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?

Everybody has an opinion. This is mine.

Let me tell you a story.

Several years ago, I was part of a local alliance of gamers, who aimed to evangelize the glories of tabletop role-playing games to as many people as possible. Debates raged about bringing RPGs into the mainstream, what events to hold to reach a wider audience.

I did not agree with any of these initiatives. And I still don’t today. Because tabletop RPGs are a niche hobby, and they always will be.

The current conventions, whether they’re ostensibly comic or cosplay or anime or toy conventions, are all fine for what they really are — platforms for mainstream marketing. That’s right. They aren’t for the otaku, the hardcore fans of whatever genre we specialize in. Cosplay contests are for the non-otakus, who invariably vote for the flashiest costume or the ones they recognize from whatever movie-remake-of-an-80s-cartoon-they-never-actually-watched-religiously just came out. Comic cons focus on superheroes that have Hollywood blockbusters under their belt. Anime conventions focus on whatever is on network TV. And why not? The sponsors all want to market to as many people as possible, and the organizers want to sell as many tickets as they can. Well-known scene celebrities become shills for commercial purposes, and the disgruntled hardcore fans usually do nothing but sputter furiously from the dark moldy corners.

I repeat: Local conventions aren’t for Otaku.

Think about Akiba itself for a moment. Every Sunday, they close off the main street and people who want to show up in costume simply do so. No contests, no shows for the pointing-and-laughing public, just people who like dressing up hanging out with other people who like dressing up.

The indie comic creators were marginalized at the Metro Comic Con 2009 because it wasn’t for them. It was for the general public. They, bless their otaku hearts, are people passionate enough to create something they want to share with other people — and they want to share with people who care about the craft as much as they do. Real fanatics. Real otaku. These people want a Comiket, not a marketing platform for cellphones and bland remakes.

Someday we’ll be brave enough to have really focused cons, like a Star Trek Con for real Trekkies, or a Firefly Con for real Browncoats, or even a Cosplay Con where people who aren’t in costume aren’t allowed to come in and make fun of the real cosplay otaku. Real conventions where people who aren’t ‘with it’ simply have no place. Someday we won’t pander to the monoculture, hoping that one day drawing comics for a living or dressing up as anime characters or rolling polyhedrons will be as socially acceptable as knowing which celebrity is pregnant with so-and-so baby. You know, stuff that matters to the mainstream, to the people who worry about ‘common sense’ and ‘appealing to a broader audience’. To the NOT US.

But until then, we’ll be like gourmets who have nowhere to eat except fast food joints. We’ll be at conventions that bear the names of our hobbies but have no place for us, that don’t want us there. We’ll be coming to events that are supposed to foster the sense of community with people who share our interests, and wonder why we don’t know anyone there.

So. What are we going to do about it?

I’m an optimist about the local otaku scene. This doesn’t mean that I see it through rose-tinted glasses. I see it with all its blemishes and foibles. I know how cliquish and insular and fractious it can get. I see groups working at cross-purposes when things could be so much better if they worked together.

That’s not what optimism is. Optimism is simply the belief that things can be better. And I believe things can be better. I’m not saying things are bad. In fact that’s the reverse of what I’m saying. I’m saying things are better now than they used to be.

When I started collecting anime, playing RPGs and CCGs, things were really bad. You couldn’t find originals everywhere. The only way to get anime was to either tape it from the Chinese Star channel (Kimagure Orange Road in Mandarin during the wee hours, anyone?), borrow from someone else or buy exorbitantly-priced copies from specialty stores — and this was before Tenchi, which was the first anime Pioneer used to sell their new DVD format. I used to drive from Quezon City to Marikina just to find the one VHS rental place that had anime. The new Ranma 1/2 OAVs. UC Gundam. Orange Road. Even Otaku no Video!

To buy Magic: the Gathering I had to go to the house of the guy who was breaking the game into the country, somewhere in Cubao, where he personally taught small groups of people. You couldn’t even find starter decks in stores at the time, just Fallen Empires boosters sold by salespeople who had no idea what they were selling.

