bleedingmyway-blog

[bleedingmyway-blog]

Disenchantment with japanese culture

I've always been a weeaboo. To me, that is the one subculture I've always identified to in the same manner that a sports fan may immediately and proudly answer that they've been a madridista/yankees fan for as long as they can remember. I have been watching anime since I was a wee young lad; at the time I was growing up, french television was ripe with animated shows that were the result of collaborations between japanese and french/italian societies (these collaborations themselves the result of laws instigated by european countries to reduce the invasion of japanese shows on children's tv).

While said shows were closer to cartoons and typically had a more western thematic, there also was a channel called "Manga" which aired a lot of anime, and I'm not talking about older anime that was already fully voiced by the early 00s, i'm talking about anime which was pretty recent at the time and already voiced in french : cowboy bebop, wolf's rain, gurenn lagan, as well as some classics (which at the time were not-so-classic and more obscure) such as neon genesis evangelion, fullmetal alchemist, code geass, amongst others.

I grew to absolutely loathe live-action TV (i could not bear to see "real" people on tv as i called them, it irked me to no end as a child) and had gained some sort of an affinity towards japanese culture in general; as cringeworthy as it may sound. Of course, I was also a big fan of super-heroes (like any child), but anime was my "main" thing. It did not help that I was more of a nintendo gamer when i was younger, meaning you'd typically end up with a game between your hands that was more influenced by japanese folklore than say, your average ps3/xbox game at the time.

As soon as I was able to scour the internet for my own devices, I naturally orbited towards the anime sphere -and I wouldn't use the weeaboo term, as i was not really involved in a fandom community-, starting by using the wonders of the internet to rewatch certain anime i was fond of, like city hunter or haisukuru kimengumi (at the time, i found it incredible that you could use youtube/dailymotion to watch any episode of any show you wanted when you wanted to).

I then started getting into the classics, watching/reading death note at the time (and getting ultimately spoiled for no reason whatsoever in middle school, despite being the one to have showed spoilerish classmates the anime), bleach, highschool DxD (which was incredibly trendy at some point), the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya and so on.

I hardly watched any movies save for those that would occasionally air on tv, or series; i was exclusively into anime and reading manga when I was in middle school. I'd like to remind you, dear reader, that the reason you may believe what I'm saying is not too interesting or uncommon -save for my subpar writing skills and failure to keep your interest- is because it has now become widely accepted to indulge in this subculture of anime/manga/japanese culture.

I shall not go into detail, but whereas it is now conventionally acceptable to go out wearing an anime shirt or tell your co-worker you spent the friday night watching the latest one piece episode with your friend/partner, I grew up in a time where this was seen as incredibly nerdy, cringeworthy, and anime was typically known as "chinese cartoons". You couldn't just up and go wear an anime shirt either; you'd have better luck trying to tell a chick about your last wow raid than try to greet somebody without getting weird stares directed at your chest. Worse : an outgoing weeaboo was basically seen as a walking talking -and sweating- cringemachine by other more recluse weeaboos.

There was some sort of an excitement to finding someone else who bore the curse of taking drawn big eyed and pink haired girls making a transformation into a bikini outfit for the sole purpose of fighting seriously, and indulge as well as recommend each other anime. By the time I went to highschool, I was deeper into the entire thing : i started watching more moe anime (which i equate to the moment where regular substance use becomes addiction), getting involved in pretty obscure animemes community (i am talking about the weird love live! plushie memes, kemono friends and such) as well as watching more obscure anime such as serial experiments lain, ergo proxy, casshern sins, and others i am probably missing. You may find me a pedant for calling these obscure, but prior to instagram (sadly) making the boa opening song trending -i cannot describe the feeling when i first heard it on instagram on a coworker's story and being in complete disbelief- lain was quite obscure and there wasn't a lot to be found about it save for the very closed online forum, the cyberia music, and a lot of theories. By college, i was mostly reading manga, going for things like Dorohedoro, Blame!, that one with the fish/mushroom girl (shimeji watchacallit) and so on.

