Sometimes reminiscing can leave a boot in your rump even years later.
Mike seems to have a positive view of reminiscing, as he associates it with something which has no real basis of quality anime but is nice:
“memory is quite a powerful thing; perhaps this is why some people can only live in the past.”
But I’m going to tell you why I don’t live in the past. For one thing, it’s gone, and another thing, the past can kick your arse. Literally. Take the Playstation One game Heart of Darkness for example. In it you will find the story of a boy looking for his dog. Simple enough it seems. But it’s wrapped around nightmare fuel and remains one of the most difficult games I ever picked up a controller to play. I started playing it again today, because I was fortunate enough to find all my old PS One games in the basement in one box which was stuffed full of Playstation One gear.
Figuratively, the past can kick your arse if you are a war veteran, or have experienced a string of bad relationships because of things you did or maybe even the fates which cackle at your attempts to find your princess who is always in another castle. However video game nostalgia is a more visceral example of the past kicking one’s arse, because if you’re rusty at such games which you haven’t played since you were nine, you can be shocked at how many game skills you have to relearn. You may also notice the graphics aren’t as good as you imagined them to be all those years ago. Heart of Darkness for example, once had revolutionary cutscenes, yet even Final Fantasy VII’s cutscenes now outclass the formerly seamless animation.
So Mike, you think nostalgia is all rose tinted glasses and romanticism? Try playing Heart of Darkness and see how much you’re smiling after you’ve been eaten by Darkness minions for the fiftieth time in a row, before you can even complete the first level!
As for anime nostalgia, the only real shows I have nostalgia for are Pokemon and Dragonball Z because I was born in 1990s Australia. We never got to see Doremon on free to air like you Mike, all we got was Goku and Ash. What annoys me is that people who were kids in the 1980s say their childhood’s Saturday morning cartoons were better than ours, when really each generation thinks its generations round of animated classics were the bee’s knees. What makes He-Man any less commercialised than Pokemon, really? Same with Transformers. The whole point of Transformers is the robot toys, which is like the Gundam situation in that the toys’ quality exceeds the show’s quality.
And after I hit high school, I never got into Yu-Gi-Oh! because it seemed pointless to me. Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons had more appeal to me. Yeah, I’m a nerd. Deal with it.
Basically what I’m saying here is that living in the past sucks, when you could easily live in the present and still enjoy the old stuff you liked even if it was an infuriating video game that kicked your arse, or a weird Japanese animation about monsters who pop out of balls and fight each other.
2 comments ↓
I have a bad habit of being haunted by the past too, it seems, even if I know it is bad.
I don’t live in the past. I’d like to live not feeling suffering, but then I won’t be human. I enjoy what happened in the past and what it offered to me, but we must look onward and forward.
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