Vindicated Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It makes everything from your past awesome. It usually does that by taking advantage of your youthful ignorance, and by outright lying to you. It is so common to go revisit something you were nostalgic about and found out that it was actually pretty lousy.

A book that will forever be on my bookshelf is Raptor Red. It is a book of tremendous significance to me. I read it as a small child, back when I was completely enamored with dinosaurs. To me, it was a story about dinosaurs and I loved it. I really enjoyed the story, seeing the titular character going through extreme hardships from the beginning all the way through, but having a pretty sweet ending.

I remember reading it a second time and still loving it, being able to appreciate it more than I had the first time. But I also remember reading it as a teenager and being incredibly unimpressed by it. Somehow, the more refined my tastes as a writer and storyteller became, the more aggravating the book became to me. I will never get rid of my copy of it, but I will also probably never read it again, either.

On the other side of this, there is Jurassic Park (the movie). I watched this as a small child and absolutely loved it. (I'm sure it was due in no small part to me still being completely enamored with dinosaurs.) I watched it with a friend a few months ago and was blown away. That movie is actually still amazing. Despite its age, it holds up excellently. I enjoyed the entirety of that movie. Granted, I was also talking about it with my friend while it played, but we did actually shut up and listen to most of it.

Jurassic Park is vindicated nostalgia. It is the rare case when something was excellent when you were younger, but even though it spoke to your unrefined palette, it actually had tremendous substance.

I would love to have my works end up being called vindicated nostalgia to people in the future. And so long as I always try to create something which is both entertaining and substantive, I think it will not be something to be concerned about.