secrets from a reformed hater
the lord of the rings, the stubbornness of a taurus, and learning to admit when you're wrong
Confession time: the first time I watched The Lord of the Rings films all the way through, I didn’t pay attention during Two Towers or Return of the King. I had it on in the background in our living room - who knows what was taking my full attention, probably Tumblr - and the only things that I remember from that watch were a walking talking tree, and a big battle. (There’s four or five at least in those two movies alone. Who knows which one I mean.) I know I cried at the end of ROTK, but I wasn’t really sure why. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what happened to turn Gandalf from grey to white, and I was confused by that Eowyn girl. I had a lot of questions. I was unimpressed and ultimately, uninterested.
I set it aside and decided to read A Song of Ice and Fire instead. That was over ten years ago now.
Cut to, this past January. Tennessee was trapped in a snow storm, and a two day weekend turned into a five day weekend. I binged a few shows that were big-time favorites of one of my close friends, and by the time I finished Chernobyl, I felt insatiable. I needed more. I was burning through Soph’s favorites, and at this rate there was really only one series left that she adores.
I had time to kill so I figured, why not. Let’s return to the scene of the crime.
Now, I’d seen Fellowship probably two or three times before this. A friend introduced it to me in high school on its own, intending to welcome me into the arms of the Middle Earth fandom. As you may be thinking, yes, I am the perfect candidate to be a Lord of the Rings fan. I love high fantasy and big books, I’m a huge fan of stories about friendship, I love Tolkien’s other half C.S. Lewis, and I have a history of befriending people who love LOTR…it’s a nobrainer! But alas, it didn’t take. No shade to Fellowship, but it is just the introduction to the wide world of Tolkien, and since I’ve seen it the most of the three films…it’s the least compelling of the three to me right now.
I am writing to you today to issue an apology. An apology and some words of wisdom from someone who is notorious for changing her mind. More than that, I want to talk about my superpower: my ability to condition myself into enjoying things.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry to my best friends. I’m sorry to my fourth grade teacher. I’m sorry to that guy who rode my bus in tenth grade. I’m sorry to my little brother. I get it now. I’m the problem, it’s me, etc. Maybe Lord of the Rings is cool after all.
Here’s the backstory: I am a Taurus.
[End of essay.]
Okay, no, seriously. I know that isn’t a full excuse, but Tauruses are notoriously stubborn people. We are very set in our ways, we think we know best, and a lot of the time we do! But a lot of times we make mistakes and judge too quickly and have a hard time admitting that we were wrong.
I have this problem where I get preconceived notions in my head about a Thing. I think a lot of us are guilty of judging things by their cover (cover, here, being your first impression of the thing), and it’s difficult to overcome. A lot of times the only thing you have is your first impression, and if you aren’t very impressed at first glance, you may never return to the thing. You may need to be coached or coerced or convinced to revisit something that originally did not interest you.
These preconceived notions may stem from real critiques - I don’t like how that person’s voice sounds, I was bored during all the action sequences, the first episode didn’t make a lot of sense - but more often than not they are prejudiced views of the thing without any real reasoning. Mainly: I don’t like it because I don’t like it. (The Toddler Paradox, if you will.) And if we take it one step further: I don’t like it because I don’t want to like it.
Our first impressions last a long time. There are things now that I still do not like simply because I did not like or understand them when I was a child. And I haven’t done the work to overcome that first impression.
Here is an incomplete list of things that have given me a bad first impression and/or things that Baby Me stuck her nose up at: Supernatural, Riverdale, Teen Wolf, A Christmas Story, Gilmore Girls (sorry), Star Trek (not you, J.J. Abrams), Mad Men, Breaking Bad, avocados / guacamole, olives, mayonnaise, story-based video games (like Final Fantasy), K-Dramas, most K-Pop (not you, Red Velvet and Blackpink), Reylo, Ali Hazelwood (nothing against you girlie, I don’t even know you!), Taylor Jenkins Reid (sometimes?), fan-fiction in general (I KNOW I AM SORRY), stories about or set-in space (not you, The Locked Tomb), zombies, The Walking Dead, a lot of old media (generally anything made pre-1985), black and white films, silent films, real true screamo music, Bridgerton, Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michelle Williams, DC movies, drama TV shows (this is a flat-out lie, but my brain tells me I hate dramas so bad), Jane Austen stories, Wes Anderson...
Sometimes it’s for real reasons: I tried the food, I watched the film, I listened to the song, and at first glance it did not thrill me. Sometimes it’s because I’m listening to my trusted people: my friend told me Gone Now by Bleachers wasn’t worth listening to, another friend told me she hates Twenty One Pilots. And sometimes I just decide I don’t want to be involved with something for random or unknown reasons: the fandom of Good Omens makes me not want to watch Season 2 of the show, I refuse to watch Riverdale or Supernatural or Teen Wolf, I don’t think I’d enjoy Star Trek.
A lot of times my preconceived notions stem from very early memories. There are books and shows and movies I remember from my youth - whether because they were popular then or they’re classics that have been around since before I was born - and they were cemented in my mind then. How I viewed them in 2002 is still how I see them now. I still think that A Christmas Story is annoying. I still don’t understand the hype around NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys. I still cannot connect with Gilmore Girls no matter how many episodes I’ve seen.
