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I started watching anime in 2006. A friend on my college hall was watching different shows and I'd slide by his door and see Zombies getting mowed down by a guy in a red outfit, or teddy bears in full military gear... one day I walked in on him watching DN Angel and stayed for the whole episode. Ever since then, I've never made time to watch DN Angel... maybe someday I will.
I lost access to my old account, and figure that instead of adding everything back in I'll simply start recording again from 10/9/2024. Allowing any long form shows I'm in the midst of onto the list once I resume them, and otherwise starting fresh. I am somewhat curious to see how my viewing patterns look to me shorn of my familiar tall mountain of finished shows and movies. I also work better with a progress bar on what I'm doing, like a typical video gamer, so I'm hoping to repopulate my list with all of my favorite shows by revisiting them. I don't watch as much of the new shows these days since I reached capacity for my attention span and can't afford the streaming services... I am what you might call a 70-90% sated anime enthusiast.
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Watching NHK now is like watching a show that has advice to offer, but it's not clear if it is the needed advice, or if it knows what it needs to say to be as helpful as it wants to be, it's trying to reach in to talk to someone who may not be trying to reach back, but anime being anime, when we sit down to watch it, we let feelings, motives, and thoughtfulness in, that if we received it from an actual person at some point in certain mindstates, we'd pull back and receive the advice with less grace, or appreciation, if we accepted it at all.
Between when I was younger and when I've gotten older my thoughts on anime as a storytelling device have shifted over the years, there's an element of subtext to the story, or what I like to call the subtextual conversation the 'known' author wants to have with an anonymous audience that cannot be reached in other more straightforward ways. One of the smaller pieces of that conversation pops out to me in episode 14 when the character of the island owner speaks to the rest of the in show group about not being able to see a path forward because of their narrowmindedness that hasn't explored all the options to see a path forward. To me, that's a piece of 'Welcome to the NHK' that became author advice to the external audience, advice that I didn't recognize as such until I hit a point in my life where I followed that kind of advice and then noticed it, sitting there in the script, jutting out awkwardly like a handle for me to grab onto in the show's dialogue. There was a period when I had reached the end of my mental rope and was stuck with a lot of mental hangups on how I was to be, what I was to believe, and what could be done that, coupled with the world I was living in, had pinned my mind down in a moment where I could not proceed, so I had only one option in my mind left, and that was that I could not continue.
That was a decade ago, so I have continued to be, and what happened there in that one small moment of despair is that I had a childhood religion instilled in me that was eating away at me from the inside, self limiting me and creating a lot of irl strife that created the imaginary script that there was no exit... a kind of mental, going to hell if you die, but the longer you stay, the more confidence there was that everything was pointing toward going to hell, and that's not a very good thought to have to live with, it kind of wears on the mind of a child, teen, grownup, like a craggy boulder eventually is smoothed down to a small smooth pebble in a rushing river.
I in that moment, had a child's sense of what going to hell was like, and that it was a frightful thing to be avoided at all costs, but as a grownup, I reached a point where I couldn't continue to be afraid of going there, or I could not continue to be. So, I had a moment where I decided to let go of my religious upbringing completely... a thing I'd held onto for such a long time, and taken apart carefully for such a long time, that when I finally decided it was time to release my grip and fall off the cliff of unbelief, I instead found myself standing on firm ground with an undiscovered resolve, as my beliefs fell away into the disappearing scream.
I lost a lot of time to the fear of living an unworthy life, feeling alone, and unwanted, and for my troubles, disappearing into some unknown, unwanted place called hell, but when I stopped fearing it, and chose to walk in there and take it, and keep on going, I found the whole fear unraveled in my mind and left me aware of a long dark night of exhaustion, and strikingly unemotional because my brain had grown too tired to hold any emotions.
I love watching Haibane Renmei, it was for a long time, my rainy day comfort show, because I didn't know how to receive, or ask for comfort from real human beings, so I folded into my show on rainy days, when my mood was sour, and found solace for 5 hours in Reki's slow descent stuck on her riddle of sin, while Raka is also emotionally descending and also trying to understand her riddle of sin. I had/(ve -don't see them much anymore,) a friend/acquaintance who's only response to the show's thematic storyline; that it was heretical, and therefore unworthy of being given any further thought). I received the riddle of sin despite its apparent heretical structure and pondered it a long time, and in a way, following Reki and Raka many times down through the cycle of sin, and release, I wasn't able to follow her back out to the other side, but I pondered where a story like that comes from. I tried to write a novel, and I didn't have a contextual basis for why stories are written the way they are, but I wanted to try to write a good one, and since I didn't know how to do that, I tried to watch a lot of anime and enjoy a lot of stories, so I could write my own impressive novel that was a pure copycat leaving behind as little telltale signs of the original as possible.
But a good story comes from the heart and the heart does not desire to be a copy, but its own original. I struggled for a long time on my novel trying to understand what my hackwork was missing.
There's an interview Yoshitoshi ABe gave on the Haibane Renmei dvd set where he talked about what he was trying to express in his story, and being very coy, possibly because to be otherwise only fails to impart the feeling, but I watched the interview after watching the show multiple times, and so, as someone trying to get 'there' in my own writing, I paid a lot of attention to what he was saying, even if it was very little, since anime disc interviews tend to be very small.
I suppose, when I didn't know how to look for help, or ask for help, I still wanted help, and that came through in the kinds of anime shows I preferred. I let storytellers send in a trojan horse to break in behind the walls of my mind when I had no way of knowing how to let anyone else in.
And I, the fortress that received the Trojan Horse, was unknowingly looking for how to become the passenger of the Trojan Horse like the storytellers before me. I figured it out (like my own little riddle of sin), albeit inconveniently slowly, and that is why I am still here a decade later.