fandom Archives | 100 Word Anime

Hi everyone. Sorry it has been a couple of months since I’ve had a go at an OWLS post but I decided to definitely get back to it in May and then, once I saw the prompt for May I knew I had to write something for this one. Let’s get into it.

Happiness is subjective. We all have different definitions of what happiness means to us and we also feel happiness in varying degrees. This month we will be exploring several questions describing our happiness in our fandoms, communities, and hobbies. Why do we find enjoyment watching anime or reading manga? Why did we decide to join the anime or pop culture communities? Why do we blog about our hobbies or cosplay as our favorite characters? This topic is all about the passions we have for our interests and why they are important to us.
OWLS Theme for May

Finding Happiness In And Out Of Your Comfort Zone

When I read this prompt the first thing I was reminded of was Prince from Run With The Wind and while I’ll get to my own experiences in a little bit, I’d like to examine his character first the journey he went on throughout the series.

Prince has a clear comfort zone at the beginning of the series. His room in the apartment is floor to ceiling stacked with his manga and he is most comfortable when his nose is stuck inside one of those volumes absorbing the story and the characters within it. While superficially this might seem like a story about getting the loner out of his room and exercising, what we see instead is Prince connecting the new experiences he has with his experiences within stories and blending the two in a way that few anime or stories dare.

Ultimately, his passion for manga is still burning fiercely at the end of the series. He hasn’t moved on from it, grown up, found a new love that surpasses the old. While the manga is visually less prevalent in later episodes, in case there was any doubt that the message here was about embracing multiple experiences, Prince’s passionate speech to Haiji about the great characters who could inspire him makes it clear that Prince’s head is firmly still with his beloved manga and the characters he has formed attachments to.

Equally though, he tells Haiji at the end that he’s had fun with running the race and its truly the first time Prince acknowledges what the audience has seen in the second half of the series, Prince has embraced the team and the new hobby without compromising on his first love.

I bring up Prince because he’s a truly wonderful example that it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. I am an anime fan and also a fan of gaming, a fairly new fan of light novels, a much older fan of novels and movies, but I also enjoy hiking, travel, and anything that involves eating chocolate. As such, I don’t define myself solely through one fandom or another and nor do I allow one fandom to prevent me pursuing new avenues should something take my fancy.

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One of the many things I love about anime is that it is squarely in my comfort zone. It is largely an individual hobby, though there is a thriving online community I can interact with, largely activities involve being indoors, and anime, despite having some interesting variations and themes, essentially follows the same basic rules and structures of narratives that I love from movies, books and other TV shows. Slipping into the anime fandom was easy, getting hooked even easier, and staying within the fandom is very comfortable.

There’s a genuine happiness that comes from finding a new anime and falling in love with it, watching a terrible anime and pulling it apart, watching an anime with a friend and cringing when you realise that they are about to do something that as an anime fan you are very used to but you are about to get asked to explain by someone less familiar with it. There’s happiness to be found when you finish an anime, whether it was better or worse than you expected and there’s true joy in the anticipation of a new season even if it doesn’t end up panning out. Then there’s the happiness of connecting with others who equally love what you love, collecting figures, books or other merchandise of characters you’ve truly come to care for, and ultimately owning the shiny DVD’s of a series that you will binge again and again.

However, anime also takes me out of my comfort zone in ways I’ve learned to love and appreciate.

Five years ago I would have said I was never going to watch harem based shows. Now I routinely have these in my list of anime watched for the year, though more reverse harems.

Three years ago I would have said I wouldn’t watch sports based shows. Now I’ve got quite the catalogue of sports anime that I’ve finished and I’ve had in depth conversations with a friend who coaches volleyball around a game we were watching because having watched Haikyu I actually know what is going on now other than the ball goes over the net.

There are so many anime in so many different genres that I never thought I would try that I’m now loving each and every season.

Two years ago I started reading light novels and some manga. I’ve since had to once again reorganise my shelves in order to find space for the next volumes of Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash and of course Natsume’s Book of Friends. The collections are growing as quickly as I can buy them and yet my shelf space is limited and I already have quite the library of novels that I’ve been accumulating since I was a pre-teen.

makishima — I don’t actually dislike e-books, but there’s something truly magical about opening a new volume and the feel and smell of the paper.

