Hiya! Your intro says you like media analysis so I was wondering - watched/read/listened to/etc anything good lately? And/or got any recommendations? (OOC: this is freeform, answer it however floats your boat! Or if it doesn't float your boat, absolutely no worries, you can delete it! /gen)
Since the delcatty's out of the bag, I guess I can be more open about how Plasma affected me. Since I was taken in so young, I didn't have much opportunity to learn how to think for myself, and I struggled with bodily awareness and identifying my own emotions. But... stories helped me realize how to feel again. I would use warrior skitty comparisons to try and contextualize my own feelings at first, but it wasn't enough.
Media analysis started as a project my therapist gave me, since I was getting frustrated with my inability to identify my own emotions, and our sessions were sort of hitting a plateau. Which is to say, they asked me how my day was, I yelled that I didn't know and started crying, and I'd spend the rest of the session on the couch snuggling my therapist's vulpix. (Baby Fluff was not very emotionally stable lol)
So I started looking for stories. I got a bit into vocaloid-- a couple favorites of mine are the medical anomaly, rolling girl, irony, yellow, and good kid medicine. It gave me words for what I was feeling, proof I wasn't the only one to feel these things. Suddenly I wasn't alone, I wasn't crazy or exaggerating, I had songs that spoke to me. Someone else out there knew what I was feeling and said it better than I could.
Hatsune Miku got me through some rough times, y'know? And the warrior skitty AMVs-- gods, that made up the rest of my music taste. I was never very good at art, except maybe in trying to copy the anatomy drawings because I was bored, but there were incredibly talented people out there. They told brand new stories, or put a twist on existing ones. I never knew there were so many stories out there!
And then there was anime. I couldn't handle anything with fanservice-- bear in mind at that point, I hadn't yet had The Talk, I just knew it made me uncomfortable. So I mostly watched kid's shows, and there was one magical girl show that looked cute.
It was, ah. Madoka Magica, if you're familiar with it. But the grief and hopelessness, the way the girls try to cope with pain and being fundamentally unsuited for something, the loneliness... and later, it's revealed that one character, who actually looked a lot like me before I cut my hair, had a heart condition and low self-esteem. She felt useless, she...destroyed herself for a chance to save someone who was kind to her. And then the bittersweet ending-- that the world can have love and hope even if it sucks. It made me think... maybe it was okay for me to live. It gave me a lot to think about, and holds a special place in my heart to this day.
I started making progress in therapy again. I'd walk in and say something like, "I think Mami Tomoe probably has a lot of guilt because she survived and her parents didn't" and somehow the conversation would turn to the fact that I wasn't taking painkillers like I was supposed to. And maybe it was because I felt like I didn't deserve it.
Just the weak herbal stuff back then, mind you, because ibuprofen scared the shit out of me, but... sometimes I would talk about a character and realize I was seeing myself through them, talking about myself through them, and I finally had a voice. They gave me a voice. So I want to help their stories be understood in return.