Music: Pulse from Cave Story (Remastered)
It's a weird thing, having vastly different interests than your friends. At least as far as my own friend group is concerned. It's the small things, really: mostly just what kind of games, music, and shows we like. I've known these people for a while so I'll still hang out w em no matter what but like,,, at least in terms of videos game, they were always into more competitive stuff than I was (they still are, more power to 'em). Y'know, your League of Legends, your Valorant, your CS:GO, etc etc. Me though, I'm not really the biggest fan of those. Number one, cuz League is League-- but usually, taking these games more seriously only resulted in people getting angry. I wasn't really all that great at those types of games, but it's not like I was horrible (at least, I think). Most of the time, I'd recognize what I did wrong, so they didn't really yell at me. It just felt like watching your parents argue. Not a great feeling when you're playing games to have fun.
Still, when I'd play these games with my friends, usually cuz I couldn't convince them to play anything else, I'd find a character that seemed cool, or that I personally liked, and I'd stick with only that character until the end of time (actually I only really did that with Valorant and Brawlhalla. CSGO doesn't really have characters, so I latched on to the Nova, a funny shotgun. I never played League). Still, I'd try and make my own fun with it, in a way, and it was nice to only have to practice one character.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. At any rate, I've always been more of a fan of singleplayer games (as a holdover from my childhood, where I'd often have hardly anyone to play games with at home). As for multiplayer, I've always been drawn to co-op experiences, or just straight-up silly games with low stakes (think Lethal Company, Stick Fight, Bopl Battle, or any multplayer game or mod where you go through the campaign together). I often try to find new games regularly, either to experience new stories or to prevent games from becoming stale. To top things off, I've always gravitated towards either platformers, or RPGs with interesting stories or fun real-time mechanics (best example I can think of being The World Ends With You and its sequel). It's very nice, being able to find overlooked, high-quality indie games, and I've found a few of them! Unfortunately I can't exactly share these experiences with others without feeling like I'm badgering my friends with something they don't care about. Especially with Friday Night Funkin'. My friends do not like Friday Night Funkin'.
of course, there are other friends in other friend groups who DO share some of these interests, and are open to me gushing about new ones! In fact, at one point I made a pact with a friend group to play every mainline Hyperdimension Neptunia game (an increasingly fanservice-y, campy game series about anime girls who represent major game companies. It has its strengths, but I hate having to wade through all the fanservice itself), and it's actually been a really fun ride! (Darth, if you're reading this, thank you so much for sticking with me oh my GOD). Since I've had to surpress my own interests for so long, it's EXTREMELY liberating when I find out one of my friends shares at least a few of my interests. For that I am incredibly thankful.
It's a little weird, though, isn't it? Having friends who don't really share your interests? It's not as bad as I make it out to be, of course; I'm very open to learning about others' interests, and there's quite a few things we share an interest in, within each of the friend groups I include myself in. Like, there's one where me and a friend who makes Minecraft mods talk a lot about Minecraft in-depth, and there's so many things I wouldn't have realized or discovered if I hadn't met him! There's a friend who's into BFDI, and I think Homestuck? And I like the artstyle of those, and their own artstyle, and it's nice to try and piece things together about them via osmosis (since I don't even know where to start with BOTH Homestuck and BFDI). A couple of friends have been successfully convinced to check out In Stars and Time, and one of them is now just as much of a fan of it as I am (I think). It's just... I don't know, maybe it's an internal thing, where I inherently think my own interests are "trashy" or something, but it's a little hard to be enthusiastic about my own interests without thinking, "oh I really don't wanna annoy my friends, so maybe I won't talk about this thing". And maybe that's not the most healthy feeling in the world.