In the last couple of years I’ve been to two conventions (which given where I live is quite the venture) and spent the weekend surrounded by hundreds of people. For me that is an intense and overwhelming experience and yet because everyone there was embracing the fandoms and a love of the same kinds of movies and anime that I love both were incredibly rewarding experiences.

Even on this last trip to Japan I made a note of a few things I particularly wanted to find and managed to even ask at shops for certain items or shows to see what they had in relation to them, though my tongue tried to glue itself to the roof of my mouth before hand as I freaked out about whether I’d be understood or not.

All of these things bring me happiness even as they push me further beyond what I thought was my comfort zone and I try things I may never have given a chance and interact with people I might never have had any reason to speak with, because of the happiness and joy I’ve found in anime.

here’s no one reason why I love anime, but because of my love of anime, my life is filled almost daily with small pieces of happiness. For as long as I keep finding those moments of happiness I will continue to love anime. How about you?Be sure to catch Jack’s post on the Aniwri t er and next up in the tour is Naja on the 13th.

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Karandi James

A personal account.

It is amazing how those six words can fill my heart with dread.

“So I hear you like anime…”

I had occasion this week to wonder when it was that those words began to fill me with a stomach churning sickness, make my shoulders droop, and generally make my legs feel like they are filled with lead. It wasn’t like those words always did that. No, once upon a time I would hear those words and eagerly turn hoping to engage in a conversation about characters or ideas from shows and so on and so forth.

Alright, I make it sound like I’m Sister Sunshine who loves to converse with random strangers, but to be honest, if I get a good anime conversation out of it that’s probably the best way to get me actually speaking. That or books or movies. Stories in general.

However, the phrase “So I hear you like anime” is very rarely a conversation opener, at least in my experience. Generally speaking the tone that is used when saying these words is akin to the tone one would say, “So I hear you raise pet snails” (no offence to those who breed snails and even google couldn’t help me figure out if that was actually a thing and if there’s a word for it).

Now, when I was younger, I would simply brush the tone aside and put a smile on my face and bravely agree that I did in fact like anime and ask the person if they also enjoyed it. You know, engage in an actual conversation that was actually initiated by another human being.

The problem being, as I said, the line is not delivered as a conversation opener. In point of fact it has almost always been delivered as a point of criticism. Almost as if the very phrase paints the recipient as some kind of oddball by default. And seriously, my liking anime was the least of my oddities as a teenager so I somehow never quite picked up that it was something worth picking on me over.

And so the years ran past and generally the people I associate with are all very clear about my love of anime and so I haven’t hadn’t heard the phrase in oh so long.

Until this week.

“So I hear you like anime…”

Unlike my teenage self, I am now very aware of the tone in which this line is delivered, the connotations and the preconceived notions that surround it. I’m also very aware that it doesn’t matter. The more closed minded person isn’t going to be dissuaded from their view point and the more neutral person may very well just be curious about something they don’t really get and a conversation might even happen but it won’t be a particularly fulfilling one for me.

“So I hear you like anime…”

I don’t just like anime. I love it. The variety of shows, the crazy characters, the more serious characters that I can relate to, the ridiculously over the top scenarios, the quieter moments that make me think, the music, the visuals, the stories, the community… Yes, I love anime.

But back to this particular conversation. Yes, I heard the words and yes, I felt that feeling and turned to face the speaker like I was about to face my own execution. I had enough else on my plate this week and more than enough other concerns of things gone wrong and exhaustion was a fairly common companion. So I was feeling incredibly weary even before I heard these words.

And do you know what?

I fixed a smile on my face and agreed that of course I like anime and asked them what they liked. Turns out, they don’t really like anime (of course their experience is limited more or less to Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z) but it also turned out they were a fan of horror movies. By the end of the conversation I didn’t have that fixed and forced smile anymore I was genuinely enjoying the conversation.

It made me once again realise that while some people are just jerks, no denying it, a lot of people aren’t. While what they say may make me feel sad or angry or cornered, many times it isn’t intended that way and it is my experiences and interpretations that actually make it feel that way.

“So I hear you like anime…”

I may never like that line and I may never really appreciate hearing it, but I think I’ll dread it less in future. It doesn’t always mean what I think it means. It doesn’t always lead to what I fear it will.

Thanks for reading.

Karandi James