The Stories that shaped me

Every day, we come across new stories. These can take the form of a film, a TV series, a book, a song and even urban legends. Stories can thrill us, excite us, scare us and even shape who we are as a person. The team at Loop reflect on the stories that have shaped who they are today.

Adventure time, as written by Pendleton Ward for Cartoon Network starting in 2010, was probably the story that had the most profound impact on my life. It’s not even like I was crazy about it; I didn’t have much merchandise from the series, I didn’t keep entirely caught up with the story, I was more pulled in by the world building and art direction, and is something that completely inspired my current interests in art and story writing. The most important part of the whole experience for me was the vivid and living world that Pen concocted, the surreal yet familiarly human writing is masterfully crafted to create a relatable and warm feeling. The show is packed with good morals, great character arcs, well written characters, and some of the weirdest and funniest humor i’ve ever seen in a show. Overall, Adventure time is one of the funniest and most emotionally intelligent shows that I’ve ever watched. - Arch

I am a very go with the flow person and have never used a film or book to help me shape the kind of person I am, I instead look to other people for me to build the identity and personality I want. I have always looked to people who have kind and caring qualities and let myself be more like them. Along with this I always keep a mental bag of quotes or sayings with me to help me remember who I am and what I am worth. Growing up I was always told that no matter what you do or no matter who you are there will always be one person that doesn’t like what you do, but for every one person who hates you another one hundred love you. I think keeping positive and knowing your self worth does so much more than watching a film or reading a book to escape and find who you want to be. Keeping positive and surrounding yourself with people that make you feel good will do you so much more than watching a film. - Emily

Recently I read ‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig and I fell in love with his words and his story. The words had a poetic quality to them and every sentence was punctured with thought and deep meanings. I was fascinated with the title as there are rarely any books that are dedicated to talking about books or libraries. It was a lovely book but it doesn’t shape me as a person.The book itself was just food for thought. I believe that personal experiences are stories that shape people. - Sulena

Music. Music is what makes me. I only really found my kind of music a year ½ ago, before that I very rarely listened to music and when I did it was just whatever was popular at the time. One day I was scrolling through instagram and found a meme and it had this song that had a really nice beat. I used shazam to find out what it was and it turned out to be Big Poppa by The Notorious B.I.G and that's what got the ball rolling for me. Ever since then I have started listening to more 90s and 00s artists such as 2pac, Aaliyah, Nas, DMX and more. This music has really shaped me into the person I am today, it influenced how I dress and present myself . 90s and 00s music just feels more real to me, the lyrics are about more than just partying, being rich and having lots of sex. They talk about real problems and issues that we face and because of that it's more relatable to me. - Rob

I think that one of the stories that had a lot of impact on me was the Diary of the Wimpy Kid book series when I was younger. I was never much into reading, but silly books like that actually made me enjoy reading when I was younger. I think that the book series helped me enjoy fictional stories as I only read out of kid’s science books and some comics that I had an interest in when I was around 5 or 6. Since then, I hadn’t read a fictional book that I enjoyed, which obviously didn’t help with my english literature. So, from this day, I still keep the small collection from the book series on my shelf, just in case I wanted to easily pass the time in lockdown.

I wouldn’t say that any particular stories have shaped who I am today, characters however have. Each show or film I’ve seen has caused me to come attached to certain characters and use their personality traits to shape my own and help shape who I have become. Sometimes it wasn’t the characters that shaped me but instead what they have said; one of my all time favourite quotes is “If you let people's perception of you dictate your behaviour, you will never grow as a person.” said by Mr Feeny in Boy Meets World. The same can be said by the character Mr Matthews in the spin off Girl Meets World in the quote “People change people. No matter what I teach you in here, learning from the people you care about is more important than the words on any page”.