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Anime & Alienation & Creativity Forests Blossoming from Rare Single Seeds

9 months ago1,679 words

I just learned that the creator of Dragon Ball (among other things), Akira Toriyama, just died, which is odd timing for me since I've been thinking about that... media franchise - or whatever you'd call it - and anime in general for the past few days...

I recently finished replaying Final Fantasy VIII, and its absence left a hole in my life that I wanted to fill with another game, but even though I've got a list of them I want to play through (FFIX, X, etc, the Kingdom Hearts games, Xenoblade Chronicles, new stuff...), I was paralysed by indecisiveness and played nothing for days.

Then I stumbled upon a post on Reddit about games people wouldn't recommend, one of which was called Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot. I'm not sure why, but this piqued my interest. Not enough to actually buy the game, but enough to go and find a (no-commentary) longplay of it - which is something I occasionally do for games I don't want to play but do want to see - and I've spent the past few days slowly working through that (mostly while eating).




I'm not a fan of anime, even though everyone else I've ever known - especially artists - has been, and I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't resonate with me in the same way. I don't dislike it exactly; I think in some sense it just feels 'alien' to me, like something that's 'not for me', in a way I struggle to put into words.

Maybe it's not all that dissimilar to how I feel about women's clothing? I have nothing against it for the most part, I can see why people like it, but I don't have any desire to wear it myself because I don't feel that it's 'for me'. I don't know.

What I mean by that with anime in particular is that the cultural differences really stand out to me, and I've noticed them more and more as I've got older. A lot of them are superficial; body language differs between cultures, and I notice a lot of ways Japanese characters physically behave that's different to how people would behave in the places I'm more familiar with. And even when the words of the language are translated, a lot of Japanese-isms are left in. Th-this hesitant... kind of s-speaking, even how grunts and screams sound, etc (eg a surprised/shocked/agitated out-breath followed by an in-breath which I don't know how to communicate in written words; "uh-huh!"?).

All that stuff doesn't bother me, though it just feels to me like overhearing people speak using jargon I don't know, or bonding over a secret handshake or shared in-jokes, and my internal reaction is to keep my distance rather than daring to act as if I have a place among them. I suppose it all extends to pervasive feelings of alienation that tint everything in my life. I feel the same about 'fandoms', always looking in from the outside but I'd never dare assert my membership as part of the group. I like things, in my own way, but I've never been a fan of anything, really.

It's interesting that anime appeals (or maybe this is a thing that once was but is no longer true?) to Western outcasts because it's different from the culture around them, but I'm a lifelong outcast and it doesn't soothe that in whatever way it does for other people.

Maybe it's not unlike my feelings about tattoos and piercings, which typically appeal to people towards the creative and curious end of the Oppeness trait spectrum because (in part) they seem deviant and maverick, whereas to me they seem too popular and by disliking them, on some subconscious level I'm appeasing my own desire to rebel against perceived conformity. Maybe in my youth I saw that everyone around me was into anime, and that manifested as an aversion that set me apart from them ("well I don't like anime like everyone else does, bleh!"), and that childish belief took root and became entangled with a desire to avoid or feelings of missing out and faliure to belong and... I don't know.

It's all more of a feeling than a carefully-crafted set of ideas or beliefs, though, which is why it's so hard to communicate.

(There are some specific things typical to anime that I do dislike - oversexualisation of prepubescent girls, for example - though there are just as many things I dislike in Western media in general and animation in particular - eg what I'll loosely refer to as 'virtue signalling' - though I don't get this sense of alienation in the same way from it.)



My first exposure to anime was through the Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z ones, dubs of which were big in the West during my teens. I vaguely recall watching Pokemon from the start, though I don't know how long I stuck with it, while I only saw bits of what I now understand are Dragon Ball Z's Frieza Saga and Cell Saga (starting with the tail end of the former).

I also remember watching the Abridged series on YouTube years ago; I saw more of that than I did the original anime.




I always found Dragon Ball Z quite absurd - a bunch of angry-eyed muscular men becoming EVER MORE POWERFUL!! at each other - but watching through the gameplay of Kakarot - and finally actually seeing (the highlights of) the whole story - really underlines how silly it all is. It very much comes across as the sort of thing two children might make up as they go along while playing with action figures.

I don't mean that to denigrate it or anything; everything has its place, and it was hugely popular and influential - especially among its target audience of young boys - for good reason. Not everything has to be some nuanced contemplation of life, the universe, and everything, full of fleshed-out three-dimensional characters and deeper, multi-faceted meaning.

Mostly it just got me thinking about the creation process. As far as I'm aware - though I know some of you reading this definitely know more about this than I do and will probably be eager to remedy my ignorance - things like Dragon Ball start off as manga drawn and written by a single creator (mangaka). They then get spun off into a whole media franchise, but those things are all anchored to this single creator still toiling away at the story alone.

I suppose the closest things in the West might be Harry Potter and Game of Thrones? Where a single author was responsible for the entire setting and story and everything and the films and series came into being before the author had finished so there was this feeling of waiting for them before everything else could continue, like an ever-growing armada of ships all tethered to a tiny tugboat.

I just find it interesting as a solo creator myself, seeing this vast forest emerging from a single seed. How much power and weight a single mind can have to shape the world.

I remember something the lovely Jordan Peterson - who I know you all adore - once said, about how true creativity is extremely rare (which I'm assuming - considering his academic background in personality psychology - meant data showed high-Openness people were the stastical minority). Maybe it is; even most artists seem to produce stuff that's derivative (fan works, representational paintings or drawings).

Does that mean then that I'm one of these SPECIAL PEOPLE with this RARE GIFT to come up with new ideas and I'M BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE AND AND AND?!?!

...Wonders the 36-year-old jobless nutcase from his tiny room in his parents' house. Ugh. If I were to be the bearer of some rare gift - the thought of seriously believing that makes me shudder - it's been far more of a curse to me than a blessing.

I suppose most creators make derivative stuff because it's very rare that the stars align and some solitary artist manages to make a meaningful impact, not due to their arts' quality, but due to being in the right place at the right time. And since familiarity is everything - we're more receptive to things we already know how to deal with - milking that for all it's worth is the path to monetary success which is all this world seems to revolve around... Grumble.

I find it sort of annoying, personally, checking the wiki for one of these anime franchises and seeing the sheer volume of stuff that's been pumped out derived from it. I can't even be bothered counting how many entries there are in this ∞ List of Dragon Ball Video Games ∞, for example. Would it even be possible for a single person to keep up with it all? Would anyone want to? How much of it is high-quality? Is it fulfilling for the many minds working on those things?

No doubt there's as much - or more - The Simpsons -branded rubbish out there, though, so it's hardly specific to anime.

Would I personally prefer a world where everyone was a portal to their own elaborate dreamed-up universe, though? Probably not. That'd be even more difficult to keep up with. Keeping up with others' unique real-world universes is hard enough (for me, at least).



I meant to write something about the usual mental health stuff this weekend, but was prompted to write this mostly due to just reading about that creator's death. Sad, that, as it always is when the world loses someone so influential.