Anime (Almost) Ruined My Life
My 10-year-old self should’ve minded her own damn business…
I’ve lived my life evolving through the multiple stages of anime memedom, and…it’s been an experience. Unfortunately, I have yet to ascend to the status of ‘elder weeb’, and I’m not sure I ever really will, or ever really want to. The Urban Dictionary — of course, the only credible place that carries a definition of the word — tells me that I’m under qualified for the position because I’m too young (apparently).
Honestly, thank God.
The term ‘weeb’ makes me shrivel into myself with disgust. My first clash with the word saw a friend weaponize it against me, because I wouldn’t stop gushing about the most recent episodes of my favourite series. I was heavily into Naruto: Shippuden at the time, so it was probably that. The term has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since. Although I may not claim the label (I’m sure nobody un-ironically does), I can unabashedly affirm that anime has coloured my life experiences thus far for the better. Or at least for the more chaotic good.
I often describe my discovery of anime as, “Tripping and falling headfirst into a black hole”.
“That sounds traumatising,” you, having even a vague understanding of how black holes work, might say. And you would be partially correct.
‘Partially’ because once you get past the whole being sucked in by a gravitational force with the strength to spaghetti-fy you thing, its not so bad. Faffing about in an inescapable void somewhere in the fabric of space, disconnected from the rest of space-time can be traumatising, yes.
But it’s also very fun.
My spaghetti-fication started with checking out my first manga (Tokyo Mew Mew) from the local library. This was in the early 2000s, I was still in Primary School, and had yet to discover the many joys (and despairs) of unchecked internet access. I was first fascinated by the kind of book it was, because it was printed backwards (manga are read from right to left). This, coupled with the pretty cover (I’m a sucker for cute characters wearing cute things while striking cute poses), and distinct illustration style I’d seen from briefly flipping through the pages, was enough to pique my fickle pre-teen interest.
At the back of almost all manga are recommendation pages that list information for other similar series. This was the time before — or at least in the early days of — robust algorithms, so it was the most effective way to e̶n̶t̶r̶a̶p̶… intrigue readers, and encourage them down the arguably unhealthy path to binging similar series. They call it marketing, I call it the birthing grounds of destructive, self-sabotaging procrastinatory habits. Tomaytoes, tomahtoes.
These pages helped me to discover more manga, but I would soon be disappointed by the realisation that my local libraries rarely carried manga volumes on their shelves. Or worse, they might carry a few instalments of the series with many missing volumes in-between. It would be a few months yet till my introduction to Google during an ICT class, and even longer till I stumbled onto my first scanlation website. I practically lived on OneManga.
I’ll gracelessly skirt around the issue of legality, and skip right to my first memories of when manga turned into anime.
I have vague recollections of visiting a friends house after school and seeing Dragon Ball Z on the TV. Just as vague are memories of a cousin convincing me to play a Naruto video game during a sleepover. My most distinct early memories of anime are of me jumping on a bed and singing along to the theme song to Mew Mew Power, the anime adaptation of Tokyo Mew Mew that aired on PopGirl.
My days very quickly became overrun with fan forum engagements, AMVs (Anime Music Videos), nightcore, vocaloids, fanfiction, and all manner of activities either directly or tangentially related to anime or manga. I used to be a kid who went out a lot, but the discovery of anime turned me into a shut-in. It helped me to uncover a part of myself that might have better been left shackled, bound and gagged in whatever dank and dusty crevice of a cell it was released from.
It wasn’t all gloom, doom and despair though. Despite my social life taking an irreparable hit, I discovered a slew of passions and skills that serve me well even till this day. I started learning how to draw my favourite characters, and now have a relatively decent art style. I took an interest in stop-motion animation, and now can animate. I took up designing magical girl inspired costumes for my dolls by repurposing the fabric from old clothes, and now I peddle handmade accessories on Etsy and Shopify.
As with all joys in life, there’s nothing more rewarding than sharing what makes you happy with those nearest and dearest to you. So, I dragged my close friends — some kicking and screaming — into the deepest recesses of the black hole with me. The more the merrier, sharing is caring, etcetera etcetera. This proved to be the right course of action as, only a few months into their spaghetti-fication, a friend suggested we attend a convention. My closest point of reference for conventions at that point had been through whispers I’d heard on the internet, and the particularly funny twelfth episode of Lucky Star. My first ever convention was the Hyper Japan of 2014, and it would be the first of many.
Two friends and I made plans to attend, and seeing as how the staple of any anime convention is and has always been cosplay, we also agreed to dress up. There was only one problem: I was fifteen and broke.
My mum, who had been warily side-eyeing my descent into the void while keeping her distance, took some convincing, but finally agreed to let me go. I think she might just have been happy that I was finally leaving the house, and wouldn’t be spending another school holiday holed up in my room, talking to my computer screen. Conventions are notoriously expensive and I didn’t want her to put more into my hobby than was necessary, so was willing to forgo cosplaying — much to the dismay of my friends. Thankfully, leading up to the date, I’d raved to a family friend about the event, and after mercilessly teasing me, she said she’d buy me the £89.99 costume I’d been pining over.
The fond memories I made at Hyper Japan 2014 stick with me vividly even almost a decade later, and that’s not just because I have an amazing memory. My memory sucks actually. I still have all the freebies I got from the convention, and for a time I had a few of them plastered on my room wall. I still own the two boxes of Golden Curry I received after attending an event, tucked in the back of a cupboard in the kitchen. My mum asks me every year when I’ll get rid of the memorabilia, and at this point I think I might as well keep them and pass them down as an heirloom or something.
Despite putting my social life in retrograde, manga and anime actually allowed me to be part of a pretty cool community — even if that community is predominantly experienced online. I’ve weened off the medium a lot in recent years, and have migrated more towards light novels, visual novels, manhwa, and webtoons.
But anime is something that I don’t ever think I’ll fully be able to detach myself from. Its become a foundational facet of who I am, and how I fit into the world.
