004: Pokemon
May. 7th, 2012 12:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomonymouspossible real life and Avengers and football thoughts later
but for now
It's so sterotypical of anime fans of my generation to say that it all started with Pokemon, but it's true. And even in the middle of the craze - and even in the middle of my own childhood - I knew my relationship with Japanese animation would be different from the norm.
Interestingly, I never owned the games when I was young, nor did I have a significant card collection. My introduction to the world of Pokemon was entirely through the anime, running home to watch it after school every day. I knew pretty much immediately that it was different from the cartoons I watched as a child - as simple as it was it had an overarching plot, and the art style was immediately distinct. Finding out it was Japanese led to understanding that I was watching a rather censored dub, and I pretty quickly gravitated to using the Japanese names for everyone as well. (Funny enough, before really understanding, I had an early headcanon of the Japanese names being "middle names" of the English-language characters. Yeah, I don't get it either.)
I remember very clearly my first attempt at fanfiction. Not the content - I'm sure it was some form of Ash/Misty fluff, that pairing always appealed to me - but how it happened, and how I knew that I was a different kind of fan. I had just transferred between elementary schools around the start of the Pokemon craze, and was somewhat desperate for friends. One day during a lull in the teaching, I started writing a fic - a story we wanted to tell about Pokemon - with others sitting at my table. It was exciting to share my fannishness with others, and it was the first time in a while that I felt socially content in school.
The next day, I brought it back, with more story - and people looked at me like I had two heads. They couldn't comprehend why I wanted to keep doing it; it had already bored them and they were on to some other task. But for me, the story wasn't done, and I would end up continuing to write - alone.
And I wrote and wrote - fiction that really wasn't well made, to be honest, a direct result of my youth. I stumbled onto the Internet in libraries and at home, fumbling about on dialup, eventually discovering fanfiction.net and the rest of fandom from there. And even as much as sometimes the Pokemon anime makes me cringe with its cliches and its simplicity today, I can never really fault it - it's just too influential on my psyche, even now.
but for now
It's so sterotypical of anime fans of my generation to say that it all started with Pokemon, but it's true. And even in the middle of the craze - and even in the middle of my own childhood - I knew my relationship with Japanese animation would be different from the norm.
Interestingly, I never owned the games when I was young, nor did I have a significant card collection. My introduction to the world of Pokemon was entirely through the anime, running home to watch it after school every day. I knew pretty much immediately that it was different from the cartoons I watched as a child - as simple as it was it had an overarching plot, and the art style was immediately distinct. Finding out it was Japanese led to understanding that I was watching a rather censored dub, and I pretty quickly gravitated to using the Japanese names for everyone as well. (Funny enough, before really understanding, I had an early headcanon of the Japanese names being "middle names" of the English-language characters. Yeah, I don't get it either.)
I remember very clearly my first attempt at fanfiction. Not the content - I'm sure it was some form of Ash/Misty fluff, that pairing always appealed to me - but how it happened, and how I knew that I was a different kind of fan. I had just transferred between elementary schools around the start of the Pokemon craze, and was somewhat desperate for friends. One day during a lull in the teaching, I started writing a fic - a story we wanted to tell about Pokemon - with others sitting at my table. It was exciting to share my fannishness with others, and it was the first time in a while that I felt socially content in school.
The next day, I brought it back, with more story - and people looked at me like I had two heads. They couldn't comprehend why I wanted to keep doing it; it had already bored them and they were on to some other task. But for me, the story wasn't done, and I would end up continuing to write - alone.
And I wrote and wrote - fiction that really wasn't well made, to be honest, a direct result of my youth. I stumbled onto the Internet in libraries and at home, fumbling about on dialup, eventually discovering fanfiction.net and the rest of fandom from there. And even as much as sometimes the Pokemon anime makes me cringe with its cliches and its simplicity today, I can never really fault it - it's just too influential on my psyche, even now.