Category: Personal

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Personal

Maybe It’s Unreachable for Me: Inadequacy in “SK8 The Infinity”

Note: This post contains spoilers for recent episodes of SK8 The Infinity (episodes 7 and 8 specifically).

It will come as a surprise to no one that much of my sense of self is tied up in my life as a hobbyist. I entered my mid-20s as a mediocre college graduate, employed but not in a field I was passionate about, and began to develop my passions elsewhere by watching a lot of anime and writing about it. I also did fan-art (sometimes) and played some video games here and there. At least as far as those activities were concerned, I felt pretty good about myself. I’d always been praised for my artistic ability as a kid and for a long time I had deluded myself into thinking that I was better than most people, at least when it came to drawing anime-inspired cartoon characters (and any art teachers who may have critiqued my chosen subject matter were just art snobs with nothing to tell me). And as far as video games were concerned, I always managed to play through the most popular ones and when I was younger I’d even give tips and walkthroughs to my friends who were stumped. I spent a long time on the phone walking people through the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, that’s for sure.

Setting foot into the broader world disavowed me of a lot of those assumptions about my own skills. I was never too broken up about realizing that I was “just okay” at video games, because it became clear as I got older that I had less and less time to devote to the sort of sprawling, epic RPG’s I’d loved as a teenager. This felt to me more like an artifact of getting older, and while that’s disappointing to have to confront it’s also predictable. I still play and enjoy games when I get around to them, but I never had dreams of being some big-name gaming journalist or live streamer, so I’ve just never been left with a major sense of loss.

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Game Reviews Opinion Personal Reviews

Threads Reconnecting: A Discussion of Supergiant’s “Hades”

Note: This post contains thematic and story spoilers for Supergiant Games’ Hades. If you’re thinking about checking the game out, I highly suggest you do so! Then feel free to come back and let me know what you think.

It’s difficult to resist the urge to refer to 2020 as a lost year, because for so many of us it feels like the culmination of a lot of bad decisions and missed opportunities. For me personally, it was a time period defined by stress without a healthy outlet. I couldn’t attend conventions and see friends, I could really go on vacation, I suffered an undercurrent of fear that something might go awry with my or my husband’s employment situation… and that’s even aside from the relentless thumping of day after day of exhausting election news. It was bad enough for long enough that I couldn’t even get myself to watch anime. For some, their hobbies are an escape; something that lets them settle into a pleasant state of mind and forget about the outside world. For me, it’s kind of the opposite in that I have to be in a certain state of mind to be able to focus and enjoy something.

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Opinion Personal

Anime Fandom on Our Own Terms

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, mostly for the purposes of looking at cool art and memes and keeping up on anime news. It seems like every few weeks lately, some bozo has blasted onto the scene with some dismal hot take about who “deserves” to be a part of the anime fandom. The last time this happened the commentary had a specifically sexist bent, but for whatever reason I decided to keep my mouth shut. It honestly gets exhausting to have to defend my place in anime fandom all the time so I usually just don’t take the bait; I’m old enough now and have seen the fandom landscape change and grow so much for the better that some troll’s short-sighted vision of how their preferred fandom should operate isn’t worth the oxygen it takes to argue about it. And if they don’t believe that women and nonbinary folks have been around and even acted as formative members of most if not all genre fandoms, well… they’re allowed to be wrong, and loudly.

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Meta Personal

The Balancing Act of Being Critical: Part 2 – Yes, Sometimes it Does Hurt

This is the second entry in an informal series I’m writing about my approach to anime criticism. You can check out Part 1 here.

Content Warnings: Discussion of mental illness. General discussion of sexual assault. Discussion of abusive internet practices.

Imagine a situation, if you’ll humor me for a moment. Let’s say you’re someone experiencing mental illness (which I suspect will be relatable to many folks reading this). Many people might not be able to detect your symptoms on the surface – your anxiety is fairly well-hidden in your day-to-day life because it manifests in being unable to do things like make phone calls (unless truly an emergency) or start your homework until the last possible second, and everything tends to work itself out in the end to the extent that it’s technically taken care of. But your insides are constantly in knots because the world feels out-of-control, and though you don’t recognize it at this time, you definitely could benefit from some talk therapy and perhaps even some medical intervention.

The one thing you look forward to every week is attending your college anime club and watching anime with your friends, and this semester’s lineup promises to be great – one of the series the group is watching is Welcome to the NHK, and it’s one you’ve been looking forward to for a while. The first couple episodes you’ve seen on your own seem very sympathetic to your state of mind – the protagonist also suffers from mental illness and social anxiety, and the way that this is reflected in the character’s behavior feels very realistic to you. Even leaving his apartment to apply for a low-level job for which he’s almost guaranteed to get hired is a monumental task; his perception that everyone on the street is staring at and judging him makes your stomach drop, because it’s so relateable. He seems to know the actions he needs to take in order to better his life, but doesn’t have the executive function or the self-confidence necessary to make himself do them.

