Meet Captain Jack Sparrow, professional escapist.

My interests are wide-ranging, as longtime readers of this blog know – anime, sci-fi TV shows, fantasy movies, video games, RPGs, cosplay, comics, fiction literature, and so on. One thing binds all of these interests: they are all escapist forms of entertainment.

According to the great font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

Escapism is mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an “escape” from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life.

The term ‘escapist’ is usually used in a derogatory fashion, meaning someone who would rather escape to an alternate reality instead of accepting the reality he or she is handed. This tends to be a charge leveled by self-proclaimed realists, people who believe that anyone who isn’t fully engaged in the ‘real world’, meaning the ‘family-workplace-church-potluck-country-club-buddies real world’, is a social cripple who fails or is unwilling to make any ‘meaningful connections’.

But as anyone who reads sci-fi or fantasy knows, good speculative fiction is a way of making a commentary on the ‘real world’ by the allegory of the alternate world. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, particularly the first book, is a study of the progression of the rise and fall of empires presented on a galactic scale. EVE Online, an MMORPG I used to play constantly, is simply a hypercapitalist sandbox set in space. George Orwell’s Animal Farm illustrates, through the decidedly-unrealistic device of talking animals, that any revolution can be undone by the corruption and short-sightedness of its leaders. The thoroughly unrealistic anime Gurren Lagann, an anime ostensibly about giant robots, is actually a parable about what it means to be human.

J.R.R. Tolkien himself, in his celebrated essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ noted that telling stories that are ‘not real’ was a way of recognizing the reality of the mundane world without having to mindlessly submit to the way things are:

It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. . . . For creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun, on the recognition of fact but not slavery to it… If men could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-tales about frog-kings would not arise.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Escapism at Rivendell University

As Joseph Campbell (of Hero of a Thousand Faces fame) has always asserted, humanity has always told itself stories and myths to escape reality long enough to see it from a different perspective, like climbing a mountain to see the broader view. In the Books of Magic, Titania explains to Timothy Hunter:

“The places you will visit, the places that you will see, do not exist. For there are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: Their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist, and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?”

Besides, as C. S. Lewis said, the usual enemies of escape are jailers.

Welcome to the 'real world'.

Irony? What's that? This is so educational!

I’m part of the tail end of the generation labeled Gen X, which was really the first generation in recent memory to adopt irony as a stance. In my early twenties I would routinely be told by people that I was the most sarcastic person they’d ever met. Even now my humor sometimes lapses into well-timed, sardonic one-liners designed to deflate egos and elicit uncomfortable laughter from listeners.

Um, Kamina, this is a cool moment and all, but you're naked. And you're wearing a midget mole pig over your crotch.

Irony was our way of coping with our largely impotent fury at the state of things around us. Postmodernism and radical relativism was all the rage, a way of rebelling against the ‘right way’ imposed on us by the over-eager Baby Boomer generation, an intellectual way of being conscientious objectors. Why conform when conformity was just as empty and pointless as nonconformity?

Pop culture was infected by irony. Shows like Daria and Buffy the Vampire Slayer made it cool to be distinct and separate from the quarterback-and-cheerleader popular crowd. Grunge made it cool to wear ill-fitting flannel shirts and sport shaggy hairdos stuck in the awkward phase between short-cropped preppy and glam-rock locks. Gen X kids were suspicious, often rightly so, of anything that presented itself as the right way in the upbeat, earnest, ‘let’s go gang!’ attitude so fashionable in the 80s, saw it as naïve, self-absorbed, even greedy and materialistic. There was a reason we were called the Slacker Generation by our elders: We didn’t buy the polished, glossy consumerist dream sold by mass media, saw it as shallow and superficial (two of the worst insults Gen X could hurl at anything) and we fought against it with our most devastating weapon: Irony.

Unfortunately, when the dust settled and we were done demolishing the Yuppie Dream, we discovered we had nothing to replace it.

So why are there pictures of Kamina, Kintaro, and Captain Jack Sparrow on this post?

