This is a companion thread to the "current obsessions" one, only this time we can talk about what we used to be obsessed with rather than what we're currently obsessed with. I like talking about my past obsessions almost as much as I like talking about my current ones, because I enjoy the feeling of nostalgia it gives me.
When I was very small (like age 3 or 4), I loved dinosaurs. I remember having dinosaur books and plastic dinosaur toys. I also really enjoyed The Land Before Time movies.
During elementary school, I started obsessing over an animated film called Balto, about a half-wolf, half-dog hybrid who retrieves medicine in a snowstorm to save sick children. After seeing the movie, my goal in life was to be a "musher" - in other words, a sled dog racer. I wanted to live in Alaska, assemble a team of huskies/malamutes and run the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. Since Balto was half-wolf, I obsessed over wolves too. My bedroom was covered in pictures of wolves and I knew everything about them. I liked pretending to be a wolf too. Some of the other girls at school thought it was cool to like wolves so they started liking them too and they tried to play with me. But being the aspie that I am, I didn't appreciate that very much, lol.
At age 8, I obsessed over Pokemon, like many children in my generation. I literally spent hours huddled in a corner of the couch under a lamp, playing it on my Gameboy. My mom would periodically tell me to put the game down and go outside for fresh air, because she worried I would make myself sick by playing the game for so long. I wasn't interested in playing competitively with other people - I just preferred to catch and train Pokemon on my own. I think the highest-level Pokemon I trained was a level 67 Blastoise.
My interest in the Pokemon TV show led to a decade-long obsession with anime. I obsessed over specific series, often two similar series at a time (which I call "double obsessions"), and they changed every 6 months to 3 years. The series I obsessed over included:
Tenchi Muyo - I saw every season they aired on Toonami - No Need for Tenchi, Tenchi Universe and Tenchi in Tokyo.
Hamtaro - I fondly remember watching this every day at 8 AM and 5 PM during the summer of '01.
Rurouni Kenshin and Inuyasha - my first "double obsession", and one that carries great sentimental value since I shared it with someone else who was just as passionate about it as I was.
Naruto and One Piece - another "double obsession". Not too many significant memories tied to this one though.
Hellsing and Trinity Blood - another double obsession, and a critical one because it was something I obsessed over at a very lonely and turbulent time in my life. I was so afraid of transitioning from this obsession to a new one that I held on to it for 3 solid years, even after I had long lost my passion for it. These were the last anime I obsessed over before I gave up the genre entirely in favor of live-action fantasy films.
