Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

This is going to be a massive shocker to some of you who have had the displeasure of meeting me in real life but I’m not very socially graceful. Now just imagine that even with as awful as it might be now, it could be worse. That was me when I was younger and obsessed with Bleach. I would stay over at my grandparents every Saturday just to watch the latest episode (my dad didn’t believe in cable at the time) and talk about it with none of my friends because I was terrified that this would be a massively damaging blow to my limited social standing and I would be lambasted into oblivion with cruel words and all the other things that a middle schooler would cry in his sleep over. In hind sight, this was a ludicrously stupid notion because I was friends with a kid who had a Lucky Star messenger bag and played Naruto Arena in computer lab but I wasn’t a particularly intellectually gifted middle schooler (and now I’m not a particularly smart adult either!) so that was lost on me. I wanted to talk Bleach and maybe other anime too but I had no outlet. I didn’t have any internet at the time either (dad’s feud with cable extended to internet) so there were no social outlets for me but I did have one thing: an Otaku USA issue with Ichigo freaking Kurosaki on the cover!

My mom did a lot for me to help me to be myself and one of those acts was giving me more Bleach in my life on a regular basis. When she went on vacation, she returned with a bright red shirt with Ichigo on it from what I’m assuming was an FYE or some other store of the sort. When I got dumped by a girl I was way too obsessed with at the start of high school and become socially despondent, she bought me a DVD collection of the second season of Bleach to console me. She even, and I’m finally getting the point here, bought me an expensive ten dollar anime magazine with Ichigo on the cover: Otaku USA.

For the uninitiated, Otaku USA is a quarterly (it was bi-monthly when I first started reading) magazine published out of America that covers EVERYTHING otaku. I put that “everything” in capital letters to help emphasize that Otaku USA wasn’t an anime only magazine. Otaku USA was an otaku magazine… in the USA! Names are great. It had reviews on yaoi manga, there was discourse on figures, and there were even delightful features on Japanese music and albums. It helped me to discover the electronic idol pop group Perfume when I had absolutely zero means to find their music legally. I poured over that issue of Otaku USA until the cover fell away from the binding and then I taped it back. I was enamored with this magazine having a feature on an anime that I loved. I never had that connection with anyone else to talk about my beloved Bleach yet this magazine was highlighting it for everyone who went buy magazines! In my young mind, it meant to me that Bleach mattered to the world at large. I felt less alone that one of my favorite secrets was out on display for people to look over and find out more on the pages within. They wouldn’t put just anything on a magazine cover!

It was enlightening. The editors and authors of the articles within always seemed so witty in ways I couldn’t find myself ever being. I did so much research on their personal preferences and interests to find out what obscure (to me) media that these editors were addressing in their introductions. What was Yakuza? What was Ressentiment? I had no way of knowing unless I delved into the temporary access of the internet I had a school to less than desirable results due to a school content blocker. Still, I would keep their written words etched onto the empty slate of my brain so I could research these things later when I had internet of my own. I was obsessed with the otaku culture within because it was so new and seemed to be so prevalent with nuanced media that I hadn’t seen before. I desperately attempted to get any issue of Otaku USA that my local Wal-Mart offered by checking the magazine rack every single time I was forced into the hellscape of an America South grocery store. This meant that I was very prone to missing issues because an Alabama Wal-Mart has no need for a ten dollar magazine with cartoons on the cover (unless it’s Disney Adventures magazine which wasn’t ten dollars but I just wanted to remind you about Disney Adventures anyways so that’s a moot point). Still, I sought them out and eventually got a subscription for Christmas courtesy of my mom. Thanks again, mom.

So why even talk about Otaku USA? Simply put, it made me embrace the hobby before I could even be involved with anime in a meaningful way. I couldn’t really watch anime that wasn’t on Adult Swim and I didn’t openly talk about it anyways so I didn’t get to have friends who were anime obsessed either. I, however, was allowed to comprehend that anime and otaku culture were a community and that there wasn’t an age restriction to being engaged with it. It wasn’t an odd circumstance to have plastic toys of anime women; there were perfectly well adjusted adults with magazine jobs who were had them. Otaku culture was a busy and bustling city with many streets and avenues to it and anime was just one of the lanes you could take a stroll on when you got into the sphere of anime’s influence. It helped me craft meaningful friendships as I got older in high school and lost interest in anime because I knew the kids who were running around with Lucky Star paraphernalia weren’t strange like some of my other judgmental classmates thought. These were just people who were hobbyists like the kind I believed that I could be when I was pouring over Otaku USA in my bedroom. A world of new media was out there and I’d have the means to explore it some day.

Anyways, I decided to spend the better part of my high school career learning to play guitar for a crappy emo band and sinking too many hours into Monster Hunter. The high aspirations of being a weeb were lost until I went into college. It’s a downer ending to an uplifting story I know (this is sarcasm) but what can you do?

I still appreciate Otaku USA. I’ve not read an issue in a very very very long time but the urge strikes me every now and again to go back. To just revisit to a period of my life when I was an impoverished kid who had no means of knowing what the being an otaku or even a weeb entailed until I read through the pages of a magazine. There’s magic in what that publication is or was and I hope that they run indefinitely so I can passively think about them whenever I inevitably run across a stray issue at a book store.

Thank you, Otaku USA!