But at the time, it felt like fodder. I was going through a pretty rough phase. I numbed my general misery by cramming in as much obscure manga, anime and fan art as possible : it helped keep me away from thinking at all. I hardly participated in online communities as I did before : i was content in my lonely indulgement, and I felt like my tastes were a tad too specific for me to bond with people who had a budding love for anime which was starting to get some pretty serious traction before covid hit (attack on titan, my hero academia and such becoming increasingly popular). But I also listened to a lot of american music, read more and more american books as well as started really getting into movies. As covid hit, I was pretty much over that very nasty phase of depression I was going through; and with it, I quit accessing the twitter account which was filled with obscure japanese artists, and started unsubscribing to pages of meme content for some communities i no longer felt like i was identifying to. I still watched anime, but treated it more like a medium which had gems but mostly had content that didn't further me in my litterary and spiritual pursuits as western media did : there was no japanese equivalent to the "holy mountain" movie by alejandro jodorovsky or to naked lunch. I also got into marvel comics during covid, which frankly didn't help.

But lastly : i felt like i no longer belonged in the anile community.

One, I didn't like the mainstream stuff. It irked me, isekais were too generic, i had my dose of shonen in my teens and mainstream anime wasn't my cup of tea. I couldn't really communicate with new weeaboos : i felt like we belonged to two different worlds. Seeing someone wearing anime merch in 2021 hit different than seeing that in 2011.

Second, I didn't identify with weeaboos either. I wasn't one of the weird wehraboos who would go on strange alt-right rants while having a girls und panzer pfp, and I also apparently was too outgoing for certain communities - i don't consider myself extroverted, but i'm not exactly keen on spending my day in a community loathing "normies" and "stacies".

Don't get me wrong : there are some wonderful people my age in those moe anime communities, but the amount of alt right/self-loathing creeps i'd have to wade through demotivates me. I was growing more uncomfortable with weeaboos in general. As time progressed, i developped new interests, and the more i indulged in them, the less I felt a connection to the weeaboo community. And as of 2024, I simply haven't watched a single anime/read any manga, for the first time in my life.

I no longer "feel" those memes, which are either sexually innapropriate (and i certainly don't write this to get anybody'd approval, i just sincerely believe loli memes are not funny and just concerning past a certain age) nor for the more bizarre female archetypes portrayed; i believe interacting with a woman on a level other than platonic one allows you to see that "anime mommies" are just the result of massive sexual frustration in the japanese anime culture. And finally, on the subject of portrayal of sexuality in anime/manga, I have no interest in getting into some bullcrap manga because it's "not like the cuckoo liberal western shitty content ! animu still shows us breasts !". I'll watch something if I judge it to be interesting enough, not because I want to make consuming any media some sort of an act of revolution.

So, ultimately, I don't know where that leaves me. I still love anime. I still love the fan art, i still feel like watching some classics which I've never watched or finished, but I think I've grown overall disenchanted with it. Anime/manga cutesy tropes just upset me now, character archetypes don't feel realistic to me, and so on so forth. I don't think I've got much to say left save for thank you for reading if you've made it this far.

[bleedingmyway-blog]

Une Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome to my tumblr blog; where you shall find an assortment of schoolboard chalk scented nostalgic rants on things which have no incidence whatsoever on our lives, pseudo-intellectual ramblings on certain social phenomenons and trends that i would honestly be better off adopting myself (giving them deeper thought makes me feel legitimate in my manic bouts of isolation) as well as semi-literate attempts at sounding like a witty accomplished writer; when in reality I am just a am no more than just a 23 year old man trying to make his way into the world.

I am not a woman, although not devoid of womanly features -do thin lips count as womanly features ?- , not jewish -albeit a strong believer in numerology-, a decently good gambler -i only gamble using my friend's money once they leave the table, i like to think of it as investing their money in risky assets-, and a mercenary at the service of broken hearts.

