Anime, of course, is a collection of fun memes which continually build on story and character concepts established in previous works. It’s a completely false world, or rather a world that’s as stylized as, say, Hollywood movies are, and just as we don’t actually see cars exploding dramatically in the U.S. every other day, most Japanese males don’t find themselves surrounded by harems of adoring females on a regular basis. Still, it’s funny how often anime seems to become real for me. Whenever I attend the school festival at my son’s high school, I feel like I’ve lived through a 22 minute “school festival episode,” and when I take my family to Guam for a vacation, I feel like we’ve all dropped into one of those “beach episodes” every anime studio feels compelled to include. Once I was talking to my wife, and I happened to ask what club she was in in high school. She replied, “The light music club, why do you ask?” which was quite a thing to hear as a K-On! fan. The other day I was watching the ending to Chuunibyo Demo Koi ga Shitai, which is about high schoolers who’d previous suffered from “8th graders’ disease” (the name for the tendency of kids in junior high school to engage in childish fantasies) trying to discard their delusions and live normal lives. My wife said, “8th graders’ disease? Oh, I had that really bad when I was a girl.” She didn’t give details, but I can’t get the image of her wearing an eye patch and using imaginary super powers to open train doors. Woop woop!
Sometimes anime can become surprisingly real.
And in case you don’t know this…
