources available in game and the experience of having played back then.


That's my mistake, but in either case you can look at someone doing something you think is difficult and make it look easy and call them a wizard. It works the same for any skill and in fact I would say the level of skill required to make something look easy is very high in general.


Can only speak for myself here; I learned through playing the game, bashing my head against a wall, solving problems with others and in general, practice.


Do you think it improved your experience of the game, or at least your level of competence within it?


I was referring to any games that were recommended to you for being "the best thing ever" by someone else that you got stuck on, but you did mention going back to (I assume a few of) them so I wouldn't know how long or short the list is. There are always good games out there.


Definitely agree Aria was better. Never got too far in Dawn because drawing the sigil to seal the boss was annoying. Still haven't beaten Fusion because SA-X chase sequences fill me with dread.


Right. I was just emphasizing the point.


If by "search further" you mean experiment with more of the game and not check a guide, then yes you understood my meaning.


I'd encourage you to try not to do this too much, otherwise you get the swathes of people berating Dark Souls II despite it being a decent (if janky) game.


@Shimapan-chan Can you give a few examples? I think I know what you mean but can't think of anything off the top of my head.


This is exactly what I do as well. For anyone interested in anime, my first question when asked for a recommendation is "What do you like? TV, movies, stories, etc to get an idea of where to start them off.


Completely agree. It's an art form, subject matter and a medium first and foremost which means anything the creator can imagine (for the most part) can come true. Mine was Elfen Lied.


Perfect (and hilarious) way to put it.

Hadn't been looking at this thread so I'm aware I'm a bit late here, but anyways...



I haven't seen it but there's literally a Blade Runner anime.

I think it really is a show by show basis though, there's a lot of anime that feel uniquely Japanese and don't have real Western equivalents, I've heard multiple Japanese viewers themselves saying stuff like "these stories will bore Westerners, but are amazing for Japanese". But then you also have anime like Hero Academia that's obviously inspired by American super hero culture.

All of that said, totally agree with you on drawing parallels when getting people into anime, even if those anime aren't your typical "starters". Like I've talked about anime so much for decades now that my Mom is a bit curious in it, I know what types of movies she likes so I plan to show her stuff based on that. My Mom loves stuff like the John Wick movies, so I plan to show her anime with that same vibe and energy. These first recommendations are only someone's starting point, and I feel like it should be leave a solid impression on them, and appealing to their pre-existing preferences is an excellent way to do that. It works in other mediums as well, once got an old metal-head friend into electronica by showing them stuff inspired by metal.

Additionally, I feel like anime is so diverse that this concept of "definitive anime experience" doesn't really exist, it's like saying there's a "definitive reading/music/movie experience" -- these mediums are just far too vast for sweeping generalizations. Of course there's classics and standouts, but as long as the viewer enjoys it, any anime can be a good starter (like hell, one of my first non-kids anime was Popotan of all things, and I absolutely loved it, all of its blatant flaws included).



You have to acknowledge everyone starts somewhere, and even though they may not admit it, all those cinephiles, were once movie babies themselves. I feel with cinema, finding your niche really helps. Like I never cared for movies much for most of my life, then I started exploring low budget Japanese movies a few years ago, fell in love with them, and now have seen hundreds. I know you said somewhere else that you for whatever reason dislike being showed things curated to you, but sometimes curation is the way to go. Like when I first got into Japanese movies I asked a friend for some recommendations, and they went off of anime I like to do that. Although I personally found some of those movies not that great, they worked as a good starting point for finding more, and gave me some directors to explore, it served as a jumping off point into the medium. You also don't need to see all of these classics and stuff, like I love movies now but have seen barely any classic movies, I just stick to my borderline JAV gorefests and call it a day. Also, becoming an "authority" in something really isn't that hard, you just deeply explore whatever the niche is and consume a lot of it, and also be able to articulate ideas and concepts. Same goes for anime.



I agree with this