Semantic Nonsense: One reason why I watch Anime

There is a great profoundness I sometimes feel when I engage in the normally pedestrian activity of consuming media.

I go to the movies. I watch movies like Captain America and Muppets Most Wanted. I watch movies like The Reader and The King’s Speech. And I am entertained by them. I enjoy them. I sometimes even think because of them.

But actually moving me, achieving the scale by which my own persona is diminished by such enormity, is just not part of the experience.

Once, I was in Paris. My then-petite amie, tour guide and traveling companion told me to do one very important thing whenever I went someplace old (which was everywhere) in Europe: Look up. It was good advice.

I’m not a religious person. To call me anti-religious would be far closer to the truth. But walking into Notre Dame and looking up was the quickest, most elegant way to explain the concept of sizes both very large and very small.

The universe is a big place. We all know that. Some of us can prattle off that the distance to Alpha Centauri is just over 4 light years, but the scale is so ridiculously vast as to be beyond any form of human comprehension save for mathematical. It’s simply “very big,” much like how a paramecium or a single circuit on a chip on the RAM stick I put into my computer is simply “very small.”

If you really want to comprehend without a shadow of doubt what very big is, don’t try to see something without limits. Go inside Notre Dame and look up. And if you want to know what small is, keep looking up and realize you are but a speck to that cathedral, small and inconsequential. You’ll feel it more than thinking about your even less measurable impact on the universe as a whole.

That is what “profound” feels like.

The cynical side of me eventually offered an explanation as to the shear explicitness of Notre Dame’s size… to be a metaphor for man’s meaninglessness compared not only to God, but also to the Catholic Church and its big brotherness back when it controlled the known world.

But that measure did little to dull that feeling of scale. One I had never felt in a big-box store with a two-story ceiling or even from the bottom of a pro sports arena.

“Profound” is something ideas are supposed to be. But I’ve so rarely felt the power of an idea, however lofty and vast, that felt profound without me needing also to be half-delirious by staying up too late.

I really like a lot of domestic media. I’ll tell you more than you’ll want to hear about how amazing and wonderful Young Justice was. But it doesn’t make me feel like I did when I was in Notre Dame.

Not even my favorite movie, The Wrath of Khan, in which I have found so much meaningful nuance and emotional depth as I have aged, does it.

But reading through the “Saikano” manga? Watching Key: The Metal Idol? It makes me feel like I am inside something so much larger than myself.

In the past, I’ve described this as something akin to the teenage existentialism that games like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Crono Cross inspired in me, but comparing it to that old longing for an altered reality wasn’t accurate.

Some months ago, when I watched The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, I (ineloquently) wrote this in my long-abandoned livejournal (you know, instead of reviewing the movie for Damage Control or some foolish thing like that):

I watched the Haruhi movie tonight. It left me in a bit of an altered state. It seems I still have some leftover teenage existentialism when it is called upon by some strange plot viewed after midnight.

I don’t mind, though; not really. It’s almost nostalgic. But questioning the nature of reality does complicate sleep. An empty apartment makes an effective echoing chamber for such thoughts.

… The one thing I miss about laptoping is taking it where I need to write. To do this at my desk rather than in my bed would surely change what gets written. It’s a bit trying to do this much typing with the iPod so quickly.

I think I’ll just put on some music.

While I didn’t quite put my finger on the feeling then, my more recent experience and a flood of memories about Gunbuster and Grave of the Fireflies and so many other things has helped me put it into better words.

For whatever reason, Anime and Manga are the media forms that can communicate “big” ideas and concepts in ways that I find accessible. They aren’t like the scaleless light years of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Inception.

Seven volumes of “Saikano” showed me life and death the same way Notre Dame showed me big and small. Key showed me what “human” means that way. Gunbuster made time more tangible and tragic than real life does.

I can’t call all Anime a transcendental experience, of course. Dragonball Z Kai and Fushigi Yuugi are dear to me, but do not in any way push the profoundness buttons.

Nevertheless, I watch Anime and read Manga because they are so different from what I have known before, because they are, for whatever reason, able to make this impact on me. These series empower my choice to keep on watching despite the miserable heaps of series consisting of little more than ecchi otaku-bait, unwanted violent harems or deliberately over-the-top nonsense.

Status report

Just finished: Bravely Default, Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Space Harrier

Just Started: Bravely Default, Kirby: Triple Deluxe, Space Harrier

Still Playing: Costume Quest, Diablo III, Dragon Quest IX, DuckTales Remastered, Final Fantasy VI Advance (CES Dragon’s Den), Final Fantasy XIII, NewER Super Mario Bros. Wii, Sonic Generations (PS3), Star Trek: Online, The Last of Us

Lagging behind: Final Fantasy: Dissidia 012, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, Metroid: Other M, Persona 3: FES, Saboteur, Starcraft: Brood War, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, Torchlight, Wii Sports Resort