The Solitary Indulgence
My 10-year journey with anime
It caught me completely off guard.
I recently watched a movie called Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata Fine (or Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend — Saekano for short). Based on a light novel series, it follows two seasons on TV and concludes the story of a high school “otaku” who dreams of establishing a “doujin circle” (an independent creative group or artist collective) to make his own video game. He enlists the help of his creatively skilled schoolmates, who, predictably, are all beautiful girls who harbor or develop some kind of affection towards him. He eventually gets into a romantic relationship with one of them and ultimately achieves his goal after a series of logistical and emotional ups and downs.
By most standards in the anime world, Saekano is as generic as they come, falling squarely into a ubiquitous genre of high school-based romantic comedies designed to appeal to the fantasies of nerdy, socially awkward boys (and older men, in many cases) who are assumed to be the target audience. I have unashamedly enjoyed this genre, among many others, since I started watching anime. Still, I generally do not expect any deep emotional resonance out of these types of stories, and certainly not from an unassuming, though well-executed example. The ending of this movie upended my expectations and turned out to be a surprisingly cathartic experience — enough to jolt me into writing this piece, starting this publication, and thinking about how I approach my relationship with an art form I have loved and stuck with for the past decade.
Origin story
I did not think much of anime when I first encountered it. Looking back, my awareness of it as a distinct medium from other types of animation or cartoons was low. As a 90’s kid, I was spoilt for choice. Even when I dutifully reported in front of the children’s television channel every weekend morning to catch the latest episode of Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh!, I did not perceive it any differently from the likes of Spongebob Squarepants or Samurai Jack. Animated series were a staple of my childhood entertainment, but with a strictly enforced schedule and limited access to a fledgling internet, my exposure to the medium stopped at the television set. I distinctly remember Samurai Jack and Avatar: The Last Airbender as experiences that far exceeded the rest, but I was satisfied with what I got and did not venture further into their anime-inspired origins.
Around 2009, when I was 15, I picked up manga entirely by accident. Some boys in my class were messing around on their computers, and they dared one of them to put on a manga called “Elfen Lied.” Their hysterical reactions piqued my curiosity, and I looked up the series. At this point, my only interaction with manga was scattered volumes of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! that I occasionally bought or borrowed from friends, read out of order, and in random bursts (I cannot figure out why I did not read those more systematically). Elfen Lied’s infamous first chapter immediately drew me in, and I discovered a story far darker than anything I have ever encountered. The horrific and graphic depictions of violence and gore (which led it to be censored or banned in some jurisdictions) and its harrowing story and characters haunted the impressionable 15-year-old me for months.
Immediately after being emotionally destroyed by the ending of the manga, my growing freedom with the internet turned up To Love Ru as a recommended antidote for washing away the existential dread. It is one of the classics of the ecchi harem romance genre. A hot teenage alien girl crash lands on Earth and gets taken in by a clueless high school boy. A beautiful cast of girls (both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial) get strung up along with the shenanigans. Sexy and hilarious situations ensue. I need not explain more.
What a way to have begun my journey with manga.
My memories of that time in my life are a bit blurry, but The World God Only Knows, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Chobits and Negima definitely featured in my reading. The typical shōnen staples of Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece are conspicuously missing from my early manga experiences. I am frequently chastised for it, but I chalk it up simply to a mismatch in timing. Having only been exposed to the medium at a later age than most and having started off with something as potent as Elfen Lied, I was unable to double back to the entry-level manga that hooked many of my peers during those early teenage years.
Down the rabbit hole
I can distinctly recall the exact reason I did not grow naturally from manga into anime — I (wrongly) perceived anime as extended slideshows filled with talking heads. With the tumult occurring around me in the midst of high school life and the looming dread of exams, while my attention was invested into my main hobby of reading novels, I lacked the willpower and time to make regular 24-minute commitments to anime episodes.
But yet, like how I started with manga, my eventual entry into the world of anime was undramatic and almost by accident. I simply forgot about my predispositions and picked it up as nonchalantly as I did any other cartoon when I was younger. In 2011, when I was 17, my family happened to get a free trial of Animax as part of a new cable TV package we bought. While flicking through the channels, I chanced upon an advertisement for a series titled Baka and Test. The premise of students competing with each other in AR video game-style battles based on their academic grades in a sort of interclass competition to obtain better school facilities was amusing yet poignant enough to pique my interest.
Looking back, it was a rather run-of-the-mill high school series like many others in its genre, but I was hooked by the sheer inventiveness and outlandishness of the premise, characters, and tropes, which were fresh to me at the time after several years away from cartoons.
