Is it wrong to like obscure stuff?

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Natural sciences? Mine are zoology, history, and gaming. I've noted that everything I've ever liked was related to one of those three.

If the normal stuff don't float your boat, then you don't have much choice.

There's a whole culture of people who like obscure stuff not on the mainstream radar. We're called "artists".
Or some people call us, "creative-types"or "originals". Lots of us enjoy travelling and are into health and philosophy and psychology.

And we read the "Dark Materials" trilogy long before they made the first movie out of the first book.

Loved those books!! !! !

haha I remember the show. I only remember bits and pieces of the theme song though

edit: forgot to finish the post so yeah :/


as for my obscure interests, they tend to revolve around games (such as the nippon Ichi ones) or Music (I am into a large amount of prog metal and death/black metal, all along with J-Pop/J-rock

just remember that what the majority of people like and remember aren't necessarily that high of quality...whereas some of the more obscure stuff may have that higher level of quality.

it happens!

I think it's cool to like obscure stuff. There's certainly nothing wrong with it. The only downside is that it's hard to find people to share it with.

true, but when people want to know about the stuff, who better to talk to then the one who's an expert on it?

I remember seeing Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Silly film. Lord knows who thought it was a good thing to make a cartoon from! How about Lobster Man From Mars?

And no, of course there's nothing wrong with having obscure interests.

Good point, never thought of it that way!

I love obscure stuff! From those old 70s disaster movies, to trammell starks, to those weird foodstuffs at the dollar store instead of "Duncan Hines" cake mix its stuff like "Donovan Haynes", or that white non-descript can of "USDA approved canned boned chicken" found at a local surplus and salvage store.

(I wont eat those things, its just fun to read the label and figure out what brand they are trying to imitate)

anybody remember "ok" brand soda? if it was just "ok" no wonder they dont make it anymore/

I've known about "His Dark Materials" since 2000. I don't like it, but I'm enough of a book nerd that I've heard about it and read part of the first book. (I wasn't very happy with the religion-bashing. The writing itself is competent.) That's not obscure.

Try this for an obscure interest: ADoM. It's a roguelike computer game with ASCII graphics. Think Nethack, only more complex and less silly; and like most roguelikes, erases your save file when you die. I've been playing it for ten years now, and won once. Yes, it's that difficult.

I've also been fascinated with "Uncle Tom's Cabin", which most people have probably read about in their history books but never actually read. (For you non-Americans, it's a novel written in the mid-1800s which explains exactly why American slavery is bad, and which was over the next half-century so mutilated in adaptations that some adaptations were actually pro-slavery. It fascinates me not just for its social impact, and for what it says about the way we justified slavery and how we thought about race, but for what society later did to the story. The last modern vestige of this social impact is, ironically enough, the phrase "uncle tom" to mean a subservient, happy slave... the irony being that the original Uncle Tom ended up being tortured to death because he refused to rat out a couple of escaped slaves.)

I'm a little concerned with the way you phrased the original post. I may be completely off base with this, since some of us aren't good at picking exactly the right words; but calling it "wrong" to like something obscure makes me wonder whether you aren't confusing the idea of "right and wrong" with the idea of "socially acceptable". I wonder this because it seems a lot of us get the idea of "wrong=socially unacceptable" drilled into our heads so hard that it messes with the much more important idea of morality. The right thing is not always socially acceptable; sometimes it's downright embarrassing. Sometimes it's something that most people wouldn't even think about doing. Just being a "good girl" and obeying the rules doesn't mean you're doing the right thing.

For the record, the His Dark Materials enjoyed some popularity with Americans after Hollywood made the first book into a movie. It never reached the level of the Harry Potter or Twilight book series but it got to about where the Millenium trilogy is now.

But anyway....just because other people haven't heard of something or don't think they would enjoy it doesn't mean they are judging you harshly for liking it. There are lots of things that I think look or sound like crap- some of them currently popular and some of them obscure- but I don't think there is something wrong with other people liking them.

Last edited by Janissy on 14 Jul 2010, 10:07 am, edited 1 time in total.

When I watch starwars I cheer on the dark side

I have an interest in obscure things and I'm not ashamed of it. Dark, gothic images particularly fascinate me. I also enjoy some of Edgar Allan Poe's works. Not only that, but I have a tattoo of Jack Skellington (many people would consider to be obscure), and I'm planning on getting another tattoo of a raven.

When I watch Star Wars, I laugh at the majority of the world for considering it an actually well made franchise..especially considering I thought the only really good one was Empire Strikes Back. In my opinion, it reeks of people just accepting mediocrity generally, and then rationalizing to all hell to convince themselves that what they watched was a massive work of art when it was little more than a massive something else.

Reading this made me very sad.