I am in school with kids born after the year 2000. We had to say our birth years in Français. Holy shit.
I Googled images of early 2000s anime, admiring the mulleted anime boys wearing long sleeves under their short tees. The muted sepia warmth of series like Wolfs Rain, Serial Experiments Lain and Haibane Renmei are just special, in their melancholic narratives and aesthetic. They are special to people my age, not quite old enough for the older wave of anime like Evangelion.
To a trained eye, this was before anime turned slick and clinical. Now it's all Ufotable style gradient-crazy-computer-generated-sparkles. You knew those older shows relied on solid art, rather than cheap tricks. Anime aesthetics are now revoltingly incestuous. Popular Japanese artists are inspired directly by the recent gacha girl or top Pixiv rankings.
In case you couldn't tell, anime obviously can have it's own expressiveness, apparent in 90s shows like Sailor Moon or Cowboy Bebop. What I'm trying to express is that 'anime' aesthetics have evolved over the years mainly by duplicating the past generation and 'refining' it down to a very particular moe. Veterans like Miyazaki have been quoted to call out the industry as filled with non-artists, people who only copy formulas.
The girls have become beyond dainty, it is an indulgence of digital artists. No longer a sexy cell-shaded pinup, but an image of perfection, right down to every soft pink highlight on her white thighs. I guess it is beyond anime but it is still imagery that I see on a daily basis and really don't know what fanboys see in them. I would argue your stock standard 'anime' illustration is usually nothing more than an artificially formed doll in the vague imitation of a real woman.
A putrid fetishized image of youth.
I cannot see myself in such stylisations of femininity, heck I despise the sparkle-boy way of depicting men too! I casually see hentai on my feed and wonder, why men think it's ok to see woman as same-faced dolls? Is it a harmless fantasy, or does it trickle out into society? It it a safe fantasy for under 25s, but toxic for anyone else?
I realise now I am the definition of non-youth. Just because I am not in the under 25 age bracket. 'Still young' Everyone tells me. Bambmm, it hits me harder than the Netflix sound at full volume.
I want to be comforted. I want a man to stroke me from the top of my head all down my neck to fluff up my hair. Not the nervous hair touching I'm doing right now.
I want to return to the early 2000s. That is one reason I started making a video game based on my memories of early 2000s childhood. Also because it was a time of Neopets, Tamagochis, flip phones and dial up internet.
Please, God or satan, whoever answers first, give me back the feeling. The childhood feeling of love I felt when looking at these pictures. I can't beg to invisible forces, I have to beg to myself to find this love.
I have felt a special breed of existential-nostalgia lately. A feeling that I have only hurt myself with these mental habits my whole adult life, my brain used to be fixated on Neopets, cartoons and even the outdoors. It is a dread of worrying I have wasted precious brain-BREATHS on overthinking, self loathing and jealously to name the first few off the top of my head. Oh, and judgement. Crap I feel this feeling too often.
Tough people like me adapt. I have accepted the only way I can ward off this existential-nostalgia is by fostering my own strain of positivity. You can see in the featured image, I have healed enough to even take selfies.
With the subtle progression of age, I know I have experiences that younger people can't see. I know when I was young, I couldn't imagine what it was like to be over 25. I thought, they should have a job by now, not like the rest of us barely out of high school!
When I contemplate the warmth of my pre-teen years, I need to cry. Is it because I think of that little girl from 2003 jumping up and down on a trampoline while listening to Bjork. I wonder if I let her down? The weight of memories is too heavy.
I could be so pathetically stupid to whine about whether I have 'achieved enough', like the LA film-industry psychopaths I saw approaching 30 that needed to let all of social media know.
For me and my experiences psychotically licking the fat cocks of satan and Jesus, both at the same time, I can assure you that nothing fucking matters. I can rebuild myself from anything, and you can too.
My experiences have taught me humility, to be my own philosopher, to not take bad advice from others, when they will never know my psychotic cock licking escapades. Nothing matters, so everything matters. My enjoying writing on my blog has same worth as someone starting a job. We are dying since the moment we are born, and are living until the day we die.
As I realised in the shower today, there is an issue with the magnetisation of chemistry between straight people. I want someone who wants to be with me. I don't want someone who wants me to be with THEM, basically someone grabbing me just because they 'want a girl'. I don't want to be an object to satisfy their caved in ego telling them they are aging, and are the only one out of their bros who doesn't have a fuck-buddie.
That is not what I want.
With age, all I can do is draw from my history and tell these stories. All these feelings simmer in me, the same way my dad reminisces over the 70s and 80s and every decade for that matter.
I loved anime when I was young for its spirit, something I felt from early 2000s stylisations, even in the first wave of Hetalia. I do not feel this spirit in Pixiv illustrations. Does looking at these images make you forget you are dying? Do these girls comfort you because they are a pristine abstraction of real female forms, void of unsightly lumps, creases and sags. Why do you run from facing mortality? In others and more so, in yourself?
We are the media we consume. With lesser forms like casual anime thots, it keeps many spiritually on the level of an infant, sucking at the tit of youth, but unable to function when confronted that we have to mentally move on in many ways.
Unfortunately, I cannot see myself in un-aging pretty-Asian-beauty-standard faces, which is what they are. I am not aroused by it either. With every year, I am alienated farther away from media that perpetuates a repression towards loving real humans for their real physical traits. Noses, deep set features or not, different skin tones, different face shapes, it matters.
I am not an immortal aniem doll, but aspiring to be like a Touhou project character is the only exception I'll make.