#posting this partly due to how polarized ppl are being about E V E R Y T H I N G on this blue hellscape

[elkian]

Right after I started middle school - this would be around 2003 - I joined the Art Club. It wasn’t a really big thing, just a handful of kids gathering in this loft area doing mostly beadwork until our parents picked us up. It got dissolved later in the year due to lack of interest.

I remember not being big into drawing up til that point, definitely more sculpture than anything. But one thing I really remember was an older kid telling us about a hilarious scene in a fic she had read. I had never heard of the source material, so she told me about it and where to find volumes. 

This is how I got into Inuyasha.

I’d always had an avid interest in fantasy, monsters, and monster-human romances, so Inuyasha was right up my alley. The fact that the volumes were mirrored made it hugely more accessible to my young 12-year-old brain. I’d also picked up an issue of Dragon Ball Z out of curiosity - I’d seen a few episodes but we didn’t get cable until after I graduated high school, and this was well before streaming and video sites like CrunchyRoll or Youtube got off the ground. I actually read that entire DBZ issue backwards before realizing how it was supposed to work, whoops.

I slowly realized that some things I was already into - Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, the brief glimpses of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z that I’d had access to - fell under the category of Anime&Manga. I loved cartoons, but I was not nearly as passionate about any Western cartoon as I was about Anime.

I consumed pretty much every manga in the school library. I ordered Inuyasha - and later Full Metal Alchemist - DVDs off of Netflix. At some point, I was introduced to Naruto, and ended up subscribing to Shonen Jump every month for most, if not all, of high school.

From what felt like day 1, the first time I read Inuyasha in that middle school, I drew obsessively. I filled notebooks not with notes, but with thousands of drawings of heavily-Inuyasha-based characters. If I looked around the house right now, I could probably find 20 of those, and it still would not be all of them.

Thanks to Shonen Jump, I became a huge fan of Yu Yu Hakusho - probably not least in part due to it being one of the only series they showed that didn’t skip 20 chapters suddenly at random (aka the reason I gave up on Naruto). Yu Yu Hakusho was probably the first anime series I watched in full, and I know for sure that I watched every episode twice because the DVDs I got had different subtitles for the English and Japanese dubs. It was an experience.

Years later, I looked back on Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2 and realized... that they’re not actually that great. Takahashi’s stories are repetitive and become weak for it, quirky character traits sometimes break suspension of disbelief when they conflict with the plot, etc. Nostalgia covered a lot of those issues on previous rereads, but its problems are now staring me in the face.

Do I regret reading Inuyasha? No.

Could it be better? Definitely. 

Do I have a problem with people who are into it, who love it, who enjoy even knowing its flaws? No way! 

My feelings towards those old series are similar to my feelings towards my old art - embarrassing in places, but I literally wouldn't be who, or where, I am without them.

In 2016, I received my Associates degree in 2D Animation. And that is, in no small part, thanks to Inuyasha.