Thinking about starting an anime blog (again)
我が旅に寄り道あれど先へゆく行き止まりすら戻れば進む
—紅苑幻流
As per the title, I'm playing with the idea of restarting an anime blog. Recently, I've been enchanted by anime once more, possibly more so than at any point since my initial period of admiration for the medium back in 2014–2017, when I was still a naive 17-year-old thinking I knew more than I did, trying desperately to grasp what it means to be and become an adult.
It is very much thanks to anime that I became seriously interested in learning the Japanese language and wanting to immerse myself in the culture, for better or worse, which led me to change universities and my major from media and communication to Japanese studies. Now I am closing in on 30, have been working for more than five years in technical sales at a Japanese company in Germany, lived for more than a year in Japan as a student, and met my girlfriend nine years ago (she might be Japanese, too, but I'll leave it up to your imagination).
One thing I did back then was establish my first online persona outside of online gaming: I created a blog about anime, wrote like three posts, and left it to rot; a pattern all too familiar, even to this day... Through that experience, however, I connected with like-minded people over the internet. Discord had just started becoming a thing at the time. Speaking of Discord, to the one person who messaged me out of the blue after nearly ten years just to ask if I had finished watching HUNTER×HUNTER: I am genuinely sorry for not replying. Also, to finally answer your question, I dropped it during the Chimera Ant arc six years ago (shame on me, I know), but right now I'm (re-)watching it with my girlfriend (currently vibing through Greed Island).^1
Whether it is due to me returning to something I deeply identified with during my adolescence or because of other reasons, these days I find myself in a rather contemplative affect, reflecting on who I am, how I changed, what I want, all while feeling many unclear feelings simultaneously about becoming 30 in about half a year from now. All the while life's responsibilities keep piling up, parents keep getting older, girlfriends keep wanting to become fiancés... yet here I am, putting words into a markdown file on a computer about feeling like nothing more than a stereotypical puer aeternus caring only about himself and the things that bring him joy, entertaining the idea of writing about anime on the internet once more, announcing the very chain-of-thought leading to it on his personal blog.
Surprise, surprise: the judge was me all along. Always has been, and—more importantly—always will be, unless I integrate and keep doing so. Not unlike Shinji's personal arc throughout the course of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I am now rewatching, finally understanding why I had been avoiding it for more than ten years despite me declaring it to be the most formative piece of art I encountered so far in my life...
The idealized version of myself—the persona shaped by how others perceive me, the "me" constructed by my ego, the responsible adult handling everything well—is not a false "me," but very real in fact. Just as real as the shadows I reject, one of them being the me that wants to start another anime blog and is feeling a very denpa-adjacent mood about his own life and the world we live in. Integrating both is the key, I know. My studies of Jung—which I might not have pursued if not for Hideaki Anno—led me to that understanding, but insight all too often fades under the pressure of existence, if it isn't ultimately embodied and cherished through individual experience.
Alas, becoming an adult might simply mean to keep risking hurting others and being hurt in return, and choosing to move onwards because of it, not despite it—because running away won't solve anything, but believing in yourself eventually might.
^1 I texted them just now, 23:22 CEST (UTC+2).