These characters, who clearly stand apart from the herd (so far apart that they’re considered idiots, weirdos, and even deviants), didn’t get the Irony memo. They’re obviously nonconformists, but they do it without the hip irony most nonconformists adopt as an ego defense. Kamina is such a glorious idiot that the social pressure to ‘succeed’, that is, become an influential and upstanding member of his little cave-dwelling community doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Kintaro gave up a secure career as a law graduate from Tokyo University because of his addiction to learning, despite being continually underestimated as a consequence. And Jack is too busy being cool to be worried about looking foolish.

It's hard to keep an ironic distance when you're running away from savage cannibals.

So what am I saying?

Yes, the monoculture is stupid, superficial, and shallow, forcing its participants to march lock-step, shoulder to shoulder, or risk being mocked for being ‘different’, for not watching the right shows and movies, for reading the wrong books, for engaging in forms of entertainment it cannot understand or simply refuses to understand. And yes, it is extremely entertaining to stand on the sidelines and mock the ‘robots’ and rest in the knowledge that you and your friends are so much deeper, so much more intellectual and profound, so much more tragically hip.

But it doesn’t change anything.

Irony as an affectation is just as robotic a response as blind conformity. And it’s a response borne out of fear, the fear of being mocked yourself. You’re a non-conformist? You’re apart from the herd? Act like it. Stand out. Be mocked and ridiculed for it by people who are too cool or too afraid to do what you do. Otherwise all you’re doing is seeking safety in a different herd, one that reads Derrida, watches machinima, and listens to obscure J-rock bands.

Lead from the front. Or get back in line.

Earth to Jaden. Page 5 preview, The Vigilant Issue #1

This is addressed to all of the following, although this is by no means an exhaustive list:

1. Gamers (console, PC, handheld, tabletop, interactive fiction, miniature, CCG, MMOG, LARPers, board);
2. Weeaboo (anime, manga, light novels, niconico, traditional Japanese martial arts otaku, people who only know Japan through samurai films, Zen Buddhists);
3. Genre otaku (fantasy, sci-fi, Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, the various D&D campaign settings, superhero, Vertigo, gothic horror, mystery, pulp, fanfic, K-Dramas, reverse harems, musical theater);
4. Head-in-Cloud-Types (poets, artists, dreamers, philosophers, theoretical scientists, sages, mystics, shamans, prophets);
5. People who play with toys (scale models, dolls, figurines, phones with excessive arrays of features we don’t use, pretend guitars and drum kits connected to consoles, lightsabers, limited edition custom-painted Stitch statues)
6. Any subculture or group I have forgotten to mention that prefers to spend time in imaginary worlds.

Hi. Nice to meet you.

We have something in common: We have vivid imaginations and enjoy spending time in imaginary worlds.

These worlds are off the six-lane highway of the shared world of the monoculture, that bland soup of the mainstream. Some are right off the exit ramp, others take convoluted side streets to get to.

Let’s stop being in denial and just accept ourselves: We’re weird.

We do things that ‘normal people’ would never do. We watch ‘cartoons’. We like to pretend we’re Jedi or magicians or two-dimensional characters or elves or vampires or pirates or ninjas. We roll kinds of dice most people have never seen. Our dialects are incomprehensible to outsiders, and there are so many.

We’re weird.

They don’t understand us. That’s what it means when they say “That person is so weird.” It’s the only way they can deal with us. Sometimes it’s a sign of disapproval. Sometimes it’s simply a sign that someone cannot comprehend our motivations or behavior because they have no cultural context. Weird. Doesn’t make sense – at least sense the way the ‘people who see the world for what it really is’ see it,  the self-proclaimed realists.

We’re the imagination subculture. We’re weird. It’s okay.

We need to stop thinking that we need approval for everything we do. Even different imagination subcultures disagree with each other, sometimes vehemently. We need to accept the fact that we aren’t going to please everybody – and that the monoculture isn’t everybody. Even entire scenes have little tribes that skirmish every now and then. Fine.

