The ramblings and thoughts of someone in love with anime + a bit about KyoAni

[Remilia Scarlet]

Six months.

 

That's how long it's been since Kyoto Animation burned. That's how long it's taken me to come to grips with the reality of what happened. Thirty six employees died. Thirty six of the genre's brightest minds will no longer shine upon the industry. 

 

I... don't really know what I'm trying to type out here. I was devastated beyond tears when I heard about the attack. It's taken me six months to fully accept what happened but transferring my thoughts from my head is harder than I anticipated. 

 

I started watching anime when I was very, very young. Tokyo Mew Mew, Zatch Bell, Pokémon and Naruto filled my afternoons. As I grew older I branched out to other series such as Vampire Knight, Chrono Cross, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach, etc. 

 

Then I discovered two series.

 

Lucky Star and Clannad.

 

And they changed everything. 

 

Lucky Star was the anime that got me into slice of life and showed me that anime can be more than just action and adventure. Konata and her friends filled my days with so much joy and laughter. I couldn't wait to get home so I could watch the episodes and seecwhat else they were up to.

 

Clannad came a little bit later. I say a little bit but I didn't discover Clannad until about 2010. By then both season one and After Story had aired already so I didn't have to wait for each episode.

Clannad literally changed my life. 

 

There's very few things in this world that affect me on a deeply emotional, deeply personal level. Clannad is one of them. I binged the entire first season of Clannad in two days and immediately began After Story. When I finally finished the whole series I was an emotional mess and was left drained and... I don't know the word I'm looking for here, but I needed more. So I started the series over. And over. And over.

 

I had fallen so in love with Tomoya and Nagisa's story. I had fallen in love with Tomoyo, Kotomi, Kyou, Ryou, Sunohara and everyone else. With one viewing it became my favorite anime of all time and that's a position it has managed to hold to this day. There has never been anything that affected me so deeply as this anime. And to this day it still remains the only show that consistently manages to make me cry every single time, no matter how often I have seen the episodes. 

 

It wasn't until later that I discovered it was Kyoto Animation who was responsible for producing both Lucky Star and Clannad. I loved both so I decided to check out what else they made. I discovered Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Air and Kanon. I watched all of them but I ended up falling in love with studio behind them long before I finished any of them.

 

[I had to take a pause here.]

 

I wanted to write this back when the attack on KyoAni happened but my emotions were so out of whack that I was unable to bring myself to do so. I still don't know what my goal here is but I guess I'll figure it out. You know that tightness in your chest you get when you think about something so emotionally affecting that it makes you want to cry? But you try your best not to. You keep yourself from crying because you know if you do you'll never stop. That's how I feel right now.

 

Anime, and by extension KyoAni, is one of the most important things to me in my life. Anime was my escape. *Is* my escape. I did not have a happy childhood. It was filled with abuse. Screaming. Crying. I was beaten and verbally abused by my mother. My dad died when I was eight. He was the only shining light for me and when he died the light disappeared.

 

I blocked out a lot of what happened to me growing up but the scars and damage still remain. Anime and manga helped me forget even if only briefly. At twelve years old my happiest moments were singing J-pop songs in really bad Japanese with my door locked. 

As I sit here and think back to those days my heart weighs heavily on me because while I did not have a happy childhood, I feel like something in me is missing now as an adult. Something that I had as a child. Despite (mostly) moving on from the horrors of my childhood, building a family and a life for myself, and having a stable job and life, I feel weighted down and.... not.... whole.

 

I do not know how to fully express myself. I have a therapist. I talk to her. I have friends that I engage with and go out with. I have the most beautiful and wonderful fiancée any woman or man could ask for and my little sister adores me. But I still feel empty and I find myself wondering what it would have been like if I had never gone through what I did as a child.

 

Anime is my escape. If only briefly it allows me to fill that emptiness with what I can only describe as the equivalent of warm sun on your cheeks in the summer. Or maybe that feeling of finally finding what you've been searching for. But the difference with me is that I had yet to find what I'm searching for.

 

Kyoto Animation released Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid in spring 2017 and I finally realized what I had been yearning for. The bond of a family I had been missing as a child. Some damage never goes away. Even though I have my family now, and we are so close, I still yearn for the childhood I was denied. It left a void in me that I'm not sure will ever be filled. Miss Kobayashi filled me with a warmth and happiness I can't really properly describe in writing. But when I finished it was left feeling empty again. 

 

As I said, only briefly. I'm not sure really how to fix this but I'm trying. I suffer a lot of depression and anxiety in my adult life and I find it hard to open up to others in my day to day activities. I don't really talk about this with other people but I had to write this out.

 

It's hard to express myself without repeating previous lines. I've spent over an hour trying to get this out. I guess, in the end, it doesn't really matter. But at the same time, it matters to me. I wanted to say thank you to KyoAni, for making such amazing works. Thank you to the community for being what you are. Thank you to all of you. 

 

Despite being so broken inside, anime has helped me deal with a lot of a pain and heartache in my life. I'm a broken mess but I'm trying to get better. I lost a lot in my life and for a long time I lost the will to live but I have it back. 

 

So... thank you.

Edited February 1, 2020 by Remilia Scarlet