Infecting with love for franchises

[MetalSkulkBane]

Recently I looked back on franchises I like and noticed a pattern. It often involved someone sparking my interest

TMNT Entity is a blog about Ninja Turtles. Mirage TMNT was something I heard about, but never considered checking. This blog gave me reading order, summaries for issues I couldn't find, and reviews from some deeply invested, which helped me appreciated those old things. Same with Archie TMNT, 80s cartoons and to lesser degree later versions.

SomeCallMeJohnny is nowhere near as good as I used to thing, but from his Sonic review I jumped to Metroid and Castlevania and decide to check them.

CellSpex convinced to check animated movies beyond Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. Interestingly sometimes I don't like a movie, but like to hear her review anyway.

B-Mask makes videos about pretty much everything, from movies to board games and I can't thank him enough to convince me to check Venture Bros.

And recently  Super Eyepatch Wolf finally broke my fear of manga and anime. His passions for shows he talks about is just... well, infectious.

 

 

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar experiences and have recommendations to share.

[batson]

With me I don't think it's that common that one single person or source sparks my interest in a new franchise enough for me to try it. It's usually more that I've heard about a certain work or series over and over again (perhapes because it is/was a popular or influential part of the medium or genre it belongs to, thus it gets brought up frequently) untill I'm interested enough to research it, which sometimes is in turn enough to get me to actually seek out and experience the original work. But the thing about me is that it's extremely rare for me to develop a truly pashionate interest in a franchise that I'm not already familiar with since childhood or early teenhood. I'm not saying that this is a good trait, but that's just how I am. I love reading about popular culture, everything from books to movies to video games, but to actually take the time to read those books or watch those movies or play those games is a different matter. As a result of this, I am for instance very knowledgable about the history of video games, but I've only played a small amount of the games that I know so much about.

When it comes to franchises that I've become a big fan of at some point during the past 10 years, the only one I can really think of is One Punch Man, and maybe to a lesser extent My Hero Academia. For the most part I just keep obsessing over my age old favorite franchises like Sonic, Mario, The Simpsons, Jurassic Park and Ghostbusters.

[Ricochet]

Back to early 2008, Meristation, a spanish gaming website, used to host a blogosphere called gamefilia. Pretty chill community that thrived into an ample catalogue of blogs dedicated to several game genres and themes. Gamefilia was my first experience proactively participating on an online community, We used to write blog collabs and everything, It was asewome. 

Most blogs were mostly about mainstream console games, but also there was a nifty niche blog about indies and crpgs that introduced me to awesome games such as Cave Story and IJI. Gamefilia isn't a thing anymore, but me and the blog's author are great friends today.