I happen to have a lot of pass-times and centers of interests, that I shall list here :

role playing games, which naturally excludes a majority of fps games and includes lesser known games that do involve shooting like jagged alliance and the earlier Fallout games

music, i pride myself in the legitimacy of my i-listen-to-everything claim, my favorite band being king crimson (their 80s era, nonetheless)

philosophy, occult and psychology; i thought to lump them together as my personal mental mosaic paints them side by side, as these subjects are interlinked and learning about them is a daily goal of mine

literature, and ironicaly i've not much to say about this one, i can't pride myself in being a voracious reader nor have i read the classics, but i greatly value literature in general. i'm also a big fan of the beat generation authors, as you may have noticed

i also ought to add that i have been a weeaboo for most my life; and while i am absolutely not ashamed of it, i frankly haven't indulged in japanese culture for quite some time. so, do not expect too many posts containing references to anime, manga and such, but there may be the occasional focus on a piece of japanese media that i like

cinema ! marlon brando, sean connery, de niro,charles bronson and such are my own heroes

there seems to be little i could add that would serve you more, dear reader, than I in the stroking of my weak ego by going on about my oh-so-dear hobbies. i hope you'll have a good time reading my posts and interacting with yours truly nevertheless, as i hope my introduction wasn't too boring to read !

[bleedingmyway-blog]

am i a reluctant pokemon fan ?

so far, both of the posts i've made here touch the subjects of pokemon/nintendo. it would be sort of stupid to make the third post ever say "i actually hate pokemon". so instead, i'll borrow the words a youtuber used to describe his relationship with kingdom hearts and call myself a "reluctant pokefan". why reluctant, and not ex you ask ?

for the simple fact that i still massively enjoy past episodes. in my life, there has not been a year where i haven't played an older pokemon game on a mobile emulator or dusted off the old 3ds to play some 4th/5th gen pokemon. while i've grown bored of a number of games that i have played too much during a period of time (dark souls 1 comes to mind), pokemon is really the only franchise i go back to; serving both purposes of being somewhat of a comfort game and genuine entertainment.

my latest emerald run, i had to grind like a mad dog to get my hands on a feebas

the reason i mention "genuine entertainment" like an android awkwardly trying to describe human feelings is because i know a lot of pokemon fans outgrew the franchise after discovering more complicated rpg/mon sagas like shin megami tensei, romancing saga, digimon and thus no longer draw an actual feeling of satisfaction and entertainment from the games. but to me, despite playing more rpgs over the years, i've never really stopped having fun playing the games. i will fully admit nostalgia plays into it, but it is definitely not enough to make me sink 40-50 hours into a given pokemon game (that i've most likely already played) every 6 months. the older games, while not being necessarily complicated gameplay wise (i remind myself sometimes that for the longest time the game was aimed at children) all have their own brand of uniqueness, which in my opinion, stretches further than gimmicks each game has. atmosphere, characters, the general artistic direction for the pokemons and the folklore for each generation makes each game worth playing for me. regardless of whether you think the battle system has not evolved at all in more than 20 years, that there the dressing aspect of pokemon has not gained any depth whatsoever, that the lore sometimes fails to stick together, that the game retain too much of their linear modus operandi over each opus, the pokemon experience offered by the older games couldn't be find anywhere else. all these examples of critics i quoted happen to be a few of the gripes i have against the entire franchise, which have amplified over the years.

Hence, my being a reluctant fan.

while what you've read so far has been almost like a letter to a long lost lover, what you're going to read is an aveu of hatred and disgust towards the direction taken by the games after the 7th generation (i personally judge pokemon sun/moon to be the last good games). don't expect an objective argumentary about why it's bad, cold hard facts or post ironic memes : i simply am going to express my hate for the mediocrity game freak subjects itself to.

i am not going to go into details about how vomit inducing the textures look (hint : i think it looks like actual gameplay from one of those crappy chinese mmorpgs that you see advertised on shady torrenting websites). how, in 2020, pokemon makes its first mainline entry onto a TV system which such godawful graphics, lackluster characters that somehow look inferior to the avatars from a prior mobile game (pokemon go) is beyond me.

