You don’t need to ask permission to post a link to something, you can just do that because you feel like it. Generally, YouTubers LOVE when people share our stuff, because word of mouth is the best promotion you can possibly get :)

I’ve never really felt that way (maybe when I was a teenager?), so I don’t know that I can speak helpfully from experience.

I guess all I can say is, it is a good life skill to learn to be okay with most of the things you like being trash garbage. Because they are all going to be trash garbage in someone’s eyes, and it is much more powerful to be able to say “yeah, and what of it?” than to be immediately forced on the defensive trying to prove that it’s not. You will never be able to prove a hater wrong or change their mind, but they can make you miserable for ages while you try.

If you are in a position where you need the things you like to be liked by others, or else it feels like a personal attack or failure, odds are—though I can’t know for sure and I am not your therapist—odds are that you are investing some part of your identity or self-feeling into the media you consume, and identifying your self with it, and vice versa.

This is normal and generally fine, everyone does it with some things sometimes. Get a sports fan going about Their Team™ and you’ll get identity connections spilling outta both their ears, and to have something communal that you’re deeply invested in can be genuinely life affirming. It is good and normal and generally healthy, so try not to get caught up in shame about it.

What you generally want to be able to do, though, is just as much as you should have the capacity to extend your soul, to connect with things, to invest yourself in them, you also need to learn how to retract those connections, and to disinvest yourself from them when it is necessary to do so. Like for example if people online are trash-talking the thing you like. In those moments you have to be able to go “I am not the thing, the thing is not me, none of this is about me, none of this has any bearing on who I am.” You have to able to retract the connection, even if just temporarily enough to say “not my circus, not my monkeys” when it is called for.

If you don’t develop the ability to retract and disinvest, well, that’s when a media obsession can become genuinely kind of debilitating, both socially and personally. And in the worst consequence, it’s where you get Harry Potter adults completely unable to let go of their Hogwarts Houses, it’s where you get people who hold on to fandom (and monetary support) for genuinely awful people and causes, because they just cannot disinvest themselves or take their identity back from it.

Ultimately, you should be able to allow a thing to have power over you—to move you, to spark emotions and love in you, to make you happy, to make you cry. You should be able to open your heart.

And!

You should be able to take that power back when you need or want to. Your You should not be owned by your Things.

All of this is a skill to develop, by the way, not an inborn trait to have. It’s something you practise and get better at, you’re not “supposed” to already know how to do it. All you are supposed to do is practise it. Shame is generally unhelpful for learning, also, try if you can not to let that be your motivator; usually all it teaches you is how to cut connections off, not how to form them in a healthy way.

Can’t really help you much there, I’m afraid, pretty much every Danish creator I know makes content exclusively in English. As far as I can tell, most of the Danish language creators (at least the ones with enough subscribers to get pushed in recommendations) tend to be vlog- and gaming creators for a younger audience, your Minecrafts, Fortnites and Robloxes and such.

That said, we all live in filter bubbles to some extent, I’m sure there are Danish creators out there making Danish language work for all audiences, I just don’t tend to see them anywhere in my recommendations. I do follow some Danish political creators on TikTok, and there’s a few comedians posting clips from their stand-up sets and such on there as well, I see more Danish language content around over there. Maybe they’re on YouTube Shorts as well.

I think the place to start is with the consciousness that all media is a collection of choices. All of it. Everything that is in a piece of media is a decision that someone made, from the big themes to the individual pixels on the screen in a video game, those are only there because someone made a decision that caused them to be there.

With that as the foundation, you can start asking the needful questions.

I find a useful place to start asking questions is “why X rather than Y?”

In any given piece of media you want to analyze, pick a choice that is being made and imagine what it would be like if a different (or opposite) choice had been made.

Say, in Star Wars, what if Luke had decided to join his father and overthrow the Emperor? If the movie had made that choice, how would it have changed the film? What would it feel like is the point the movie is trying to make then? What if Vader was not Luke’s father?

Or, what if the good guys’ lightsabers were red and the bad guys’ sabers were blue? What does that change? What are the things you instinctively associate with those colors, why would swapping them around feel wrong? (or would it actually feel really right? If so, why?)

You can do this for the very big questions, like themes and entire plots, but you can also do it in the very minute. Read a poem and ask yourself why the author picked this word rather than one of its synonyms. Maybe it’s for the meter, maybe it’s for the tone, maybe it’s to match vocabulary. Imagining a different word or a different phrase in the poem, how would that change how it feels to read? What it feels like to hear it spoken out loud?

The answer to many questions you’ll ask about a piece of media are entirely banal. Like, in 3D animation, some things look the way they do because that’s just how a particular software suite handles that particular task. Light reflections, physics simulation, motion blur, etc. Plenty of video games look the way they do in no small part because they are built within the constraints of their engines. Sometimes paintings have the colors they do not because an artiste is imbuing every choice with profound meaning, but because those are the colors the painter could afford, or which were available at the time. And those banal answers are still useful, even if they don’t sound deep.

But the important bit is, the more questions you ask (however banal), the more answers you’ll learn, and the more you’ll understand about the mediums you’re interested in, and the more you’ll become able to interpret the choices that are made and work towards building an understanding and constructing a reading.

If you start from the understanding that everything (everything! literally every single thing!) in a piece of media is a choice, a decision that could have been made differently, and you ask yourself why it wasn’t, you’ll be in a decent position to start to interrogate the art you enjoy.

Outside of that, there are lots of books on art appreciation, and tons of people doing videos on media literacy on YouTube. I think Crash Course has some high-school level courses in English and Theatre and Film on their channel, which can be another good place to start.

Also, just, generally… Media literacy is a skill, not a trait. It’s a thing which you practise doing, and in practising it you inevitably become better at it. Nobody starts out good at it, literally everybody is improving with practise all the time, and literally the only way to get any better is to try to do it to the best of your ability as much as possible, working the muscle so it will start to grow.

Hey, it’s better than being known as the League of Legends guy :)

Honestly, I’d want Robert to surprise me with someone deeply horrible I’ve never heard about, but if it’s going to be a person I have some expertise/personal relationship to, maybe Christian VII and Struensee, or Tordenskjold?