And RPGs? Fortunately there was a small but obstinate subculture that I found myself plugged into, but no one else seemed to know anything about RPGs except that they were played by socially-maladjusted Satan worshipers. Ask the lady on my interview panel for UP Law. When she said ‘Talk about anything’ to me, I said, “Let’s talk about role-playing games, then,” and she replied, “Mr. Sawit this is a serious interview.” No surprise I got rejected despite acing the entrance exam.

Things were bad. Things have gotten better. I know, some of you dislike the fact that anime and cosplay and CCGs and RPGs and computers and whatever niche hobby you’re into suddenly hit the mainstream. I have some advice for you.

Deal with it.

Seriously, if your niche hobby is as wonderful as you think it is, it’ll stay wonderful even if newbies learn about it. Do you see me whining about everyone having a PC just because I was the only kid back in elementary who had a PC AT? Do you hear me cry out for the good ol’ days when the only way to watch Ranma 1/2 was to watch some 4th generation copy that CATS charged me 450 pesos for? Of course not! Things are great now! You can get D&D rulebooks from mainstream bookstores. You can get new anime fansubs off the Internet. And every kid knows about CCGs. Anyone who draws their self-esteem from the exclusivity of their hobbies needs to get their heads examined.

We have choice now. We have convenience. We have a large community to share these things with. Despite all the flaws of today’s otaku scene, things are good.

But they can be better. I believe it. I’m an optimist.

But how exactly can they be better?

Well, stay tuned. I’ll tell you. I’m the Otaking, after all.

(to be continued)

(I tried to cover this topic on a previous now-defunct blog called Role versus Player. What happened to that blog is a tragic story for another day.)

I became a tabletop role-playing game otaku very early in life. My cousin ran a simple D&D session when I was six and I became hooked. Not only did I use my birthday money to buy myself the red D&D Basic Set to run for cousins and friends, but I became hooked on anything vaguely RPG-ish, which at the time meant books like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, Lone Wolf (and Grey Star), TSR’s own D&D books, and J.H. Brennan’s Grail Quest. (I would have an interesting, unrelated encounter with J. H. Brennan many years later.)

By the time I started playing computer RPGs like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic, I realized that there seemed to be two separate aspects of RPGs, implied by the name itself: Role-Playing and Playing Games.

Computers automated much of the game-playing aspect of RPGs, removing the need to check table after table, making die roll after die roll, streamlining the gaming experience. The Gold Box games and Japanese cRPGs like Final Fantasy made dungeon crawling less painful and much quicker, providing colorful graphics where previously simple imagination sufficed.

Role-playing, on the other hand, was not so easily simulated. Encounters could be scripted, but this necessitated a limited range of responses that the computer could handle. Non-player characters tended to repeat the same lines over and over again (Welcome to Coneria!), more interactive conversations simply provided you with a limited list of two or three responses, usually geared toward a black-or-white scale of good and evil.

This clashed directly with my tabletop gaming experience. I had become the default game master for most of the games I played in, and RPGs became a major outlet for my creativity, teaching me how to create fictional worlds, how to improvise and react to player reactions I could have never planned for, how to flesh out characters and give them motivations and personality quirks of their own. You could argue that even my writing was heavily influenced by my experience as a GM.

I started out running games for cousins and close friends, but going to college exposed me to running games for casual acquaintances and then total strangers. I started to skip class just to play RPGs. I ran mainstream games like D&D and Vampire: the Masquerade, indie games like My Life With Master and Dead Inside, games based on anime and scifi like Star Wars and Gatekeepers, homebrews like the previously-mentioned Reality Prime and Null Time. I would run them face-to-face, or as LARPs, or online using instant messaging and text-only role-playing servers like RanmaMUCK and KazeMUCK.

Then MMORPGs broke onto the scene. I imagined great adventures being played in cyberspace, epics of heroism and intrigue and general ass-kicking. But that’s not what happened. See, MMORPGs reflect the development of the cRPG as a separate branch from tabletop (or face-to-face) RPGs.

