Entry #013 - Anime

Hello, myself from the future.

Anime has been a pretty significant part of my life. I don't mean to say that anime has shaped my life and I am who I am because of it or anything like that. But as I look back to my childhood times, I realize that I literally grew up with Anime. I never started watching it voluntarily but it was simply always on television growing up in Korea. It started off with popular titles like Dragon Balls, Naruto, Crayon Shin-Chan, and more. Eventually, when I got to middle school, I started borrowing mangas from the public library to binge read. It wasn't like I had anything better to do with my time back then. 

From time to time, I watched animes that interested me on "illegal" sites such as gogoanime and kissanime. It wasn't until I reached my late high school years when I started to get subscriptions to Crunchyroll. Even though I thought it might have been a little pricy (especially over time), it was great to watch anime safely and fast, with high image quality. From that point on, I started watching anime more frequently and started filling out my myanimelist. 

Currently, I am sitting on 80 completed animes. I should technically have more considering I started watching years ago. However, because of my often busy schedule, I don't have the time to make the commitment to a lengthy 12+ episodes of a series. Furthermore, starting a series is like a roller coaster ride. You feel entitled to finish the series whether you like it or not. Most animes typically follow the regular story curve. It starts out lowkey (exposition), the plot gradually (thickens), and there is a climax, and so on. Anime is just like every other form of story-telling. It is simply made in Japan with its unique style of creation. 

That isn't the part that I hate about anime, however. The part that I despise is the fact that I feel so sad after finishing a series. What I realized about myself is that I get way too attached to the characters in anime. In all the other mediums such as a book, a movie, a Netflix series, I never feel attached to anyone. I finish a series and I simply move on. Anime, however, makes me feel like I made a connection with these cartoon characters that I don't even speak the same language with. It also really makes me wonder how boring my life is. That is partially the reason why I prefer to watch youtube in my spare time over anime.

So I don't watch anime that much anymore. The only series that I still keep up to this day is One Piece and Attack on Titan, with the latter ending after this season. Which reminds me to tell you, future myself, that One Piece has recently reached 1000 chapters and it was incredible. It was when Luffy finally punched Kaido and was able to knock him down. I hope when you are reading back at this entry Luffy has accomplished everything and was able to become the pirate king. Like him, I wish that I have also accomplished my dream of becoming a Neurosurgeon. 

I will be looking forward to that day.