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Nostalgia

Page updated: 25 May 2025

Or: media that shaped me growing up.

I am Canadian, and I grew up in a small-ish city in central Ontario in the 2000s. I've never had many friends and I don't have any siblings, so a lot of my free time was spent by myself at home, usually playing video games or on the family computer.

This is a list of things I enjoyed the most as a child until 2010-2011ish?

WIP page!

Websites

Neopets

Other virtual pet sites

Video games

Pokemon

Pokemon was also one of my biggest interests growing up, and I was literally OBSESSED with it as a kid. My first game ever was I think Sapphire? Which was rented from fuckin Rogers Video, but the first game I ever owned was FireRed, and followed by that I got Emerald!

Giratina

In the following years I ended up getting noble pink Nintendo DS, and I was super hype for the release of gen 4 with Diamond and Pearl. I'll never forget the days of Serebii.net before they were an official site or whatever they are now -- I used to check the site daily for leaks and rumours, something they'd never post nowadays lol

As far as DPP goes, I originally rented Diamond, but later got Pearl and Platinum for myself. Platinum is honestly still one of my favourite Pokemon games to date, and I actually replayed a good chunk of it in 2024? Which was really fun!

Later, HeartGold and SoulSilver also dropped as part of gen 4, and I vividly remember being excited beyond belief when I saw this specific trailer where they had the cool ass 3D models at the beginning. I still have my copy of HeartGold (with Pokewalker!) and it's also still one of my favs -- I think I'm just a sucker for gen 4.

My interest in Pokemon started to wane with Black and White though -- I had White bc I thought Zekrom was cooler. I ended up not liking the more story-focused approach, and the switch to the animated sprites with the weird camera angles and zooms and stuff -- while cool -- was super jarring to me.

However, gen 5 did also introduce one fuckin asshole... that green-haired weirdo, N. I was obsessed with him, and he was the first Pokemon character that I had a HUUUUUUUGE crush on.

I don't really have any particular feelings for N these days, but looking at him makes me feel like I'm staring at a weird ex somehow.

Anyway, here are the games that I ended up owning as a kid -- I ended up getting more than I talked about here bc 1) the games weren't always 200$ a copy, and 2) my obsession was literally unending:

* was played to completion

I did end up later playing Y and a few other games since, but since I was a teenager or older when I did I won't count them here.

Honestly, as somewhat without an interest in an abundance of merch or their card game, Game Freak did not keep the series interesting for me as I grew older. The games are super dumbed down now, and I honestly feel like they're much more boring in general -- there's too many cutscenes, and the stories they try to do are extremely shallow and/or bland imo.

I do still have a passive interest in Pokemon games, but I mostly just play the older games now bc they're what interest me and are also the most accessible via emulators. Never mind that new AAA games are 100$ or more after tax here now...

Digimon

I surprisingly did not have exclusive brand loyalty to Pokemon, and I enjoyed Digimon a lot as well (probably bc it had cool dragons).

Digital Monster? What's this about?

I wrote more about Digimon here, but the games I had and played were:

I would like to revisit Digimon World as an adult at some point, bc I was terrible at that game as a child and could not raise anything but a Numemon or Sukamon for the life of me. Despite that though, the sounds and design of that game are burned into my mind, and I played it a lot despite never managing to actually get anywhere LOL

On the other hand, I did play through Digimon World DS in 2024, and... I do not recommend it. I enjoyed it a lot as a kid, but as an adult it kinda sucks, with bad writing and an odd, very limited selection of Digimon available. On the flip side, Dusk/Dawn are way better improved versions of DS, and I would definitely recommend giving those a try if you have any interest in the DS games at all.

Spyro

God, I still love the original 3 games for PS1 to date. I literally played those endlessly, and I still could play them endlessly.

There were a bunch of flops in the series later on, but these are the ones I played:

Other Nintendo franchises

Weird rental games

Other

Movies and TV shows

Cybersix

Storm Hawks

Bakugan Battle Brawlers

The Lion King

My Neighbour Totoro

Introduction to anime

Books

I never read anymore, but I used to be obsessed with reading as a kid, and in turn that influenced me to want to write as well. I was mostly into books featuring animal protagonists, dragons, and sometime between like, 11-13 I started reading a lot of books with transgender characters once I realised I was probably trans myself (and it wasn't as widespread on the internet at the time).

I honestly learned most of my writing skills from reading a shit ton of books, and I would kinda "study" the layouts and styles to learn how to write for myself. And I guess it kinda worked out?

Warriors (Erin Hunter)

If you were into Warriors also, you know.

Age of Fire (E. E. Knight)

I originally picked up the second book of this series, Dragon Avenger, from some random bookstore while on a day trip once -- I was drawn in my the cover (it features it a big green dragon on it), and the premise that it was not a kids or YA novel about dragon characters, but instead intended as general fiction for adults. So I had to read it!

(For the record, I was always at a much higher reading level than my peers in school, and in general I enjoyed much more "mature" books even when I was like... 10.)

The first three books in this series actually all feature their own protagonists, with their stories running parallel and overlapping, so it actually wasn't an issue that I started with the first one.

To be honest I couldn't tell you much about the books anymore, but the second protagonist's name, Wistala, was my Elder Scroll character name for a long ass time, and in general this very much influenced my dragon-loving self for the longest time. I'd like to give this series a re-read at some point... who knows when.

Other

Other random series that I don't have much to say about, but were probably influential in some way or another.

To be quite honest I don't really remember a lot about most of these, but I had them listed on my ancient Goodreads account and they stood out to me as books I remember drawing influence from, even if it was just inspiring me to write my own stories (often fanfic, though I used to write a lot of original stuff as well) and develop charactes.

And yes, most of these aside from Eragon and Exodus feature animal protagonists LOL. That was pretty much the number 1 to lure me into reading anything.