Aesthetics

 

I used to be self-conscious about the fact that I have a very visual imagination and that I need an aesthetic that appeals to me, to be able to really get immersed into a piece of media. If I don't like the drawing style of a comic, I can't read it, no matter how amazing the story is supposed to be. If the setting of a book makes me feel and see nothing but grey, I find myself skimming through it. Only movies that allow me to notice tiny aesthetically appealing details, such as the way a strand of someone's hair curls or the way a flicker of light is reflecting on the surface of the river, are completely immersive for me.

For the longest time, I felt like this wasn't something I was allowed to focus on or need. Even though some media is largely visual, the pressure to not care about what things look like is huge sometimes, as if liking a certain aesthetic means you're vain or that you would automatically judge people by looks in real life. This type of thing is really easy to say if you're not very visual, or you happen to like a more grotesque aesthetic, because no one will think you're vain for liking something "ugly". Actually people seem more likely to think that the deepest stories lie behind an aesthetic that would be considered traditionally unappealing.

And it's easy to say if you're neurotypical.

After discovering that I'm autistic, many issues in my life have made more sense, and so does this one. My brain type explains why my aesthetic includes so many things that a lot of neurotypical people would consider "kitsch" and thus boring or vain. For me they communicate different things, because my brain responds to them enthusiastically.

Glitter and softly flickering lights stimulate my brain in exactly the right way. Looking at them is essentially stimming for me. So are characters with big emotive eyes where you can count the eyelashes and the pen strokes, and clothes with a lot of tiny details in them such as pearls or lace with a consistent pattern, and the contrast between dark woods and a starlit sky and how each branch of the trees contributes to the whole picture. These types of things make me feel absolutely delighted.

Basically, it's very hard to get into a story, or anything, when you're understimulated. And for me the visual aspect is very important, and it's not because I want real people to look like fairies or something. (Obviously no complaints if they do.) The things that my brain needs from visual media say absolutely nothing about how I treat real people. The fact that I have a hard time reading a book with an unappealing font or a cover that ruins the visual experience of the world or the characters for me, doesn't make me a bad reader.

This is not about "not vibing" with something. This is about some media actually being inaccessible to me, and other people with different neurotypes, in a way that is just as real as someone being forced to read in a foreign language. Yeah, you might understand a word here and there, but overall you wouldn't be able to comprehend what you're reading.

My brain is just a little bit particular and a little bit more detail-oriented than average.

I don't ever again want to think that movies like Red Riding Hood or Crimson Peak are a "guilty pleasure" for me. There's nothing cheap about their aesthetic. There's nothing to feel guilty about in liking a movie that has an aesthetic and the level of detail that makes me so immersed that I forget the rest of the world exists.