Time Killer and Random Stuff - Kidhood

[shipperx]

angearia made the suggestion that I do the Narrative Likes/Dislikes meme, the only problem being that I don't know how to do it. I'm not sure what they are. I know I have narrative preferences, but I'm not always conscious of it.

However, a few years ago I sussed out that I have 'thing' for fate vs. free will when doing some meme about recurring themes in our own fanfic. I realized that though the fanfics I had written were in different fandoms and had different plot lines, they each had pivoted on a questions of free will... usually by playing with something that looked a heck of a lot like 'fate'.

So maybe the way for me to discover the answer to the meme is to look at the stories I've followed and liked. Since it's already quite late, what I'm posting is limited to my kidhood...

As a small child my eclectic viewing habits ranged from:
Scooby-Doo
to Land of the Lost
to Thundar the Barbarian (Looking at that YouTube clip, it seems to me that Dr. Who stole a Thundar villain! And LOL at the youtube clip "In the year 1994 comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the moon and earth unleashing cosmic destruction. Man's civilization is cast in ruin. 2000 years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old, a world of savagery, superscience, and sorcery..." LOL!

Ooh! Does anyone remember Space 1999? I watched that too.

to Little House on the Prairie (considering the others, I'm not sure what that's doing in there. Maybe it fits with watching the afternoon reruns of The Big Valley, which was sort of a Bonanza, except it had women that didn't die... as long as the women in question were Victoria or Audra Barkley )

to afternoon re-runs of Bewitched and TOS Star Trek

and (precosciously) to a couple of soap operas (I think it was a combo of having a sister who is nearly 13 years older than myself to my being a latch-key kid with a baby-sitter watching them). I remember General Hospital's Luke and Laura's 'summer on the run' with their "mystery of the left-handed boy" (It was a statue... filled with gold... and had a hitman in drag...heh) followed by their island adventure leading to the apocalyptic Ice Princess (the Ice Princess was a crystal that had the ability to freeze the world LOL! When I was eight, that stuff was riveting!) L&L did this alongside international (Aussie) man of mystery, Robert Scorpio (Scorpio, my kid-self was in love you!... at least until I fell in love with Pierce Brosnan's Remington Steele). )

And then there was the aforementioned Remington Steele (Show into: Try this for a deep, dark secret. The great detective, Remington Steele? He doesn't exist. I invented him. I always loved excitement, so I studied and apprenticed and put my name on an office. But absolutely no one knocked down my door. A female private investigator seemed so... feminine. So I invented a superior, a decidedly masculine superior, and suddenly there were cases around the block. It was working like a charm... until the day he walked in, with his blue eyes and mysterious past, and before I knew what was happening, he had assumed Remington Steele's identity. So now I do the work and he takes the bows. It's a dangerous way to live, but as long as people buy it... I can get the job done.)

I also watched Heaven Can Wait an excessive number of times on HBO

Tossed into that mix was a smattering of female superheroes such as
Lindsey Wagner's Bionic Woman
Linda Carter's Wonder Woman
and (heh) Oh Mighty Isis (LOL! By day she was an archeology teacher, but if she put on an ancient Egyptian mystic amulet she would become... the Mighty Isis!)

Meanwhile, I was an absolute addict for Trixie Belden Mysteries (I was never a Nancy Drew girl), a middle-class farm girl (with rich friends) who somehow stumbled into mysteries and orphaned runaways at a near constant rate. She lost me a little by the time she was investigating Sasquatch and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

Also (like many a kid) I was sucked into Narnia (as in reading the books).

After that I moved on to Madeleine Brent (which was a pseudonym for a male author but I didn't learn that until a couple of years ago when out in fit of nostalgia a re-ordered one of the books).

I adored his/her's Merlin's Keep (An mysterious orphan found in the Tibetan Himalayas is later sent to Victorian England, and eventually she makes her way back to Tibet and eventually falls for a British Officer who is stationed in... Tibet? (I probably need to read this again. I did get an old copy from Amazon).

And Moonraker's Bride about an orphaned missionary's child growing up in China during the Boxer Rebellion... which I have to say in more recent years has mentally often played the counter-part to the BtVS and AtS episodes of "Fool for Love" and... was it "Darla" or "Dear Boy" that was the companion episode?

So, I don't know. What does that say so far? That I watched too much TV?

That I was a sucker for high concept stuff virtually from the cradle?

That I have a penchant for bickering/bantering couples solving improbable mysteries (actually, I know I'm a sucker for that. So I guess that definitely goes into a 'like' column). And even as a kid had a thing for men with foreign accents?

That if there's a ghost involved, I'm going to assume that it's a stupid guy in a mask, but lizard men and Tyrannosaurs are scary!

And that while I have a perverse enjoyment of post-apocalyptic stuff (This is true), I'm also highly tolerant of wholesome all the way to the downright sacchrine.

And it's now excessively late, so maybe I'll do teen and adulthood another time. (Actually reading through this stuff, kidhood clearly imprinted on me because my tastes haven't strayed all that far afield...)