Computer RPGs tend to follow one of two paths. You could play a generic hero type of whatever class you choose while wading through wave after wave of monsters gaining experience and money, which you spend to help you beat stronger monsters, repeating the process just because the feeling of advancement quantified by ever-increasing numbers on your character sheet is so satisfying. Or you could be thrust in the role of a hero in a pre-written adventure, following the rails toward one or more pre-determined endings (which is characteristic of Japanese cRPGs). Each has its own pros and cons (the former gives the player wide latitude in roaming the game world, the latter sucks you into the story of the character you’re playing), but both lack the infinite flexibility coupled with the storytelling of a human-run game world.

I came to this realization while playing Ragnarok, wading through another undead dungeon with a party of my friends. Sure I was playing with a group of friends. But when I created my character I imagined a deep backstory for him. I expected more varied epic adventures instead of ‘killed the toughest boss character available to him at his current level’. I expected to save kingdoms, rescue princesses, navigate a maze of court intrigue.

I was playing the wrong games. I had the wrong mindset. I wanted human experience in a world that rested on a foundation of numbers and attributes. Although I eventually came to enjoy Ragnarok and other MMORPGs on its own terms (like a cute cross between Diablo and Final Fantasy Tactics, two games I happen to love) I disagreed strongly with the self-appointed experts who claimed that MMORPGs would eventually kill off tabletop games because they served different purposes, appealed to different markets. cRPGs filled my need to play games. But I needed to stimulate my imagination too, and pretty graphics were a poor substitute.

As far as MMORPGs went, I eventually settled on EVE Online, a cutthroat hyper-capitalistic space game where, having specialized in mining and transport vessels, I unwittingly got swept up in an epic struggle for the frontier star systems and was forced to take up arms. (Just like Malcolm Reynolds, I was on the losing side.)

So I still play cRPGs and MMORPGs. I happen to love them. I love Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic, and am looking forward to playing in Jedi vs. Sith. I’m playing a lot of Fable II these days and I’ve finally started on Fallout 3. I love the Final Fantasy and Chrono-series soundtracks. But I stopped role-playing in cRPGs, instead returning to playing or running games face-to-face or on forums or MUCKs or instant messaging.

I realized that despite the R in MMORPG or cRPGs, they’re for playing games, not playing roles.

The hardest thing about becoming a comic book creator is the actual creation. At least with fanfiction or doujinshi you had preexisting characters and a more-or-less fully realized world that they inhabit. Creating your own means starting from scratch.

The first comic book I ever wrote was under my little sister’s pretend comics publisher, ‘Apple Comics’. Predictably, most of these comics centered around a bunch of anthropomorphic apples having wacky adventures and hijinks a la Archie and the gang. My sister wrote about the main cast, and my own comics centered around a different gang that went to the same high school. Or something. I’m not clear on the story anymore. There was the cool-cat leader Shades, his girlfriend and all-around thug Spunky, his laid-back roller-skating sidekick Runman, and a host of other misfit rejects from the teen 80′s movies that were popular at the time.

Even then I was a better writer than an artist and had a better grip on the characters than the character design. Shades was smug, cool, and prone to random fits of incompetence. Spunky liked beating people up but pretended to be shy and demure around Shades to avoid emasculating him. Runman was the apple equivalent of Neku from The World Ends With You, only predating the latter two decades, and was often lost in his own world (and his favorite tunes).

After that came a very crude wrestling comic, with a shades-wearing hero clearly based on Bret Hart called ‘The One’, taking on all comers, most wearing luchador or tiger-head masks. I hope those comics have long been burned.

The next attempt at comic book writing was a comic called Technomancer, whose protagonist Benedict practiced a high-tech version of ceremonial magic, who had etched circuit boards instead of pentacles, cybernetic implants instead of tattoos, and who fired lasers from his fingers instead of lightning bolts and plasma blasts instead of fireballs.

