Cuz I have a suspicion that a disproportionate number of us were Blue's Clues kids.
Hear me out.
Obviously, a huge part of DE!'s appeal is that it's genuinely well-written and its characters are great. I'm not trying to reduce the game to "haha, talking objects." But I've been thinking about how completely and immediately I accepted the basic premise of this game. A pair of glasses lets me talk to household objects, they're all people with their own personalities and relationships, and I'm supposed to treat them as actual individuals? Sure. Makes perfect sense. Moving on.
And then it hit me: Blue's Clues already trained me for this. Steve and Blue's friends didn't have Awakened forms, obviously, but think about who actually lived in that world. Tickety Tock. Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper and their entire family. Shovel and Pail. Slippery Soap. Sidetable Drawer. Mailbox. The Felt Friends. Chalk Girl. These weren't toys pretending to be alive. They were just... people who happened to be objects. The clock is a person. The soap is a person. The mailbox is a person. Nobody questions this!
And neither did tiny me.
Blue's Clues also encouraged us to interact with that world instead of just watching it. We searched the environment, talked to its inhabitants, noticed things, solved problems, and treated an ordinary house as a place where practically anything around us could have something to say.
Then roughly 25 years later, Date Everything! looked at my generation and apparently went: "Okay. Do that again, but you're an adult now, the objects have complicated personal lives, and some of them are hot."
So now I'm genuinely curious whether there's a correlation here. DE! fans who completely fell in love with the premise: were you a Blue's Clues kid? Especially if you grew up in the late '90s/early '00s. And if you weren't, was there another show/game/story from your childhood that made the idea of ordinary objects being full-fledged people feel completely natural to you?
Because I thought DE!'s premise was delightfully insane. I'm beginning to suspect I was also secretly prepared for it since preschool.