Being Cultured?
A few nights ago I was winding down doing what most in my age demographic probably do: watching pointless YouTube video essays while eating. Doing so I stumbled across this video which primarily analyzes the video game Mouthwashing. The game is about a crew in an isolated space ship with not much to do. Everything is automated and pressure builds with conflicts between the crew members. None of the doors lock, including the bed chambers for male and female crew members alike. The plot then takes multiple turns in bad directions, bad things happen, and it gets very esoterically horrifying.
The video was pretty good and I'd suggest checking it out when you have 50 minutes to burn. The game seems nice too though I didn't (and probably won't) play it. However, what really struck me was independent of the quality of either of these things.
Part way through the video the book "Men Who Hate Women" (retitled in English to "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") from the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. I really love this book series and was kind of shocked1 to see it here. It's not indie by any means with millions of ratings on Goodreads and a whole ass movie adaptation, but it's not a book I've ever seen brought up point blank before. I "found it" by buying the first novel at a thrift store because the cover was sick and the premise seemed cool. No prior recommendation or book club, it was kind of like my little literary discovery.
Seeing a book I know (and love) being brought up in a context so unpredictable for me felt therapeutic, a little empowering. It was a reference that I actually got. There's a lot of media that I don't know: TV shows, movies, books, games, etc. I'm a bit of a pop-culture hermit. It's sort-of validating, too, that my intentional goal to read more has been working. I've got my lists showing I'm obviously reading books little anecdotes like this feel really nice, too.
The kind of shock you feel seeing your 5th grade teacher at the grocery store. The motifs have tons of parallels so it isn't surprising, hell the title of the video even says "Men Who Hate Women" which I knew was the original book title, I just didn't put 2 and 2 together. Like, "holy crap, you? thing I know from A? all of a sudden you're in B? whaaaaat???"↩