It’s like I downloaded my skewed perspective for a thing, failed to take the time to accurately understand it, and then buried my naivety with the thing down deep in my psyche, never to examine it any further. It’s prejudice. It’s a lot of internalized bullshit. It’s stubbornness. It’s ignorance. And more often than not, I’m usually wrong.
I don’t set out to be a hater. I think I’m a very open-minded person, and I am generally open to trying anything. Maybe I’ve become that way over time, maybe it’s always been buried down there, but nowadays I am always looking for new media to try. I want to like the things other people like (usually), and eventually I do want to understand why people are jumping on the bandwagon. It’s that good ol’ FOMO acting up.
But being a hater is actually a fun venture if you do it right. Obviously, I’m not out here trying to hurt or shame anyone for liking things, but one of the few pleasures of being human is getting to say, “I loathe that.” It’s ranting and complaining and arguing. It’s looking at something and going, That thing is absolutely horrible and I want to tell you why. It’s a way of virtue signaling. It’s stress-relieving. It makes you feel more important than you are.
Being a hater makes you unique. It means you stand out from the crowd. You know something that others do not. And when other people hate with you, you form a little club together. It’s like a badge of honor when you hate something that everybody else loves. I DON’T GET WHY YOU LIKE THIS THING AND THAT MAKES ME SPECIAL! I AM NOT BRAINWASHED LIKE YOU! I WAS NOT TEMPTED BY SOMETHING SO BAD AS THAT!
(I know, I’m a bad person. But aren’t we all.)
Who’s to say why it’s so difficult for me to enjoy things that everybody else enjoys. Maybe I don’t like being told what to do. Maybe I want to choose to come to something of my own volition. Maybe I’m just stubborn.
I was in high school when hipster became the coolest thing you could be, and I think that made me reluctant to jump on the bandwagon for most things. I hated The Avengers in 2012 because everybody everywhere would not shut up about Loki and Tom Hiddleston. I didn’t want to read Harry Potter in 2003 because everybody in my class was obsessed with it. In fact, most of my favorite things have always been the things I found on my own before they got big - Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, The Hunger Games, etc. I pride myself on finding good things before anybody else. And it annoys me when everybody is talking about and enjoying something I’m not apart of. It makes it even more difficult to form an accurate first impression because I am stubborn enough to believe that if everybody else likes something, it’s probably not that great.
And yes, you’re correct, that does not make any bloody sense.
Things are generally popular because a lot of people enjoy them! Isn’t that crazy!
Why am I so intent on being a hater!
For a long time I told myself that being a hater is the easy path. To stay on the shore rather than fight my way through a raging current, to completely remove myself from the equation. I used to think it’s less work for me to write something off than to take the time to understand it and enjoy it. And sometimes, I do think that’s true. There are certain things that you know intrinsically are not for you and never will be. They don’t align with your morals, your interests, your beliefs. They’re too much to even attempt to understand. They’re inaccessible. But a lot of the works we write off are mountains that we need to climb.
In fact, a lot of times, I think we avoid certain things because we’re afraid of how they can change us. We’re afraid of who we will be after we find that we do enjoy something we assumed we’d hate. It’s actually very easy to get swept up in a current, to be taken by the river, to be carried along with the crowd. If you let go and allow yourself the freedom to be changed, it doesn’t take as much work as you’d expect.
A few years ago, my friends gave me a nickname. I have this bad habit of consuming media right when it gets released, having a difficult time connecting to it at first and therefore flat-out rejecting it, and then about an hour to a month later I come back, head-over-heels obsessed with the thing. It’s incredibly annoying for my friends (but also I think kind of hilarious to them). Therefore, I have a persona as “180 Jenna.”
In some ways, I like this nickname. It gives me an out when I do turn around and enjoy something I previously defamed. It’s self-aware when I use it on myself. But more than that, it’s a reminder that I can and will change my mind. That the things I think I hate right now may actually become very important to me in the near (or distant) future. That one day, if I take the time to step into the stream, the current will take me too.
Let’s talk about my superpower. For as much as I hate on things, form prejudiced first impressions, pretend like I am immune from all the bandwagons, I actually am really great at conditioning myself to enjoy things. Things that I used to hate vehemently. I firmly believe that almost anything can be enjoyed if you try hard enough.
Since I am such a stubborn person, I can sometimes use that power in reverse. I can be so stubborn that I want to understand or appreciate a thing, that I will go to great lengths to force myself to enjoy it. Not because deep down I can’t stand the thing and I want to pretend on the surface like I like it, but actually because after much consideration and exposure, I Get It Now.
This has happened over and over again as I’ve grown up. I wanted to understand why people were so enamored with Twenty One Pilots so I drove four hours one way to see them in concert. I was so fascinated by the trailer for Thor: Ragnarok that I had a 15 movie MCU marathon over ten days in order to see just that one movie in theaters. I heard The Haunting of Hill House was so terrifying that people were throwing up, so I overcame my scarred-by-horror-childhood and watched it alone in the dark in two sittings.
