How the Christian, Home-schooled Otaku Became Just That

Konnichiwa! It's the Christian, home-schooled, otaku here!
This week's Japanese word is: Onee (Big Sister) {Pronounced: Oh-nay}
Now it's time for the story of how I got caught up in the sand-trap known as anime.
I say "sand trap" for a very good reason: see, once you really get into anime, there's really no way to get out of it. You'll find yourself squealing over fictional people for pretty much the rest of your life. It's really not as miserable as it sounds, but you might die laughing from inside jokes that you share with your anime friends.
So this is my story. I should mention that much of the following incorporates my sister. Since I am home-schooled and have no friends that I get to see on a daily basis, my big sister, for all intents and purposes, IS my best friend.
Yeah.

   I was young in that Golden Age of children's television known as the late 90's when Pokemon was all the rage... well, more than it is now. But my mother did not let me watch Pokemon. She did, however, let us watch Digimon, one of those lesser known substitutes for possibly the most popular kid's anime ever to air on television.
 Out of the six seasons of Digimon, my sister and I watched only four. The first, in our opinion, was the best; the second series was crap, the third was okay, and by the fourth season, our interest was starting to wane and our mom's mindset that "Japanese cartoons are evil" was starting to rub off on us. So in about 2002, we abandoned our dear Digimon and steered clear of anime: anime of any kind. We moved on to better things like Harry Potter and more recently Percy Jackson, and period drama. Our time was occupied by drooling over charming British actors in cravats and tight trousers.
   We developed the policy that anyone who like anime had officially achieved "Dork Status". We didn't have anything against people who liked anime, we just thought that they could have better taste in television. I stuck to that idea for pretty much all of my elementary and middle school life. Somewhere along the line my sister and I discovered a delightful sport called tennis and just fell in love with it. We payed (and still do pay) distinct attention to the four Grand Slams, as well as establishing our favorite players.
    Neither of us had any inkling that tennis might get us in to anime. But it did.
    In 2010, that sister of mine lazily searching for those silly online "Which Tennis Player are You?" quizzes just for something to do.
    But she couldn't find any for tennis. No. All that turned up on the screen of the particular quiz site was quizzes for The Prince of Tennis. So she decided to take one, just to see what Prince of Tennis was. She soon found that it was an anime. She then did something not out of character, but still unexpected: she decided to watch a few episodes. Now, she started watching the OVA's*, but she got the general idea of the thing. And she liked it.
Oh, she did this all on her own time. But in our tiny house, the computer is located in the living room, behind our mom's recliner and... the chair that isn't mom's off-limits-to-anyone-but-Mom Lay-Z-Boy. I do tend to turn around on this chair and lean on the back so as to talk to my sister. From this chair I sneaked peeks of what Nee-san* was watching, and when I realized what it was the only words that came out of my mouth were: "Is that anime? Seriously?"
Nee-san took the time over the next two weeks or so to try and convince me that this tennis anime wasn't totally lame. And it worked. She told me about most of the main characters including her favorite, Tezuka Kunimitsu, the bespectacled and seriously cool captain of the protagonist team. After this, I actually asked her about the first character I seen, Kaidoh Kaoru, a surly and unsociable supporting protagonist who is famous for wearing a bandanna and is popularly known as viper. He incidentally became my instant favorite... but I drift, and digress.
Essentially I got sucked into anime too, and in March of 2010, I watched my first full episode of anime since I stopped watching Digimon.

"But this anime was different," we said. "It's about sports; it's about tennis. Not cute monsters that you store in red and white balls."
We also tried to swear that The Prince of Tennis was the ONLY anime we were going to watch. Because it was about tennis.
That worked out soooo well.
When you've been a fan of anime, it sticks with you, and if you ever start to watch it again, it's probably there to stay. Watching Prince of Tennis brought back all of the idiosyncrasies of Japanese animation that I dearly loved and had nearly forgotten, like anger marks and sweat drops*. It was nostalgic for me, and I adore nostalgia.