Let’s stop trying so hard to make everyone accept us, we lose our identities in the process, our cultures. If everyone was like us, acted like us, thought like us, talked and dressed and hung out in the same places as us, then we would be normal.

And we don’t want that now, do we?

LISTEN UP YOU WHINERS!

I have something to say to the following people, no matter who you are or what you’re into, like anime, or cosplay, or writing a novel, or starting a band, or traveling, or drawing a comic, or making your community a better place, or overthrowing the government, or ‘changing the world for the better’:

To everyone who’s ever claimed to want to change the world, or leave a legacy, or make a mark;

To everyone who says they have a dream or a destiny to fulfill but can’t do anything about it now because of the circumstances;

To everyone who is waiting for the right opportunity but feels the timing just isn’t right;

To everyone who writes on a blog or whines on a video or podcast or to friends over drinks about how bad things are and how different everything would be if they were in charge;

To everyone who believes they should be judged on their potential instead of on their actions and accomplishments;

To everyone stuck doing things they hate because they feel they have no other alternatives;

To everyone who ever traded in their dreams for a sure thing they detest;

To everyone who talks big about their plans but have done nothing about it;

To every special snowflake whose dreams are just not possible because society would frown on it or because their parents didn’t raise them properly or because their significant other doesn’t support them or because their friends would laugh at them or because they just don’t like being laughed at;

BULLSHIT.

If you’d wanted to change you would have done it already. And you would have started with yourself. You wouldn’t just shift employers, or cities, or cars, or uncannily similar-looking girlfriends or boyfriends. You wouldn’t spend more money to get more stuff. You wouldn’t buy clothes that hide the body you’re ashamed of but won’t do anything about. You wouldn’t strive for the next pay grade at the same dead-end job just because you don’t know what else to do. And least of all, you wouldn’t be content with mocking the people who are trying their damndest to achieve their dreams, no matter how foolish it makes them look.

Yeah, I’m talking about you, with your name-calling, with your dismissiveness about broad swathes of people you can’t be bothered to get to know. I’m talking about everyone who’s ever shown up to an event organized by other people just to diss it. I’m talking about everyone who fired off a snarky comment or twitter or plurk about someone instead of doing better than them. I’m talking about people who get off by saying how much everyone else sucks. Fine, we get it, you’re awesome.

Prove it.

“I don’t have to prove anything to you.”

BULLSHIT.

See, the fact is you don’t actually want to fulfill your dreams. You don’t want to make a better anime, a better costume, a better comic, a better novel, a better song, a better band, a better body, a better country, a better world.

If you did, you would’ve written that first chapter by now. You would’ve composed the first few lines of that song. You would’ve checked the Internet for ticket prices. You would have set the date for that trip. You would’ve attended the first class, the first workship. You would’ve lifted the weights, run those kilometers. You would have met or called or emailed the people you need. You would have posted the flyers, practiced for the first gig. You would’ve attended the right parties, shook the right hands, exchanged calling cards.

But you haven’t.

You protest. You say the time isn’t right.

The time is never right.

You don’t have enough money.

You will, if you start now and you know how much you need.

You don’t have enough time.

What are you spending your time on?

You don’t know the right people.

Start meeting them now.

You say you’ll do it someday.

‘Someday’ without a specific date means ‘never’.

You can do one of two things. You can admit to yourself that entertaining the idea that you’ll do everything you want to do ‘someday’ is enough, that you don’t actually want to change, that you would prefer it if all these things fall into your lap while you stay exactly the way you are. Because you’re special and unique. You’re an individual. And somehow that gives you the right to act as if the world owes you a living, owes you the fulfillment of your dreams without you having to lift a finger. You can rest on your laurels, tell yourself that you could do things better if you could only be bothered, except your favorite show is on, or because the job you hate so much takes so much of your time, or because it doesn’t pay you enough, or because it just isn’t the right time, and it may never be the right time, ever. You can resign yourself to the fact that you prefer comfort and security over change, over some vague dream that would be kind of nice if it happened.