I’m stubborn as hell, and I will use it to my advantage. Who knows how my brain chooses which things I need to change my mind on, and who knows when my brain will make the switch from DO NOT APPROACH THIS PIECE OF MEDIA IT IS BAD YOU WILL HATE IT to IF YOU DO NOT CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT THIS PIECE OF MEDIA YOU WILL SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE REGRETTING IT. Sometimes my brain makes sense, but usually it doesn’t. I am often coerced by people I know who recommend things to me, but I’m also coerced by my own internal curiosity. I see things online that intrigue me, convince me to change my mind. It’s usually a very random thing in passing that does the most damage, some gifset on Tumblr or a quote on my feed, and I’m always grateful that the universe does not give up on me. I know art is meant to find us in our time, and I wonder how many works are waiting in the wings to revisit my periphery and alter the course of my future.
Frequently I find that the things I was most prejudiced about are actually some of the most life-changing works of my life. Perhaps there’s a bit of self-loathing buried under all this, that I’m so ashamed of my own self that I cannot bear to look in the mirror by embracing a piece of media. I do not want to accept that I am associated with certain fandoms, certain implications, so I push the thing as far from me as possible and go on my way. Of course, those pieces of me just keep coming back. My self is relentless. I do not let myself rest. The boomerang has to return to my hand eventually.
Which brings me to The Lord of the Rings.
A bit of history here. I was a kid when Peter Jackson’s trilogy was just being released in theaters. The trilogy came out when I was in early elementary school, and I have vivid memories of seeing Elijah Wood’s face everywhere. People at school were fans of it, and I remember the fourth and fifth graders (who seemed like giants) being obsessed with the movies. Of course, it was PG-13, so I had no business watching it, and my parents are not huge fantasy people, so in my house we didn’t really know much about it. I just remember seeing Gollum in the most random places and being both confused and terrified. And annoyed.
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher was a huge fan of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and so my first introduction to Middle Earth was in his classroom. I have vague recollections of seeing posters of Middle Earth plastered around the room day after day, oblivious to what any of it meant. Mr K used to read us the Narnia books aloud in class, and he made a profound impact on my life at that young age. I credit a lot of my interest in fantasy to him to this day. But he focused more on The Chronicles of Narnia than The Lord of the Rings because Narnia is much easier for nine year-olds to digest and understand.
I’m not sure what happened between 2004 and 2012, but the world continued to fall deeper in love with Middle Earth, and I could not be bothered by it. I can’t blame it on my age because I was reading Sword of Truth and Game of Thrones by tenth grade. I was a fine and mature reader, so it would not have been strange if I’d picked the book up in those days. I read the 900+ paged sequel to Wizard’s First Rule when I was sixteen, so 1300+ pages isn’t quite so far off. I could have convinced my parents to let me watch the movies if I was interested, heck we could’ve even watched them as a family. But I was so annoyed with how Middle Earth was so beloved that I couldn’t step over the first impression line. I kept hearing about it on The Big Bang Theory, I kept seeing it in the Neopets guilds, I kept watching other people reading it in school and it would not go away. So I made it go away in my brain and pretended it did not exist.
In hindsight, this is ridiculous. It’s like we’ve been orbiting each other for almost thirty years. Every piece of media I love most was impacted and influenced by The Lord of the Rings. Books like Throne of Glass or Harry Potter or Game of Thrones would not exist without Tolkien. It’s almost disrespectful of me to ignore it for so long. I’m kidding myself by thinking I am not a Middle Earth person.
But I’ve written about media finding us as the proper moment. It took me ten years to read and appreciate Les Miserables, and I’m grateful that I took that time to sit with it before fully giving in. That book stalked me, waited in the wings of my life until the exact right time to effect me in the perfect way. And so sometimes I think my brain hates things on purpose. It pushes things away from me so that I have something to come back to later. It’s like god or the universe knows what I need, knows I will need these things in the future more than I need them in the present, and sets them aside as my inheritance. They are gifts that I still have yet to earn. And it isn’t a punishment, it isn’t a duty or a burden, it’s a purpose.
At the time of writing this, I am still waiting for the moment when Middle Earth clicks. I’ve rewatched all three of the films (the theatrical cuts because I’m still weak) and the making of the films, and I am about 400 pages into the LOTR book itself. It’s too soon to tell if my stubbornness will carry me into the promised land, but I have a hunch that this time will be different. I’ve waited too long for this inheritance, and it feels like it’s a long time coming. I owe it to a lot of people to give this world a chance, and I owe it to myself to forgive the younger me that was so adamantly against it.
I’m still a hater. I lied in the title. I’m not reformed at all. You guys cannot get me to like A Christmas Story. But I am more conscious of how and why I hate things. I’m more open to giving things a second chance. I love the challenge of trying to coerce myself into loving something that once annoyed me. I love the work it takes to find the empathy to understand something that once seemed irrelevant to me. I love that my purpose here on earth is to learn how to love all things. I love loving art and people and stories.
But let’s be honest…I love hating things too.
Yes, I will be honest: I’m a hater. We are all haters in different ways and for different things.