At the time, my younger sister was also discovering her own interest in the medium, starting off with shōjo staples like Shugo Chara and xxxHolic. Anime soon became a shared experience between us, bridging the eight-year age gap. Sadly, her infatuation with the medium was rather short-lived (she turned to K-pop — I will not get into that here), and the bulk of my anime experience would be solitary from then on.
After Baka and Test, I turned to the internet, now readily available to me, to seek other shows that could replicate the light-hearted enjoyment the series provided. Angel Beats!, one of the most popular and influential anime series of 2010, was fervently recommended. It is based on an intriguing premise of high school students finding closure in the afterlife after experiencing traumatic or difficult lives, interspersed with fast-paced action and well-timed comedy. Notwithstanding some heavy-handedness with its drama and character writing, its memorable and dramatic set pieces, catchy soundtrack, quality production, and well-balanced mix of genres made it the perfect gateway anime.
I completed all 13 episodes in 2 nights. Then it all started happening very quickly after that.
Chasing the high
I entered the world of anime like how I did manga — rather peculiar by most standards. Many friends got into the medium through more “traditional” routes such as children and teenage franchises commonly known to the general public, including Dragon Ball, the big 3 shōnen series mentioned above, and more recently, global smash hits such as Shingeki no Kyojin and Kimetsu no Yaiba. Because of the relatively late age at which I started and my initial gateway anime, I did not bother with learning my ropes in the shallow pool — I dove straight into the deep end.
The third show I watched was a throwback to my manga-reading days. The World God Only Knows was one of my favorite manga series due to its unique and balanced approach to the ubiquitous and understandably maligned harem genre. It focused strongly on the motivations and personalities of each character, examined the relationships between the lead and the varied cast of girls, and wrote compelling romantic narratives for them, several of which spanned nearly the full length of the series. It was one of the few long-running manga series I stuck with until the end, and the high-quality anime adaptation faithfully captured the spirit of the original.
My fourth show was Madoka Magica. It was also my first encounter with studio SHAFT, which will eventually become my favorite anime studio by virtue of this show and the Monogatari series (my favorite anime series of all time). I believe my lack of prior experience with the “magical girl” genre endeared me to this show. I was vaguely familiar with the concept due to the cultural impact of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, but I jumped into the world of Madoka with pretty much a clean slate. Instead of looking at this as a “deconstruction” of the genre like many viewers did, I simply appreciated it at face value — an eerie and beautifully presented Faustian tragedy with compelling characters and top-notch production values. The hard-hitting emotional climaxes made their marks, and nary a year passes by without me thinking back to the bittersweet conclusion of the series.
10 years on from when it first aired, I paid over 20 dollars to watch the live announcement of a sequel to the sublime and magnificent Rebellion movie, which was released in 2013 as a continuation of the TV series. I cheered along with hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide when we received our salvation after eight long years.
If Hollywood made anime, they might have come up with something like Guilty Crown, my fifth anime. I frequently have to defend this series from my anime-watching peers. It is easy and rather fashionable to rip into its abundant plot holes, juvenile plot developments, and heavy-handed character writing, but I think this remains one of the best gateway anime for newcomers, if simply for how good it looked and sounded. The sci-fi setting creates a marvelous backdrop for a straightforward story of rebels fighting an authoritarian regime, bombastic action setpieces, and a beautiful, soul-stirring soundtrack. The first few minutes of episode one remains one of my favorite scenes of all time.
For a more adeptly written and similarly well-produced introduction to anime for sci-fi fans, I would give a special shout-out to Psycho-Pass, a hard-boiled police drama that is frequently and favorably compared to Minority Report.
I cannot quite recall the exact order of the series I watched after Guilty Crown, but I list ten of them below, in no particular order:
- Anohana
- Steins;Gate
- The Monogatari series
- Durarara!!
- Baccano!
- The Index and Railgun series
- Darker than Black
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
- Toradora!
- Psycho-Pass
It was probably just a stroke of luck and good timing that my initial introduction to this medium was so diverse, as those series informed my relatively broad taste in anime which has endured to this day. 2011 was one of the greatest years in anime history. The shows that defined the cultural zeitgeist around that time would eventually set the tone for an unprecedented decade of growth in this medium and become modern classics themselves.
No anime, no life
Unfortunately, anime did not (and still does not) garner a similar level of acceptance and respect as a medium of mainstream entertainment compared to blockbuster TV (or online streaming) series or major sports. I remember anime as a solitary experience, holed up in a dark room at one in the morning, seizing that twilight hour between relentless amounts of homework and little sleep during the punishing school year leading up to examinations. It was a regular and deeply private soul-cleansing experience for me at the end of what often was 14 hours of studying during the day — akin to meditating or having a long shower. Escaping into the world of the anime I was watching cleared my mind of mathematical formulas, scientific concepts, and historical postulations, which boosted my sleep quality immensely and helped me cope with mental stress. It anchored my day and was something I could look forward to at the end of it, without fail. I have kept up this habit, nearly unbroken, since late-2011.
