There was a time that I tried my best to reject everything pop-culture. I refused to publicly indulge in mainstream music, movies, or TV insisting that I was from a different time. My favorite movie was Back to the Future and my favorite band, Kiss (which I’m a little embarrassed to admit). As time went on, I realized that I was isolating myself for the sake of being different. I could enjoy things, both past and present, popular and not, and use them as ways to connect with others.
In the last few years I’ve grown to embrace my geekier side. It used to be that superheroes and comic books dominated this segment of my personality. Lately, its drifted into the territory of 90’s and early 2000’s cartoons of my childhood–The Powerpuff Girls, The Animaniacs, and Kim Possible to name a few. These shows were pure entertainment when I was a kid, but in retrospect they featured some heavy themes and confronted important social issues. Kim Possible featured strong feminist figures that both reinforced and challenged what female strength looks like. While Kim embodied the archetypal heroine Shego was her own woman. Born into a family of heroes she decided to turn to the forces of evil, ambitious for power and control. Unlike other popular female villains, like Harley Quinn, Shego called the shots and was more often the mastermind than her supposed superior, Dr. Drakken.
Today, I can watch these shows through a more critical lens, acknowledging what was done well and what could have been better without looking through rose-colored lenses. They are children’s shows after all and shouldn’t necessarily be held to the same standards as shows like Game of Thrones, but I can still appreciate them for what they are and the role they played in my development.
Perhaps to others my attachment to childhood innocence, fun, and play are considered cringe-worthy given my age. That’s fine. I totally understand the resistance because I had been there myself. I personally enjoy “participatory culture” according to Jenkins because it allows individuals to engage with media in an inclusive way, building on it in ways that are nearly impossible to achieve on one’s own. I can cosplay as Shego at a convention like C2E2 and spark conversation with other fans about how underrated the character was. I learn what others value most in feminist characters like Shego and how we’ve carried those values with us since watching the show as kids.
I’ve gone through much the same transformation as you mention above, and I think that for me, it has much to do with accepting that I’m not perfect, that all the media which I consume isn’t perfect either. While I have friends who have participated in cosplay culture I have yet to, although I often watch on with great interest and curiosity. I agree that trying to hold onto what was and avoiding to embrace what could be is a difficult process, but I’m glad that you ultimately got through. I often find myself revisiting old things which I used to enjoy and thinking that they’re ‘cringe,’ but then I think about how much joy they used to bring me and try and apply your mindset to it. I can talk about them critically and think about how they could have been more soundly written, but that doesn’t detract from the joy that they used to bring me when I was younger.