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Apr. 10th, 2021 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfJust rambled a bit (in a comment) about what, recently, I've gotten obsesssive about and what I haven't, and you know what? Even after twenty-odd years of observing and analysing this in myself, I still can't say what the common factors are in all of the things that got me intensely interested in my life. It's strange. There is no one theme, no one character type or ship, no one genre, no kink, not even a physical type (and sexual attraction is really only present in a fraction of these, anyway)... There's a certain cluster of themes I tend to be interested in, some characters I like tend to have *some* traits in common, but really, nothing reliably predicts obsession. The only universally common factor, "angst", is so general that it's practically useless as a distinguishing characteristic. It's also present in a zillion texts I've consumed and *not* gotten obsessively interested in. And it comes in so many different shapes, even in the texts I'm interested in, that I'm not even sure you can say it's a commonality between all of them.
Things, texts, characters, and people I've been strongly obsessive about, somewhat chronologically, over the past 31 years, a by no means exhaustive list:
Twin Peaks (Cooper)
Lord of the Rings (Frodo; Frodo and Sam; Frodo, Sam and Rosie; hobbit members of the Fellowship in general)
Highlander (Methos)
Deep Space Nine (almost everybody had stuff going on, there, that I was deeply interested in. Also, group dynamics & politics.)
Farscape (John Crichton, most strongly, but also very much the whole Moya family)
Remus & Sirius of Harry Potter (never interested in the books or the world of the books, in particular, just these two, mostly as fanon had them, ca. 2002/2003)
Life on Mars (Sam)
Hellblazer (John Constantine)
Doctor Who (the Doctor, esp. Nine and Twelve)
Radiohead (Thom Yorke but also the whole band and its collective dynamics - and let me tell you, this entire thing threw me for a loop, because I don't get obsessive about people, only stories, or so I thought. But of course the media image of real people *is* a story.)
Terra Ignota (Mycroft, I guess? But entirely in a "wtf" kind of way. Yeuch.)
The Laundry series (Bob; also Bob & Mo)
Donjon (Herbert & Marvin)
Steven Universe (mostly Steven, I guess, but really the whole family dynamic there. But Steven is the nexus of that, of course.)
Foreigner series (Bren)
12 Monkeys (show, not movie, though I loved the movie. Ramse; Ramse & Cole; Cole; also absolutely everybody and their twisted conscience and even more twisted, shifting relationships)
There's some things that crop up a lot here, like trauma, like mass murder, like falls from grace, like discrepancies between internal identity and external presentation and perception... but none of these can be generalised.
Things, texts, characters, and people I've been strongly obsessive about, somewhat chronologically, over the past 31 years, a by no means exhaustive list:
Twin Peaks (Cooper)
Lord of the Rings (Frodo; Frodo and Sam; Frodo, Sam and Rosie; hobbit members of the Fellowship in general)
Highlander (Methos)
Deep Space Nine (almost everybody had stuff going on, there, that I was deeply interested in. Also, group dynamics & politics.)
Farscape (John Crichton, most strongly, but also very much the whole Moya family)
Remus & Sirius of Harry Potter (never interested in the books or the world of the books, in particular, just these two, mostly as fanon had them, ca. 2002/2003)
Life on Mars (Sam)
Hellblazer (John Constantine)
Doctor Who (the Doctor, esp. Nine and Twelve)
Radiohead (Thom Yorke but also the whole band and its collective dynamics - and let me tell you, this entire thing threw me for a loop, because I don't get obsessive about people, only stories, or so I thought. But of course the media image of real people *is* a story.)
Terra Ignota (Mycroft, I guess? But entirely in a "wtf" kind of way. Yeuch.)
The Laundry series (Bob; also Bob & Mo)
Donjon (Herbert & Marvin)
Steven Universe (mostly Steven, I guess, but really the whole family dynamic there. But Steven is the nexus of that, of course.)
Foreigner series (Bren)
12 Monkeys (show, not movie, though I loved the movie. Ramse; Ramse & Cole; Cole; also absolutely everybody and their twisted conscience and even more twisted, shifting relationships)
There's some things that crop up a lot here, like trauma, like mass murder, like falls from grace, like discrepancies between internal identity and external presentation and perception... but none of these can be generalised.
