I process the emotions of fiction slowly.
This is a general note to anyone who has ever asked me to read/play/watch a work of fiction, or who ever may ask me to do so in the future.
The way I go through fiction in my mind is extremely slow. I don't read slowly, but I process the impact on a very detailed level. I need to pick up and examine each facet of it piece by piece, trying to figure out how I feel about it and what it means to me and how it fits into my personal bigger picture. Meanwhile, there will be a huge queue of other things about the story that I haven't even LOOKED at yet, because I'm too busy thinking about the first couple bits in the most intricate detail you can imagine and relating them to a hundred other things on my mind. Only after I feel like I've picked those things apart and decided how I feel about them do I move on to another thing to worry about. For instance, this is why, even within Suikoden, I can't tell you much about Harmonia's relationship with its vassal states, but one incident from Scarlet Moon's history is seared into my brain-- and even then it's particular aspects of it, the things that caught my interest.
I do this with all fiction that has any kind of impact on me (i.e. all fiction that I find moving, all fiction I LIKE,) which is why I don't actually get through that many stories. I read very fast, but if a book is going to impact me much, I have to sit around and think about it during-and-afterwards for maybe ten times as long as it took me to read it. And, if it's a really moving book, I will often put it down in the middle just to think for a while about what I've read. I could theoretically go through books faster, but then I truly do not get much benefit out of the fiction-- I leave thinking, "Hey, that was a good story," but NOT giving it the justice it is due, because if I don't have that time to immerse myself in it, it won't really move me.
So I have an enormous queue of fiction that I need to read and watch and play. I fully believe in the incredible awesomeness of the things in this queue, and I'm convinced that I will really really really love them when I finally sit down and get to them. However, if I rush it, I won't love them. It won't do them proper justice. It'll be like what happened with Suikoden 2. I'll be too preoccupied with the LAST thing, which I was not finished thinking about yet, to feel the impact of the new fictional thing.
Because of this, I do sometimes opt to be reading stuff that's not likely to affect me, or mediocre fiction, or lighthearted things, or nonfiction, or to not read anything at all, instead of the Really Awesome Thing sitting in my queue. Because I can read the mediocre fiction and get out of it the little bit of usefulness that it has to offer, or I can read the humor and laugh and have it serve its purpose of entertaining me, but if I read the good serious fiction just yet, I won't be able to do it justice in my mind. I want to save the Really Awesome Things for when I'm in a receptive mental state.
(And no, this is NOT directed at anyone in particular. It's directed at everyone. Because I hear "you should read/play X" a LOT, and I usually agree that yes, I should, and am even excited to do so, but it's very hard to convince people that I REALLY TRULY do want to when I don't actually go out and do it right away afterwards.)