CH-CH-CHANGES: Defining myself not by my old flaws but my new vision of myself

Listen to my speech.

I’ve been away from the aniblogosphere for a while, because I’ve been busy spending time with my meatspace family. You know, the people who raised you outside of the internet.

Meatspace families are the people who are obligated for whatever reasons to look after you even if you wreck your life. I’m not saying that I don’t need my cyberspace blogger family, I’m just saying that at this time in my life spending time with my meatspace family is most important to me right now.

Today I saw Where The Wild Things Are with my family. I know, it’s crazy, an anime blogger seeing a live action Western film? Sounds crazy, no? Well I liked the film a lot, for a number of reasons which are hard to explain but since I’m blogging about this it’s my job to try anyway. Essentially the Where The Wild Things Are movie reminded me of how I get a bit sad every now and again, not just because of my own mental health struggles with depression but because when I see people I care about unhappy or angry around me, I’m lost about how to figure out how to make that angriness or sadness go away so all of us can be happy again.

It’s like how on the same day I saw this movie, my mother blamed me for when the Dominoes set I was buying at the nearby Oxfam Fair Trade shop was crashed all over the floor because the clerk gripped the box by the drawer, spilling the wooden and brass dominoes everywhere. My mother said she assumed I was the culprit of this because I was in the vicinity of the accident, as if she was assuming I was incapable of not causing trouble. The truth is my mother doesn’t think I’m clumsy all the time, it’s just that when accidents happen she fears the worst because usually I am the one doing the spilling. By the way, because the well meaning clerk was a klutz, he fetched me a new Dominoes set out of the shipping box to try and make amends. So he is no enemy to me.

Relating this to how the character Carol in the Wild Things movie feels about himself, wanting all the Wild Things to stick together but always worried that it will never work out, I wondered about how I saw myself and how the way I perceived my own flaws was affecting other people whom I loved who were sick of listening to me being sad all the time. So I decided to try and remind myself that every now and again, when somebody is angry or sad it’s not always my own fault, and when it is my fault I need to take responsibility in trying to fix it.

So how is this related to anime blogging at all? Well I can only do anime blogging on my own terms, and not somebody else’s. I can only blog shows I’ve actually seen, and manga I’ve actually read. I have a new review of Brave Story up at The Ranobe Cafe now, and if you want to check out some of my light novel review work there you can feel free to do so. I guess I began to blog out of loneliness, to meet more people. So I wasn’t really blogging for myself. This was a bad time for me even though I got some really good articles out of the past year. I should have been blogging about anime and manga that really interested me, and shaped me as a person, the stuff that just doesn’t get enough attention that really deserves a look.

And in this I noticed that nobody really blogs vintage/licensed shows to the extent that fan-subbed shows do. Fansubs/fan-translations are a big issue right now because of what Tokyopop is getting in hot water over. I try not to blog fansubbed shows as much anymore, not because I don’t think they’re not worth watching despite being deliciously illegal (hey, keep in mind Hunter S. Thompson is on my bookshelf: I know what Gonzo meant before there was an anime studio with that name). I just think that even though anime is disposable pop culture in Japan some examples of manga and Japanese animation really deserves to be preserved for future generations. Stuff that needs to be kept in print so that the next generation of anime fans will know its awesomeness. I want to see FLCL remastered for Blu-Ray eventually. I want to see the Marvellous Melmo manga and anime translated into English. I want the shows that really mattered to people like Card Captor Sakura and Love Hina to be remembered!

Look, in the year that I’ve been writing you either love me or hate me, and there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. At this point I don’t care whether you don’t like me as long as you don’t troll me with “ASSBURGERS LOLZ” comments. Because that doesn’t make just me feel bad. It also creates you as a cause of why people are losing faith in humanity. I am not a nihilist, merely an optimist with occasional mood swings that take me into dark places. The important thing to realise in one’s darkest hour is that you can find the light at the end of the tunnel when you take a shovel and start digging damn you!

You know what really brightened up my day? This post which really encapsulates the universal joy children of my generation felt when growing up through the late 90s and early 2000s. It’s not just about nostalgia, it’s about the history of our lives and acknowledging where we came from, our origins in how we developed from children to young men and women. I haven’t seen many articles like it but as time goes on I expect to see a lot more of them. Because people my age are really starting to demand: “Make room! I want to be heard too! Let me breathe you old geezers who clog Hollywood with 80s trash that isn’t relevant to me at all!”. These are the things I’ve been thinking about this week, so I close with saying this:

If you really love anime and manga, what would you want your children to be growing up sharing with you?

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Text Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.