Your Biggest Inspirations

[OutlawTorn]

We all have them. People, places, events, music, movies, comics, games, characters, poems, novels, or general stuff like nature, science, there are a lot of possibilities for sources of inspiration in this universe. They've made and make us who we are, what we've been, and who we are yet to become.

I don't like getting too deep out of character, but I feel the subject has been made clear.

What are the things that have inspired you the most?

POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT
BEYOND THIS POINT

I ask that if you're about to discuss events/characters from novels, games, comics, TV, movies, etc, that you:

Bold The Name
Before the beginning of the paragraph, so no one Finds out the guy dies an it's all a dream! ^_^

Thanks!




My grandfather was my biggest and oldest inspiration. With my mother leaving my father when I was 4, he replaced my dad as a father figure. He instilled core values in me from the old world. He was a coal miner from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Born in 1927, things weren't easy. He slaved in the deep, dark, perilous under the Atlantic coast for 37 years to buy land, build a home, and raise a family. He died of Dimensia in 2004.

ABC's Lost
Not Spoiling shit. I HIGHLY reccomend this series to everyone, unless you watched it all, can keep up with me in a convo about it, and still didn't like it. This is one of the most beautiful, intelligent, powerful stories ever written period. A huge cast of diverse, well-played, exceptional characters with a convoluted, genius storyline. You owe it to yourself to pick away at all 6 seasons of this masterpiece. The finale had me in shambles; nose running like q fosit, pounding headache, eyes like I just smoked a pound of grass. And that's saying A LOT coming from me. I only cry when kids and dogs are involved.

Squaresoft's Xenogears
You've probably all heard me rant enough about Xenogears by now. You get the picture.

Alexander The Great
Guy fascinated me. You're looking at a stratagem guru, not to toot my own horn. I'll challenge anyone here to a game of anything from Chess to Risk. (Risk Master. I once took 4 boys in a game of domination starting with only Japan and 25 men)

Vintage Squaresoft Games (as a whole)
Not even just Square games, but particularly Square games. That entire SNES/Playstation era was my childhood/early teenhood. Those games took me into amazing worlds with powerful, captivating storylines that haven't been available via gaming since. They had a special, rare and one of a kind style of storytelling. They weren't out to make a blueprint story hitting all the right conventional marks to make their money and move on to the next cash in. The mastered, furthermore perfected storytelling.

Film (in general)
Movies are my thing, as much as I love classic games. Cinema has moved, inspired me, and changed me as a person in so many ways big and small (Lost included, TV is a form of film), that I can't even begin to explain or break it down, that's *why it's last instead of second.

[Rowan]

Neon genesis evangellion: Anything that explores philisophical ideas (especially when they are expressed through the perception of young minds, as often they are but totally and utterly ignored in reality), inspires me to question the things we are never really taught about, nor even discussed in common place. Pondering your own existence without the shallow explanations of a 'god' thats just there because it is if you have faith *shudders*, allows us to accept and explore many ideas which otherwise are never talked about thanks to the doctrination of the majority of the world population.

NGE in particular takes cues from many different ideas, even some from religious texts, but not necessarily expressed in the traditional sense. The strongest theme is that of existentialism. Existentialism in my view, is an idea that equates to the importance of self, in a meaningless/absurd world. The themes are strongly expressed in this anime.

I think when it comes to understanding life and what its all about from an existentialist point of view, the only answer can come from the self. So in summary, I think NGE taught me that noone else can find you your place in the world, and that its important to value yourself, while the world may be bleak and even hopeless at times, you still exist and you most certainly have the power to control your own life.