u/Narrow-Ad2056

This is a slightly strange experiment I've wanted to try for a while.

I'm not looking for someone who simply likes the same movies/games/music I do. That's easy. I'm looking for someone for whom a weirdly specific combination of things means roughly the same things.

Basically: how far can two strangers' internal cultural mythology overlap before it gets creepy?

So here's mine:

• Harry Potter is home. Not “a franchise I like.” Home.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a photograph of the happiest period of my life: geek culture, weird people, clumsy dramas, your own little tribe, and the feeling that life is only just beginning.
• Twin Peaks is my ideal small town. Cozy, ridiculous, beautiful, everyone knows everyone, and everyone keeps some darkness inside.
• Peter Jackson's LOTR is still the greatest achievement in cinema for me.
• Zelda is what the word adventure means.
• Book Geralt is basically my model of masculinity: say less, understand more, let actions do the talking.
• Everything Is Illuminated is my favorite book. Nothing else by Foer hit me remotely as hard.
• Panic! at the Disco is the closest I've found to a band with literally no song I want to skip. Scissor Sisters and Electric Six came close.
• Mulgore / Thunder Bluff feels like a place I have actually been homesick for.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on PC, Diablo II and WoW aren't favorite games. They're pieces of my childhood.
• A rusty old bus can be genuinely more beautiful to me than an expensive new car.
• I love worlds built by people who are already gone: ruins, obsolete infrastructure, buildings nobody quite knows how to maintain anymore, new life awkwardly growing through the remains.
• The most beautiful point in an apocalypse isn't the apocalypse. It's 20 years later, when people are simply living among what remains.
• I would rather preserve an old building's scars than restore it until it looks new.
• Lynch feels liberating to me. Donnie Darko / The Fountain / Kojima often feel like someone really wants me to notice how deep they are.
• I will forgive an artist almost anything if I can feel: “I made it this way because this is how I see it.”
• A sincere disaster can be more lovable than a focus-tested success. I have genuine affection for The Room.
• I don't care if something I love becomes mainstream. I care whether I had to do some work as a viewer/player to make it mine.
• Discovering “HOLY SHIT, THAT'S WHY THIS THING WAS HERE THE WHOLE TIME” in a game is more satisfying than beating a brutally difficult boss.
• Dale Cooper, Ichiban Kasuga, Samwise Gamgee and Ted Lasso are my kind of good people: they don't preach goodness or try to fix everyone. They just do what they believe is right.
• Karlach is Karlach. If you know, you know.
• Yennefer and Morrigan appeal to me for almost the opposite reason: earning the trust to see the vulnerable person underneath the armor.
• Morticia/Gomez, Monica/Chandler, Shrek/Fiona are great love stories. Love should involve actually enjoying the other person's existence.
• Mia and Sebastian are also a great love story precisely because letting go can be the right ending.
• Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker is the gold standard of comedy.
• Monty Python, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Dara Ó Briain and incredibly wierd memes can all make me laugh for essentially the same reason.
• Vulgarity can be beautiful when it knows exactly what it's doing. “Tits/farts/shit = comedy” does nothing for me.
• Conventional physical perfection is boring. A big nose, big teeth, a belly, unusual proportions, whatever — distinctive features can make someone more beautiful.
• Sexuality is most attractive to me when it feels natural, physical, confident and completely unashamed rather than polished into perfection.
• A small town whose entire map I can remember feels more like home than an endless city ever could.
• The old internet felt like places you visited: ICQ, forums, TeamSpeak, your ISP's local network, hunting for patches/cracks/fixes, burning CDs.
• I miss seeing a meme when it was actually new.
• CD-R Verbatim is somehow an emotional object.
• So are VHS noise, rugs on walls, cheap printed shop signs, artificial Christmas trees and the smell of food that's been sitting on a holiday table for hours.
• JeremySoule, Jesper Kyd, Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne and Gorillaz can function as involuntary time travel.
• And yes, AMV Hell 4 is a legitimate cultural landmark to me.

There are many more, but you get the idea.

I'm not interested in “wow, I like LOTR and Zelda too.”

I'm interested in the moment where someone gets halfway through this and thinks:

“Wait. Why does this stranger assign the same meanings to things that I do?”

If that happened, tell me which 5–10 points hit the hardest.

More importantly, tell me 3 things here you strongly disagree with.

I'm genuinely curious whether my cultural doppelgänger is somewhere on this website.