CultureQ #3 : Which Stories Impacted You?

Cross Culture is getting fired up. We have more and more posts each week, and it already feels as if we never left.

There’s a really amazing (or terrifying) personal story I wanted to share today but I will hold off so I can introduce the new Cross Culture topic for the week!

Just a reminder, the new format is simple:

• I present a question or prompt through my personal account, and give my submission in the same post.

• You are free to read both the prompt and my response or just the prompt.

• You post a response in the cross culture community.

• We vote submissions at a % based on their quality and try to support all decent submissions to some extent.

• No curation posts, no community account, no bureaucracy, no complex reward distribution, just a prompt with some support around it.

• No rules other than use common sense

• Answers we suspect of being generated by AI will be ignored. If you use AI to translate to English, please leave your original text in your language at the bottom.

• Honesty, passion, effort and interaction are what we look for. Be yourself.

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Here is this weeks topic:

What are some stories (films, books, media, folklore) that influenced you the most growing up?

This can come from your own country or another country, the important thing is that it had an impact on you. It can be a modern story or an ancient story. We tend to tie place older stories to our ideas of culture but new stories are just as, if not more relevent at times. And stories from another country can influence a society as much as local stories can.

Stories have a huge influence on us, shaping the way we see the world, and so talking about the stories that shape us can help us understand the world better.

Share whichever filled you with the most emotions or stayed in your kind the most as a child or as a young adult.

If possible tell us what kind of influence that story had on you and how you became who you are today, how it shaped how you see the world, or what was most memorable about it.

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My Submission
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I was always a little bit odd, not so much that I stood out and not so much that I couldn’t pass as being normal, but I was always curious about the world outside of my little bubble.

Most of my classmates found their favorite series from what everyone at school was talking about that. For a time I was no different, I had every single Goosebumps novel at some point, and some of my first full sized novels were Star Wars stories.

Eventually I wanted to know what else was out there so i would spend a lot of time browsing the book store, treating it exactly as a library and digging for treasure.

I loved sci-fi most because it was exciting to imagine what the future might look like and ehat might be out there in the galaxy, and while I was still young enough to be browsing the kids section, I picked up a book called Animorphs #1 The Invasion, and for the next 3 years of my life Animorphs was a secret I kept from everyone other than my parents.

It wasn’t any cheesier than what other kids were reading, but I didn’t want to be intergated or teased and I had no idea how other students would react to these books. Would they call me an alien?

The story follows 5 kids who discover that the human race has been infested with a parasitic species called the Yeerk who are slowly trying to take over the world so they can use the entite population of earth as slaves. This information is imparted on them by an Andalite (basically a blue centaur with scorpion tales and extra eyes on stalks above their head), a species fighting the Yeerks. Along with it, he uses Andalite technology to give them the power to morph into any living being they touch.

The story progresses through 50 something books and a few spin offs as they morph into various animals and eventually aliens in order to infiltrate the Yeerks bases and turn the tides on a nearly hopeless battle, being that they are the only uninfested humans who know about the Yeerks, and as the Yeerks have taken over politicians and business leaders, telling the world would likely accomplosh nothing but their own downfall.

Recently I started rereading the series and realized just what a massive impact it had on me as a kid. Of course certain proclivities were always there: an attraction to the mystery of the unknown, but this series nurtured it when nothing else was, long enough for me to discover the Ender’s Game series, Dune and Final Fantasy.

The most striking thing about the series was the way the POV of animals were written. The writers (a married couple with the wife leading) did their best to portray the animals as realistically as possible.

It forced the reader to consider having senses that work differently, having different kinds of hormones and insticts. It allowed you to see into the mind of not only predator and prey but different varieties of each.

And as the story progressed, you were allowed to see into the minds of sentient creatures from other worlds, from tree dwelling lizard people to blood thirsty monsters to the parasiting Yeerk themselves.

At one point a Yeerk forces the Animorphs to wuestion whether it’s imoral for them to want to experience 5 senses and travel the stars when their life before was blindly seimmong around in thick lead colored water. We eat cows and pigs, so why is it wrong for the Yeerks to infest us.

The aeries never seems to imply that the Yeerks are in the right (at least not up until book 36 which is where I left off when I went to hogh school and got busy with other things), but it certainly has you questioning whether or not widely accepted human behavior is truly moral or just self justification.

At the heart of it, as stated in interviews, the story is about war and the moral complexities that surround it, but it’s done in a way that introduces these ideas to children in a very responsible way, not forcing anything down the readers throat but guiding them to have more empathy to all living things but also not feeling guilty about the need to survive when threatened, and helping us question how we can better co-exist with others

I don’t think there are many people out there who realize what a true gem this series was and I am only just starting to see how prfoundly it impact me as a child. If you ever readthe series please make it to book 19, that was a turning point for me and probably the most memorable of the 36 books I read.

I hope to finish this series next year, two decades late but better late than never!

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My work:

Check out “Sun Shone Blue” EP on music streaming platforms and “Confessions of the Damaged 1.1 +1.2” on audiobook or ebook services!

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