We got through Prince of Tennis and all it's OVA's and filler arcs twice between March and June. That's when, in July, Nee-san said that there was another anime that she was getting interested in. This one was called Vampire Knight which is basically the grossly more entertaining and better quality anime equivalent of the Twilight series, except that there are noNative American, Abercrombie model, pseudo-werewolves, no correlation with an Italian vampire hierarchy, and very little sparkling to be seen.
Instead, Vampire Knight is all attractive vampires/vampire hunters all the time, as well as angst and blood-lust and all that classic preternatural romance stuff.
By August we'd moved on to an anime called Gakuen Alice. Then in September came our first FUNimation anime, Ouran High School Host Club, which we'd finished in about a week and a half, by which time we came to our first slightly popular anime, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I won't explain why we didn't want to bother with the so-called "original" Fullmetal Alchemist anime and skipped right to the really good one.
Then came, Black Butler, and Fruits Basket in October and by December we'd made it through the entire first series of Naruto. When January rolled around we started on Bleach and since then we've managed to get tangled up in the likes of Slam Dunk, the 90's basketball classic; Nodame Cantabile, which centers around messy college classical pianist Noda Megumi and Chiaki Shinichi, a handsome conductor with a crippling fear of heights; Hetalia: Axis Powers, which allegorically misrepresents world history with ridiculously cute guys; Big Windup!, a great baseball anime centering around the cutest pitcher in the history of Japanese boys' high school baseball; Baccano!, a fabulous, if somewhat confusing, prohibition era drama incorporating the mafia, an immortality elixir and Bonnie and Clyde's clueless and contagiously happy doppelgangers; and finally Sgt. Frog, the best kid's anime about colorful space frogs invading Earth ever to be devised.

Somewhere in the middle of this I was talking to my cousin who happens to watch a lot of anime. I said that I wasn't quite a full-blown fan-girl yet. He said "Just wait: a few more months and you'll be as sad as the rest of us." He was sort of right.
I'm not saying that I'm miserable because of anime, far from it. It's just that I find it difficult to have a conversation with anyone without managing to drag anime into it. This makes it difficult to talk to people without boring them to death.

Otherwise, anime is a great, great thing. It sparked my love for Japan, it's language, it's culture, and it's people; and it gave me the ambition to become a voice actress to rival The Boss, Brina Palencia. Not an easy feat, but I intend to do it.
Some day.

This is the story of the Christian, home-schooled Otaku.


Next time we get to the interesting stuff. In the next post, I'll actually talk about an anime, and not my boring back-story.


 Footnotes__________________________________________________________________________

*OVA stands for Original Video Animation. They are direct to DVD long episodes or movies which are produced as a continuation for an anime series. Some OVA's are fabricated specifically for the anime. Others, such as the Prince of Tennis OVA's portray canon material that wasn't featured in the anime series.

*The Japanese word for this blog post, as can be viewed above, is Onee which does mean big sister; but the O part is optional and merely a sign of respect for the family member in question. Omitting the "O" is not disrespectful, it's just more casual.
San is an all purpose, fail-safe honorific title that can apply to anyone of any age, gender, or social standing. If you can offend a Japanese person when using this title, there is little hope for you.

*I'll tell you more about these anime visual effects in a future post.

An Observation by a Christian, Home-schooled Otaku

Konnichiwa! This is the Home-schooled Otaku. Today I'm going to introduce the"Japanese Word of the Week." Every post will be accompanied by a randomly (or possibly not so randomly) selected Japanese word and it's translation.
This week's Japanese word is: Seiyuu (Voice Actor)

Something I've observed: There seem to be many different degrees of being a fan of anime.
First off you have those more common people who are really only interested in a handful of anime which are already popular here in the west; shows like Dragon Ball or Naruto or Fullmetal Alchemist. This type of anime fan is probably only interested in the anime itself and doesn't pay much attention to the sort of "behind the scenes" stuff that goes along with it. They can probably only name one or two American voice actors off of the tops of their heads - usually Vic Mignogna or Crispin Freeman... possibly J. Micheal Tatum, your homework this week is to Google them if you don't know who they are - let alone any Japanese voice actors. This type of anime fan will most likely not care whether they get to watch their anime in Japanese or in English and won't care to pay attention to the quality of the English voice work in comparison to the Japanese.