Or you can find out what you want, find out the first step to achieve it, and do it. No matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel. If it takes money you don’t have, find a way to make that money, or to do it for less, or for services or barter instead of cash. If it takes time then make the time. If it takes connections then make the connections. Make any connection. If it takes exposing yourself to criticism from other people, then endure it. And if it takes hard work and dedication, then commit.

And if any of this sounds too hard, or too scary, or too uncomfortable, then shut up and admit it to yourself once and for all: You don’t want to realize your dreams. It’s just not worth the trouble, not worth the time, the money, the effort.

Just admit it: Your dreams aren’t worth changing for. Your dreams aren’t worth the time, the money, the effort, the sleepless nights. Your dreams are just broken little toys you like to take out of the toy chest whenever you want to feel better about yourself, especially at the expense of other people, then put away at your convenience. Why do you think other people’s dreams are foolish, or pointless, or misguided, too? Why do you pretend to be better than everyone else, when all the world knows you aren’t? Why do you think your irony and your sarcasm and your mockery and your ennui somehow make you better than the people who try and fall flat on their faces, but pick themselves up and try again, and again, and again?

Because you’re scared. Because you don’t want to expose yourself to the scrutiny of others. Because you’re special and if the world doesn’t see that then it’s the world’s fault, not yours. Take me for what I am, you say, and give me all the money and fame and glory that I deserve without having to even try. Without having to change. Why change? You’re awesome and everyone else sucks.

BULLSHIT.

Here’s an idea: Lead from the front. Lead where everyone can see you. Lead where everyone knows what you stand for, instead of sniping from the sidelines, pretending to be so much better, if only you could be arsed to try. Lead where everyone will know whether you succeed or fail.

Put up. Or shut up.

Shut the hell up.

I’m eating lunch at Sizzling Pepper Steak when the group of freshmen college kids from Ateneo at the next table start talking about what classic movies they’ve seen. The list is absolutely disheartening to me: The Matrix, Gladiator, The Truman Show. These are classics now?

But their love for the movies despite their ‘age’ is great. One of the boys tells his rapt female audience about the plot of the Truman Show in loving detail, remembering little plot points like Truman’s father being written off the show as ‘lost at sea’. “But the movie is kinda old na,” he qualifies, “nineties pa.”

I remember talking about Star Wars with my law school classmates and one of the girls said, “All I know about Star Wars is like, Yoda. That’s the little guy with the lightsaber, right?”

So, little guy with lightsaber am I?

Indeed.

(more…)

I’m watching the sixth episode of K-ON! and it’s at the part where the band is onstage for their live performance at the school festival. Mio is frozen with fear under the spotlight.

My breath catches in my throat. Because I remember what that’s like.

(more…)

“If you don’t do it now, you will never do it.”

This is what I tell myself every time I try something new and the fear threatens to stop me.

When I was a child, I was often asked to perform in public. I would act, sing, declaim, orate, compete in academic competitions. I was out of the classroom practicing or preparing more often than I was in it. I would have to be judged by a crowd.

Unfortunately, I was also a painfully shy child. I could barely stand talking to one stranger, let alone dozens, or even hundreds. I was an introvert, still largely am in that I actually like spending time alone with my thoughts. I was a loner who would be pressed into performing for crowds.

Fear would grip me the moments before I was about to go on stage or at the mic or before a panel of judges. I was afraid of what they would think of me. I was afraid they wouldn’t like me. I was afraid I wasn’t any good.

(more…)

Shibuya at night. I took this photo while crossing the street, trying not to get elbowed and shoved around.

The Nintendo DS Game The World Ends With You is set in an alternate-reality version of Shibuya, the ultra-trendy fashion capital of the ultra-trendy city of Tokyo. More than anywhere else you will find people dressing according to the subcultures that they belong to — loligoth, urban hip, princess-kei, retro hip, and so on. And unlike more homogenized fashion scenes like, say, Manila, the fashion of one subculture wildly diverges from the fashion of another.