Next was the Robotech-like Sector Theta, once again set in a world originally created by my sister, featured in her comic book ‘Nekkai’. The Nexus are an ostensibly-benevolent alien race who came to Earth to spread their superior technology in exchange for peaceful assimilation, and who had three sexes. Don’t ask me how that works. The Nekkai are a resistance movement dedicated to exposing the nefarious plans of the Nexus. Sector Theta itself refers to a distant outpost in the Nexus empire where three human pilots in the Nexus fighter squadron hunt down a rogue Nexus who turns out to be an agent for the Nekkai. The three pilots defect to the Nekkai upon learning the truth and fight their former squadron-mates.

Meanwhile I was running a few role-playing games at school. While some of my games simply took existing settings and planted the player characters in them — D&D, G.I. Joe, X-Men, Galaxy Rangers, Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs, Visionnaries, you name it, I probably ran it — some had homebrew settings. Timerunner was your typical displaced time travelers story, with a little corporation vs. hackers thrown in for flavor. Reality Prime was a post-apocalyptic high schoolers vs. aliens adventure, with shopping malls as defense bases and refugee camps. Reality 3 was a part of my personal multiverse where emotion was outlawed (and tightly controlled by the ruling class) because a skilled empath could influence people by manipulating their emotions.

College brought new attempts at publishing my own comics and new games to run. On the comic book side, Tenryu was an extremely derivative shonen-type fighter against the world comic involving a single-minded martial artist with a dragon tattoo who acted as the bodyguard for a hot-but-ditzy rich girl who happened to be the heir to a great mystical school. Firewalker was a fire-wielding member of a Council of great powers composed of representatives from the five Oriental elements.

On the gaming side, I discovered White Wolf games and played and ran a few long-running games. The advantage of long-running games is that it gives characters room to develop and become more three-dimensional. In the Vampire game I created the ruthless manipulator Jenner, who hid a deep-seated need to avenge his vampiric sister with a facade that appeared to only be concerned with the acquisition of more and more power. From the Mage game came Denning, a roguish misfit whose unpredictable antics masked a personal crusade to Awaken every single human on the planet, and the return of Benedict, now a charismatic prodigy who suffered from a lack of a sense of purpose and who resorted to stealing other people’s dreams.

This was all well and good, but I didn’t have a story of my own, just raw material. I had characters, I had settings, I had concepts. But that’s all I had, a constantly growing pile of parts, a pantry overflowing with ingredients.

Part of the problem was that I didn’t feel that my stories were good enough. It was one thing to be a well-respected fanfic writer, but releasing your stories to the free market is something else. I had the preconceived notion that you had to be ‘the best’ before you even released your work to the general public. I was actually too ashamed to let anyone but my closest friends read my work. I was worried that my stories would be too derivative or too geeky or just not good enough, whatever that actually meant

And then, I shifted from Biology to Creative Writing.

(to be continued)

I would have to say that the radical downturn in my academic career beginning in college coincided neatly with the rise of three influences in my life: access to anime, access to Magic: the Gathering and RPGs, and access to the Internet.

All of these things would be supplemented by a community of geeks known simply as The Hill. The Hill alumni are many. You might actually know someone who was part of the Hill. We were, for all intents and purposes, a catch-all otaku group just like in Otaku no Video or Genshiken. Some specialized in anime, some in CCGs, some in RPGs, some in comic books, science fiction, tarot card reading, and so on.

We contributed to each other’s academic demise. Going to class man? Nah, just stay for ten more minutes and have one more duel. If you come with us we’re going to So-and-So’s place to watch the new Ranma OVA. Hey, study later, read this Oh! My Goddess fanfic I wrote and tell me if it’s good enough to submit to the FFML or if it needs work. Captain, I detect no intelligent life on this planet. So roll the dice already. You’re already late for class anyway.

I took more pride in my knowledge of trivia like voice actresses and opening themes and animation directors than, say, in how fashionably I dressed or if I had actually studied for the midterm I had that afternoon that I only found out about that morning.

During this unglamorous but necessary period in my life, I watched Gainax’s masterpiece, Otaku no Video. For those of you who can’t be bothered to check Wikipedia, Otaku no Video was Gainax’s last anime before doing underground, triumphantly emerging from its own ashes three years later with Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This would be the first time I had a word that described I was, encapsulates it so completely. I had always been that way, but had no name for until now.

I was otaku.

(to be continued)