lacking 3d animations, battles still load up in an enclosed area where the trainer is nowhere to be seen, pokemons remain static, simple looped animations with not even a god damn idle animation, something that mid 90s point n click games had for chrissake. it is unbelievable game freak went on about the pokedex not including enough pokemons as to concentrate on the ones they're going to be using when truthfully, you couldn't put less work into what's already in the game if you wanted. "it could be worse" yeah, sure, if they didn't just lazily re-use the animations from the 3ds

and you may argue that this had always been the case, to which i'll answer that the only example of gf being this lazy was the shameless copy/paste of the post-league house of battles (whatever its name was) in ORAS; considering the original one in XY was already incredibly lackluster. i actually suspect gamefreak started getting real lazy around that time the way, providing players with the bare bones minimum of pokemon games : expect that's the thing, it's no more interesting than a plain bowl of white rice with nothing on it. pokemon, at its base form, is rpg so behind and archaic that it could be called backwards. features that have existed for 2 decades in mainstream jrpgs such as wild life encounters and beast riding are seen as good additions, while the series was conditionned to smaller machines with weak technical capabilities, the limitations were excusable, but i refuse to ever pay for the undercooked pieces of garbage that nintendo has somehow been able to churn out at a faster rythm than back when the games were made for smaller formats; and on top of that, pouring a thick greasy nasty sauce of dlcs on top.

legendaries that no longer have any connection to existing folklore/mythical symbolism, flagship legendary pokemons being just recolors of each other. jesus christ, scarlet and violet were centered around the gimmick of motorcycle dragons being ridable and somehow nintendo manages to flip the middle finger by making said pokemons CRAWL on top of being extremely buggy

let us ignore, once again, the awful graphics (final fantasy XII on ps2 somehow looked better in its pixelated glory)

the problem is not the choice of gimmicks or pokemons whatsoever, that's up do debate, we've had for each ds game a gimmick to act as a placeholder of the lower screen, but there's no soul left, and as to define this vague concept; not spontaneity from the devs, no extra-work to make the player smile as he thinks "they didn't have to do this but i like it", like getting something on the house from a burger joint you already love. no, you can truly feel that even though nintendo has always been multi billion dollar company, they now decide to make money on unfinished games, capitalizing on a new demographic of older players who won't mind spending 50, 60 bucks on the lastest pokemon game no matter how shamefully mediocre it is.

i think i'll stop here as i would have to go deeper into detail, but frankly, i feel like i could go on forever, with more structure, and yet, it feels childish because this is ultimately the result of disappointment at the downhill slope a loved franchise that occupied a big role when i was younger is taking.

thanks for reading once again, and do tell if you've any objections or remark concerning something i said

[bleedingmyway-blog]

on the subject of nintendo hype, i also miss pokemon hype pre XY (which are already 11 years old, wow !), which i know is : 1- oddly specific 2- really old ? i'm talking about basically, back in 2006-2007. now, while i was pretty much a kid back then, i remember that the internet was only useful for three things for me back then : 1 cartoon/anime openings (the dragonball Z op was the first thing i ever searched for on youtube) 2 videogame help and 3 pokemon. whenever i had access to the internet, i'd look for stupid fan art of pokemon fusions, fanfics shipping a variety of the characters from the series and news on the games.

the reason why i specified before XY is because Pokemon X/Y were the first episodes of the series to be announced globally.

on tuesday 8th of january 2013, pokemon xy was announced. i remember running home from school at 12 to open my laptop (that i had left on in the morning so i wouldn't waste a single second) to see the trailer

you have to understand that before, the games were first announced in japan, released there and then eventually announced for the rest of the world (europe, usa) and released. this was a BIG event. but prior to xy, unless you could speak japanese and lived there, you were practically left in the dark about the most recent pokemon news/events. "why not watch the trailer in japanese then and quit dramatizing past events lol ? "

the reason is that back then, a trailer was the culmination of months and months of mystery and hype. you didn't get the trailer first. rumors would circulate from "insiders" and so called trust worthy leakers from japanese and american image boards that a game was in the works (and these rumors would usually start 6-9 months after the release of the most recent mainline game), then speculations about the region, thematic, features would start; i remember how each gen we had someone saying "this time, we'll be able to explore ALL regions !" or "this is going to be open-world in 3d on the TV console !".

remember : the internet was a much more decentralized entity back in the mid/late 00's. information did not drip down from a single verified source on 3-4 social media accounts ; it spread unevenly, gathering misinformation, theories and the interpretation of the relayer along the way. you're probably going to ask "well, if you didn't get it from the official twitter/facebook (this is 2008), where did you get the info from ?"