As the weeks and episodes go on, however, this feeling of elation begins to sour. At times, the main character’s social anxiety feels pushed aside in favor of more palatable otaku-style antics – an unsuccessful attempt at producing a pornographic video game, an accidental inclusion in a group planning to die by suicide (wacky!), unintentional involvement in a shady direct sales group… The emotional truth of the character’s situation begins to deteriorate, with a few very painful gasps here and there to remind you what the series was purportedly attempting to depict. And through the series’ many messy ups and downs, the audience around you laughs at the character’s misfortune. You feel smaller and smaller each time their laughter rings in your ears, because you know in your heart that, though they might not realize it, they’re laughing at you.

It might be obvious to most of you by now, but that club member was me.

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Meta Personal

A State-of-the-Blog Post

Ahh, to be a cozy little mummy… thing.

Hi Friends. With the end of the year coming up swiftly I wanted to do a little “state of the blog” post to set some goals and expectations for the new year. If you’re just stumbling in here randomly, most of this may not be that interesting to you (but I hope you’ll decide to stick around!). If you’re a long-time reader who’s interested in reading some of my thought processes, well, then you’re in the right place.

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Meta Opinion Personal

The Balancing Act of Being Critical: Part 1 – Passions are Personal

Over the past couple of months I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I approach my writing and reviewing, and the things that go into crafting a well-written critique that has value to others. I think media criticism and textual analysis is interesting no matter what your chosen medium of focus is, but anime in particular appeals to me because I feel like there’s a lot to unpack – both regarding the material itself, as well as the ways in which the Western fandom interacts with it. As an affect of the Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, I’ve also had a lot more time to interact online with folks within my anime club friendship circle; as a result I’ve gotten into some interesting discussions regarding anime likes and dislikes and had the opportunity to consider some alternative viewpoints to my own. Because I’ve been hoping to write more about the more “meta” parts of anime fandom, I wanted to use this opportunity to record and ponder some of those thoughts.

I’ve been writing about anime for a long time (since early 2007 at least). While plenty of anime series have crossed my path over the years, some blazing onto the scene with a lot of fanfare before being largely forgotten and some remaining favorites of mine despite all the things I’ve experienced in the interim, one thing that’s been a constant is that anime as a medium has always had its share of controversial material. This isn’t something unique to anime; there are plenty of Western TV shows and films that push the boundaries of our collective social taboos (or just trample all over what I’d define as good taste). But I suspect that there are traits of anime that make these kinds of transgressions stand out to a greater degree than they might otherwise.

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Personal

Happy Halloween!

“Hey Jessi, why did you basically stop updating your site over the past couple of weeks? I thought you were trying to keep up on first episode reviews?” Well, friend, it’s Halloween season, and while I typically don’t put a ton of effort into my costumes (I’ve told folks in my “real life” that my special shitpost language is conveyed through my janky Halloween costumes that are typically funnier than they are legitimate cosplays), I thought this year deserved something a little better than minimal effort. Typically, I like to base the costume off of either some meme, or something that the anime club has watched recently, and this past Summer I was lucky enough to convince people to watch one of my recent favorites, Planet With.

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Personal

Giving it Another Try

Since I’ve been a blogger, my primary focus has been on newer or current anime. Watching newer series has helped me maintain my interest in anime fandom, which is a fandom that often seems to pride itself in bulk consumption – as much as possible and as quickly as one can manage. There are certainly a lot of anime series out there and it can be very easy to get caught up in the destructive mindset of watching as much as humanly possible (I have to say, I do pride myself on the number of anime I’ve completed even though I’m not necessarily proud of having finished everything on that list. I’ll leave that to my readers to guess at which anime fall into what group).

With a near constant onslaught of new anime, it becomes much more difficult to look backwards to the classics. I’ve admitted in the past that I have some large blind spots when it comes to certain famous franchises. I’ve watched very little Dragon Ball (or its offshoots). I don’t have a special connection with older sports anime like Slam Dunk. And, in probably one of the more surprising twists of my life, I’ve never really gotten into the Gundam franchise.

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Personal

A Few Meager Words for a Hero I Never Met

It might seem a little weird for me to have much to say about Zac Bertschy; I’ve never met him, and our online interactions were limited to a few isolated tweets back-and-forth some years ago. But when I learned of his untimely passing yesterday, after the initial shock had began to dull I began to ponder all the ways in which his words and writing had influenced me over the years.

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Personal

Looking to the Past

For a long time I meticulously maintained a MAL page where I’d keep track of the obnoxious number of anime series I was watching at a time. Every season I’d watch anime I liked, anime I didn’t like (I was big on watching things ironically at the time; I’m sure I was completely insufferable), and older anime I’d heard about that I thought might fill in some of the many gaps in my viewing history. The nice thing about using the tracker was that it helped me stay on top of what I’d seen and what episodes I still needed to download and watch. And I have to say, doing things this way exposed me to a lot of anime series that I enjoyed and barely anyone else remembers, which is both very cool yet somewhat lonely at the same time.

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