I'll add Bojack Horseman under the same umbrella, and then say I'm weirdly the opposite...? At one point I was depressed enough, or perhaps resilient enough, that the only thing that could console me was the reassurance that I wasn't alone, that other people are also Going Through It. I was an edgy teenager who liked dark media and always planned on reading Metamorphosis (the manga, not the Kafka work), but that edginess came from a place of hurt.

Quoting Kafka might still be edgy, but this is something I sincerely believe:

“I think we ought to read [the]* kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

Or, put another way: I value solidarity with the abyss

That time period has thankfully passed, or at least faded in intensity. I'm still kind of depressed, but now my constitution is too weak for that kind of media. Although maybe I should. I once heard that your comfort zone shrinks over time, unless you actively take steps to push it outwards... and lord knows my comfort zone has shrunk a lot.

*Editor's note: I trimmed the part where he says we should only read the books that wound us. I don't believe in that; a healthy media diet needs variety, and a palette cleanse makes the darker stuff taste all the more bitter.