Illumination
In the last week I’ve watched the entire first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender and initially this post was going to be about why you should watch it (which I’ll cover in a future post). Strange enough though, thinking about this new show (for me at least it was new) has given me a major eye-opener about myself: I had totally lost faith in the creation of good great cartoons.
Looking back, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single animated tv show since high school (six years ago), casually dismissing all series without even trying them. During that time I did consider myself an animation lover, but just believed that nothing that was produced now could ever reach the standards of previous shows. I did keep watching animated films, but subconsciously just disregarded new animated tv series. I’m really only fully realizing that now and I’m still in shock by it; how could I not watch potentially addictive material?
I guess I do understand where this in part comes from. In the years before I stopped watching, you couldn’t exactly say that the quality of the then-new shows were any good. On the other hand, it could also have been that only bad ones were being shown on Dutch television (if that was the case, why the hell didn’t they broadcast any good stuff?). Or alternatively, that my standards were just way too high. No matter the reason, somewhere along the way I started believing that all new cartoons were bad and that from that moment on only bad cartoons would be created.
What was I thinking?! How could I ever be so halfwitted to even think there would never be a good animated tv show ever again? I’m still amazed, baffled, flabbergasted that my mind (no, scrap that, I shouldn’t be giving my mind the blame) that I could ever believe such a thing. And yet, it is true. I’ve lived under this weird illogical delusion. Me, someone that prizes herself for being a logical person. It’s as if never reading another book in your life again, just because you read a couple of bad books, even though you read hundreds of great books before that. It’s a fallacy, an utterly faulty reasoning, a down-to-the-core wrong deduction.
I’m still in shock. I just can’t believe it. It’s not about Avatar. It’s not about not watching cartoons. It’s about realizing that there’s this weird little part of my mind that’s been influencing my choices in life (even though it’s something as simple as tv-watching) based on a reason that is so out of sync with the rest of me. It just feels so very, very weird.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but then I’m writing this in the wake of my illumination. And very late at night, after 2 days of sleep deprivation. Yeah, not the perfect time to blog, I know. But I know that for me this has just been a revelation and my mind it still trying to cope with it. Hey, blogging is supposed to be therapeutic, right?