we got it the old fashioned way. i present to you, the corocoro magazine

the magazine, launched in 1977 is a children's mag that advertised a variety of manga and most importantly video games to a younger audience. and you would not believe how dependant the online pokemon community was on this magazine : any info concerning a new game, teasers, shadows for the shapes of starters would be there. mind you, google trad was not as developped as it is today : you couldn't just up and whip out your phone to translate the text from your computer screen. you had to wait for translators to do so; and boy, was it exciting. i remember how on the french pokemon bubble, it was a race between various websites to translate the info first ; either from the english translation, or directly from the source, if they could comprehend japanese.

source : japanese TV show "Pokemon Sunday" circa 2010-11

and since i mentionned shadows, here is a tradition that sadly disappeared : shadows of the new gen starters as a teaser. surely, i don't have to name or even show you the starters on the picture above for you to recognize them. instead, let us see how creative such teasers got the community :

(i'm too lazy to currently fire up the wayback machine and get some of the fan designs which i remembered to be quite interesting back then)

and so it went on: drip fed teasers, leaks and speculations about info that we take for granted now, like the very names of the new pokemon in english, of the rival and the game's evil team, new or returning mechanics, etc. the hype would go on, info would become clear as we near the japanese release, then once it does, we all sit behind our screens jealous at the lucky ones who either lived in japan or uhm, accidentally received an online package containing a rip of the game's file (jokes aside to avoid getting censored, if this was the case, the games would have safety patches that didn't allow it to be read by the current firmware of jailbroken consoles).

the lucky ones would document their adventure, some try to prepare guides in advance for the international release, others cook-up fan translations ; and at that point, theories have begun. all before we even get the game !

to be honest, i did not expect this to be this long, but as i wrote, i remembered more and more, and like an old sailor, got to recall why i was so excited for pokemon back then. i lived for the hype : play pokemon, next game gets announced, get on the hype train, write theories, debate with other fans on forums, convince people that we're not getting a 3rd gen remake on the Nintendo DS, game releases, rinse, wash and repeat.

to me, this entire topic is an interesting look at the aspect of a bigger topic; the centralization of the internet over the years and the controlled spread of information. of course, i won't get into this here or now, but i'll also add that whatever i put down does somewhat apply to not only nintendo but also games from japanese manufacturers as well : even more obscure light novels on ps4 are getting releases in various languages now. before, you needed a japanese console to play japanese games, a german game would not work on an american console, etc. i am not necessarily nostalgic for this - it was annoying, and some of us missed many games because of it. but i will admit that the absence of teasers and hype when you can just datamine or immediately get the info on twitter from a game dev is saddening. i shall leave you, dear reader, with this trailer for pokemon black and white 2 that had me excited for a month :

[bleedingmyway-blog]

i really miss being a nintendo fan sometimes

i havent really cared for nintendo since i've been playing almost exclusively on ps4 (and now, on pc) for a few years but before, i'd been a fan for really long

i miss getting hyped up for the nintendo directs, speculating about remakes of zelda/pokemon games and *cough* metroid prime 4 *cough*, then counting how many of the games announced are going to be jap exclusive releases (which i'm not saying sarcastically as i'd typically end up getting some sort of an english patch for them either way)

legit, there used to be such a special kind of nintendo micro-environment because of how exclusive nintendo tends to be, everyone would be talking about the games they'd get on the pc/xbox/ps trinity and exclusivities here and there while nintendo wasn't really getting any of it save for shovelware or yearly games (just dance, fifa)

tbh, i don't know if i just outgrew nintendo or if they legitimately lost some of the "magic" associated with their brand, objectively it would probably be more of the latter, since nintendo started charging for the online services, churning out dlcs for pokemon games, and so on so forth

but then you could argue that it has always been the case and quite frankly, that wouldn't be wrong, nintendo is a multinational corporation and like any other, its primary goal is profit

with all this being said, all of this i just expressed is typically a passing case of nostalgia i happen to feel, much like i would for stumbling upon an old picture, an album i haven't listened to for a long time, etc. i'm quite satisfied with the gaming systems i use rn and the games i play so its not one of the rants that go on about how games suck nowadays. anyways, if anyone did read this, thanks for doing so until the end