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.