Mandela Effect
One of the fascinating things I see when browsing Mandela Effect forums is how many Americans (it's almost always Americans) seem to have an EXTREMELY brittle, cut-and-dried, view of the world.
Like "there is absolutely only one possible version of [corporate logo | song | quoted movie catchphrase | English word spelling | historical event], and I learned it 100% in school and it cannot possibly have any nuance or multiple variants to it whatever"
I guess this feeds US politics.
Mandela Effect
Maybe it's just living in New Zealand and ALWAYS being in the cracks between time zones, English variants, US vs British TV and pop charts, etc, even our Windows struggles to process the idea of 'New Zealand English', but... I think here we just get innoculated against the idea that there's one true spelling/version/edition of ANYTHING. If there is, we're almost never in the country that it exists in.
Mandela Effect
So like, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone or Sorcerer's Stone? Well yes, it's both. Even for the movie version. Colour/color? well depends if you're solving a British crossword puzzle or programming an American computer. And we just get used to living in a world with all this ambiguity.
Mandela Effect
And then poor Americans are all 'bbbut how could Darth Vader have said NO I AM YOUR FATHER and not LUKE I AM YOUR FATHER'
and it's just sad, like, have you never been on the outside of media culture trying to decode the original from jokes and third-hand retellings? Christmas is in midwinter for you. You don't get Coca-Cola summer and winter ads in the same season. Everything just came to you on launch day, all ready to buy, tuned perfectly to look like reality. You poor things.
