Projection · 2:29pm Nov 1st, 2022
I wonder if anyone here notices themselves projecting a lot onto characters. For me, as a younger teenager, I definitely found myself getting lost in literary universes, notably The School for Good and Evil. It felt comforting to have this perfect yet nonsensical high school world, where somehow people would get an education in magic, evil, and witchcraft rather than practical skills like math and science. I found myself getting lost in a different book series at the time called the Lunar Chronicles, but alas I found those books and that series hard to get through because of the content.
I found myself projecting onto cartoons a lot, but when I get older and older, it becomes harder to do so. Like when I was younger, I could sort of find myself getting lost into the Ever After High series as a perfect world where the only conflicts were so nonsensical that I hardly found the difficulties of my personal life slipping into it. As I get older though, it becomes frustrating balancing the struggle between finding escapism in what is meant to be a perfectly marketable and overly saccharine world, and just getting lost in some of the shallowness of the plot and characters.
Truth be told, among all book series and among all TV series even more so, I find that cartoons and that shows I enjoyed as a child seem to really be the only escape from the heavier topics on TV. Hell, I can't even get through one TV episode or one movie without running into a trigger. I can escape having these mental health triggers present if I stick to old tried and true tv shows and book series, but then it just feels like falling down a saccharine trap where everything and every plot is so much more overdone and exhausting to watch. Way more so than I remembered as a kid, though I might be moody enough from this constant bouncing around to soften my tone a little bit here.
Whatever, there are just random thoughts I have had about cartoons and childhood shows for now, especially when "safe" series for me such as My Little Pony, Equestria Girls, and the Equestria Girls movies felt like a safe way to escape the harsher realities of high school and life into a perfectly saccharine, and overdone cinematic universe.
~Hugs~