Then there are the fans who have a marked preference for the English dub of anime. They were probably introduced to anime by the English dub and never cared to take the time to watch their anime in the original Japanese. They figure "Why bother?" They already know what will happen in the story; when you watch it with subtitles, you can never quite catch all of what's happening on the screen, AND to them, Japanese "just sounds like gibberish."
Fans of American anime will probably, as opposed to the first category that I mentioned, know A LOT of american voice actors and be able to name which studios those voice actors are affiliated with. For instance Actors like Yuri Lowenthal and Stephanie Sheh mostly do voice work for VIZ Media, whereas Todd Haberkorn, J. Micheal Tatum and Brina Palencia are affiliated with FUNimation Entertainment.
Many fans of English dub may prefer FUNimation's anime over VIZ's or vice-versa. It depends on what they are familiar with. English dub fans may also listen to pod-casts such as That Anime Show and may be as big a fan of the production staff as the anime itself.

Then you have the strictly Japanese dub ONLY otaku: Those purists in all things anime who s firmly have the mentality that all English dub anime is crap on a screen. With this type, I can only speak from my own experience.
I used to fit into this group. I discovered anime when my sister introduced me to Prince of Tennis. Since, of course, VIZ Media only released and dubbed the first fifty episodes of that particular anime, we had to make do with fan subtitled versions of the episodes, which we subsequently lost access to and had to make due with the officially released episodes of which, as I mentioned above, VIZ only managed to hash up the first fifty. I think I may say with little contradiction, that both the VIZ dub-work and subtitles are dull and, to the sincere PoT fans, excruciatingly painful to listen to, but that tangent is for another post.
    While I only beat down on VIZ Media's dub-overs, I'm afraid that many have followed my poor example of thinking that the talent displayed in VIZ's work is sum-total of all American voice work. Many have likely only watched one episode of English dub and, if they're anything like me, had to turn it off halfway through the episode because the found the English to be painful and cheesy. With all fairness, these otaku aren't entirely wrong. I have found that certain English dub-overs other than Prince of Tennis, don't pass muster. I should say, though, that I would not make the foolish mistake of saying that ALL those who prefer the original Japanese only do so because they haven't given the English a chance. I'm not that stupid.
The last of many characteristic's that I can list for this particular brand of otaku is that they have more of a tendency to be picky about how the names are said. I still do this. They may crucify any English dub in which they mispronounce Japanese names, put the names in Western order (first name before last), or, heaven forbid, actually try to translate honourifics or those cute little idiosyncratic lexicon that certain character put on the ends of all of their sentences like dane or de arimasu.

Lastly, we have those otaku who like both English and Japanese dub. The people who pay attention to who voices what character in both versions, and what is more, will want to listen to both and compare the performances. They can not only name all those more obscure American voice actors like Alexis Tipton and Micah Solusod, and Scott Freeman, but also some of the Japanese ones like Fukuyama Jun, Ono Daisuke, Fujiwara Keiji, Okiayu Ryoutarou, Orikasa Fumiko, ect. This type may, depending on whether or not they first listened to the English or Japanese, prefer to use the eastern order of names (Family name before given name), but have come to terms with the fact that, in the interests of the greater public, NO American studio is going to use the eastern order of names.

This all is just my take on some different kinds of anime fans. Please don't crucify me if you find that I've "labeled" you or tried to corral you into some kind of stereotype. I wasn't trying to.

This is just the type of thing you have time to observe when you're a Christian, Home-schooled Otaku.

Next time I think I'll talk a bit about just how I came to get caught up in anime/manga.