There were scarcely any opportunities to share or discuss those interests, not with my family nor my closest friends. The circumstances of my strict upbringing would never have allowed for a hobby as frivolous as anime. I cannot recall where I read this, but I believed that I should only reveal my “weird” interests after I have established friendships, so I will be regarded as the friend who just happens to have a weird hobby, rather than that weird person who has a weird hobby.
Furthermore, as any anime fan growing up in the 2000s and 2010s can tell you, being public with one’s interest in the art form was equivalent to social suicide. The medium was on the fringes of pop culture at the time, and loving those strange Japanese cartoons meant that you were, by extension, strange as well. The public was unable to dissociate anime from the stereotypical image of socially awkward otakus, which compelled many to hide their interests from anyone but themselves or online communities of like-minded people. This may explain how I would later discover that several of my peers, who would be regarded socially “popular” in high school, were closet anime fans like myself.
That is not to say that it was easy “coming out” about it. When I joined and got elected president at my university’s anime club, any mention of my association with that group were accompanied by smirks and giggles from my non-otaku peers. When my girlfriend (whom I met at the club) introduced me to her family and described our interests and how we met, they were in disbelief that I was into “that stuff.” I could not blame them. I was (formerly) relatively athletic, (still) socially engaged with many of my peers, and generally present a clean-cut image by virtue of my professional career, which means that I hardly fit into rather unfair and frankly nasty stereotypes of otakus that many people hold.
Old perceptions die hard. Nowhere are those attitudes more crystallized than in the workplace. There is an unspoken list of “acceptable” hobbies for high-powered yuppies, usually involving fitness or outdoor activities of some kind. To most of my colleagues, I enjoy tennis, basketball, and reading. To the ones I am closer to, I also play video games. I am not lying — just omitting parts of a much bigger truth. Forgive me, but I have a reputation to uphold. Anime geeks do not belong on a trading floor in an international bank. The only nerds we take are the math ones.
Times are changing for the downtrodden otaku. Video games, formerly the outcast of entertainment media, have become massively popular and widely accepted (not to mention lucrative), bringing a whole host of associated subcultures into the limelight. It is not a stretch to imagine that anime could be next. Netflix helped propel anime into the ranks of mainstream entertainment, and it has become a production powerhouse in its own right. Social media and the openness of the internet-based celebrities of this generation towards anime have normalized attitudes. Traditional celebrities have also boosted the reach and acceptance of anime — I suppose Kim Kardashian and Elon Musk pitched in there.
I have mixed feelings about this. I am certainly glad that closet anime fans no longer have to be quite as secretive as they were. Even if they still cannot fully come clean about the true extent of their hobby (depending on the social contexts they are in), at least they will not be subject to the extreme levels of social exclusion that would have befallen them years prior. But somehow, it feels like something was lost amidst all the marketing and hype. To many of us, and certainly to me, anime was, for the longest time, a deeply intimate, introspective, and even lonely experience. I was closely guarded about my relationship with the countless universes and characters within the anime I watched. It was a personal secret that I was uncomfortable sharing publicly. That is certainly not a healthy way to approach what is otherwise a relatively light-hearted hobby. After ten years of growth in the art form and myself, I believe the time may be ripe for change.
Spoilers ahead for the Saekano movie.
In the post-credits scene, the main character continues to grow his dream, running his video game studio with his former high school love interest, to who he is now happily married. He discusses an upcoming project with his old friends from high school — former collaborators who have become his professional partners — and the group enjoys a boisterous reunion dinner party at the couple’s apartment in central Tokyo. A simple enough ending, but one which touched me on a far deeper level than most other stories that strived for a more obvious emotional climax.
This series far exceeded others in its genre by having an actual, satisfying conclusion instead of the frequent and loathsome industry practice of leaving characters and plot threads untied due to limited runtimes.
It encapsulated an ideal approach to one’s professional life and hobbies. The main character’s honest, single-minded, but often brusque and insensitive pursuit of his dream caused frictions along the way, but he mended what he broke and achieved what ultimately mattered to him. He found a lifelong partner who genuinely shares and supports his interests. He was able to wholeheartedly enjoy his profession and pursue his hobbies openly and with a close network of friends. This is one of the happiest endings that could be, and I am elated to start experiencing those joys in my own life.
For most of the ten years I spent alone with my favorite form of entertainment, it had to be hidden, glossed over, and laughed off. But luckily, I found people in my life who made it such that it no longer has to be a solitary indulgence. More than a happy ending, this is a happy beginning. Here’s to ten more years, and a lifetime, of loving anime.