Friendship knows no fashion bounds.

To reflect this, The World Ends With You (or TWEWY, as fans call it) allows the player to outfit their characters with many different outfits from many different brands: D+B, Lapin Angelique, Wild Boar, Jupiter of the Monkey. Some of the more outlandish outfits require a high level of BRAVE.

On one end of the spectrum is the protagonist, Neku, who starts out only just brave enough to wear simple, urban-hip clothes like hoodies, sneakers, and big shorts.

On the other is Joshua, whose BRAVE is so high that he can cross-dress with impunity.

I sat inside the Freshness Burger (bienvenido!) and stared at all the snappily-dressed people, armed with my copy of TWEWY, open to the map screen for help. I decided that many of the best shops were off the beaten path (like they were in the game) and ended up buying a sweet leather jacket from Flash Report.

Then I wondered what I would do with a leather jacket in Manila.

=====

As I attended event after event since returning on the local otaku scene, I realized that I didn’t have a very high level of BRAVE. Since my BRAVE was low, I couldn’t bring myself to wear anything more daring than a Gurren Lagann shirt and some jeans.

Which makes no sense, because I have a secret, burning desire to cosplay as this guy:

The MAN.

This is Sanae Hanekoma, aka Mr. H, aka CAT, the hottest grafitti artist in all of Shibuya, whose identity is unknown. Other characters refer to him as the Producer, the man behind the scenes, behind the Composer, the Conductor, the Game Master, and the Players.

He is a being of such undeniable, effortless cool that he literally comes from a higher plane of being because of his ‘highly tuned vibe’. (This is literally true within the story of TWEWY.)

But I don’t have enough BRAVE to carry that ensemble.

Cosplayers, who widely vary in motivation, physical appearance, and personal hygiene, all have one thing in common: a high BRAVE rating.

It doesn’t matter if they’re dressing like magical girls or giant robots for the attention, for money, for prestige, for influence, or just because their parents didn’t love them enough. The reasons vary, but the effect is the same: They can dress up as whomever they want, in public.

That takes BRAVE I don’t have.

Yet.

Before I uploaded my lightsaber-wielding picture to my About Page a few days ago, I thought about it for a very long time.

What was the worst that could happen?

When I was a kid, I quickly learned that being different in any way meant that the people you were different from were going to pick on you, sooner or later. Sometimes the picking was for harmless fun, like a joke between friends. (I’ve always made fun of my martial artist friend’s bald head, knowing full well that if he really felt that I was dissing him just to diss him, he could kick my butt so hard I can taste his shoe. He’s cool with it. Plus it makes him look like a badass.)

Every now and then in any kid’s life, the picking becomes mean-spirited and vicious, a way for kids to show other kids who’s top dog of the playground. This is fine if you realize that the name-calling is all just a kid’s game, even if it’s one that’s played for keeps. It’s not so good when you start letting the insults wound you.

Ever been made to feel ashamed for being intelligent? For reading books? For liking the wrong color? For watching the wrong cartoons? For not knowing a song? For speaking the wrong language? For having a funny-sounding name? What is particularly different about you doesn’t really matter to kids who want to pick on you. They will pick the first thing they can see and throw that against you. So the key is to realize that it’s all a silly little kid’s game, even if it’s dead serious.

Some kids keep playing this game till they’re older, when they’ve become Important People with Important Opinions, people other people listen to. And they hurt other older kids who don’t realize that they’re still playing the same old tired kid’s game, when there are better games to play now.

Some adults still like to play the ‘Loser’ game they learned in the playground when they were two and a half. It’s simple: pick a kid you don’t like and call him a loser. If the other kids laugh, you win.

Sound familiar?

Like the About Page says, I’m pretty much a professional weirdo. True story: in elementary I once brought a lunch box to school with nothing in it but red kiamoy and a thermos full of iced tea. I got picked on for it. I can see why.

In college I nearly got beat up by a frat guy for giving his girlfriend the ‘wrong’ tarot reading. (The cards don’t lie, sir.)

My favorite authors include a German who liked to write about Eastern philosophy and chicks breaking out of eggs, a mousy Japanese woman whose idea of romantic tension is years of tragicomedy puncutated by a motel room scene, an American ultravagabond who funds his country-hopping with a sports supplement company he runs entirely over the Internet, a postmodern Macchiavelli who collaborates with rap stars, and a dodgy chap from Northampton who looks like Captain Caveman’s evil brother.

I like the Star Wars Universe more than I like the Star Wars movies. Wrap your head around that for a bit.

So this is what I realized: If any kid wanted to make fun of me just because of what makes me different, they already have a lot of ammunition.

I stared at the screen for a moment.

Then I clicked ‘upload’.

You’ve probably noticed how diverse the topics of my blog posts can get. Anime, professional wrestling, media theory, comic books, /b/, the Internet. You’ve also probably noticed that my post tags reflect this diversity.

Now imagine how limited my writing would be if I limited myself to a single narrow topic every time I wrote. Say, anime, without talking about the effect of the advent of broadband or the influence of Western animation or its synergy with Japanese music. And yet this is how we used to define things — genres, individuals, movements.

Think about your Pictures folder on your computer and how you sort individual files. Some pictures fall under Family, for example, and some under Friends. What happens when you have a picture that has both Friends and Family in it? Do you upgrade it into a higher-tier (but more general and vague) category, ‘Loved Ones’? Do you decide that the presence of family members in the photo trumps the presence of friends and sort it accordingly, or vice versa? Do you place one copy in each of the folders? What if your sister is your best friend too?

Now think of how simple it is to simply tag the photo with both ‘Friends’ and ‘Family’.

The same thing applies to individuals. Think of someone famous, like Jose Rizal for instance. (I don’t want to debate historical accuracy here. I’m referring to the predominant ‘myth’ of Rizal.) We usually toss him in the category ‘hero’ and think nothing more of him. Categories are shortcuts.

But tags are handles. Rizal was also a novelist, poet, polyglot, fencer, ‘illustrado’, and womanizer. (Maybe some of you would like to throw in the ‘Allegedly Hitler’s Dad’ tag too.) Each of these tags adds resolution to our picture of the guy, much more than the simple ‘National Hero’ category could possibly give.

Now think of yourself. Think of the category people tend to lump you and your interests into. Geek. Jock. Airhead. Weirdo. Otaku. Doesn’t really say much, does it?

Now tag yourself. Tag your interests. I’ll give you some of mine: Computers. Music. Anime. Science. Games. Comic books. Law. Philosophy. Literature. TV Shows. Movies. Personal Finance.

Now let’s drill down and tag one of those broad tags. Let’s take a selection of tags from Games: Console Games. PC Games. Role-Playing Games. Board Games.

Now let’s pick Board Games, because it’s the tag that most non-board-game-geeks assume is all Monopoly and Chess: Monopoly. Chess. (Start with the basics.) The Game of Life. Settlers of Catan. Princes of Florence. Senator. Acquire. Cashflow. Lord of the Rings. Diplomacy.

Head spinning yet? Each one of the tags drill down all the way to specifics like this. And all of those tags add up to me. So does a neat category like ‘Geek’ or ‘Otaku’ encapsulate me? Or are you over-simplifying who I am so you can dismiss me out of hand?

In his book The Long Tail, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson discusses what he calls the Massively Parallel Culture, which is rapidly replacing mass culture. Instead of a homogenous lump of people who are all into the same things (which our current mass media tries to cultivate), we are developing into individual members of many tribes, some which overlap (for example cartoons, comics) and some which don’t (cosplay, basketball, indie rock). So it no longer makes any sense to diss someone because they don’t belong to one of your tribes (ball-jointed dolls) when most likely you both share another (anime).

Yes, I’m part of the Lawyer Tribe (which you may detest). But I’m also part of the Otaku Tribe. So what will it gain you to reduce me to one or the other?

Stop pigeon-holing. Start tagging.