I am a very emotion-driven thinker.
I’m sure a lot of you know that, whether you’re my poor teammate I scream at in my Counter-Strike games, or you’re unlucky enough to open twitter right during my hate-fueled rants about my parents. I get very emotional sometimes, no, more like a lot of the time.
It’s a part of me that I can’t particularly get rid of. It’s a lot easier for me to tilt in my competitive matches because I will think nonstop the entire game about what other people think about my skill, my voice, and the decisions I’m making. It’s been an up and down battle, and although I certainly have my high points, for every single gamer’s high I get on, 6 more depressive periods after gaming pass as well.
And while I wouldn’t exactly call it something that’s helpful or nice, being born caring so much about what other people think has its benefits. In fact, these benefits might as well be the reason why depression is such a huge issue worldwide, because they think it’s the only part that’s special about them, and don’t want to lose it.
This trait is empathy, and different people have varying degrees of it. You’ve felt it before. Maybe when you see a person being chewed out without reason, you feel that person’s pain. Maybe when someone else is being laughed at by their classmates, you felt the need to interject, or at least knew that what those classmates were doing was wrong.
And yet, if everyone had some degree of empathy, wouldn’t the world be a better place? Wouldn’t we all try and understand each other, and in doing so, solve the problems of the world?
Well, it’s just not that simple. While humans are perfectly capable of empathy toward one group of people, history has shown that we might neglect the next group of people. That because of their skin color, that because of their religious or political beliefs, they aren’t human, they aren’t like us.
Let’s take something small. Anime, for example. All around the world anime fans are at each other’s throats talking about the rating of each anime, giving them ratings and fancy numbers, feeling great when their favorite YouTuber or critic gives the anime a high score.
It feels like in today’s modern society everyone wants to be a film critic, everyone wants to be a film critic, talking about the story, the flow, the characters, whatever they can talk about to convince their audience that they know what they’re talking about. Having someone call your anime taste bad isn’t as trivial as it sounds, instead it’s telling people that they’re dumb, that they’re not the professors and the film critics that they aspired to be.
We care so deeply about what others think about our opinions that somehow we miss the point of the show completely, we try to explain the magic of watching that first show but we use meaningless technical language to explain our infatuation with them while failing to capture the actual magic of the show. We go into the next anime like we’re in high school grading our partner’s essays, desperate to give it a number and move on to the next essay.
But that’s missing the point entirely. The beauty of art is that each person has their own unique tastes and ideas that they can bring to the table. Coming from an African country an artist can tell a story about the severe wars and genocides that have been committed in their country. Coming from Asia you can talk about the culture and the history of China, or something more modern, like the influence of tiger parenting on their children. Each artist has a different story to tell and an idea to give, each with his or her unique perspective on the world.
I think that’s one of the things that I’ve discovered with my emotions, especially after watching through the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion. While I was well aware that the story was confusing and hard to understand, something that two of my friends had brought up after I finished it with them, I knew I had a sort of emotional attachment to it that couldn’t be explained using words, but only through experiencing it all.
I’m sure Sword Art Online’s exploration of Kirito’s reserved quiet nature during the first few episodes was a very cathartic and relatable experience for a lot of people, and that Darling in The FranXX offered an insightful view into a person who’s made to believe that they’re a monster their whole life.
Maybe to start making the world a better place, we have to first let go of our objective standards that we compare pieces of work by. Maybe instead of criticizing others for enjoying an anime, we find what they loved about it and feel the same magic that they felt. Maybe instead of blaming other people for your problems, we should look at things from a subjective scope, trying to utilize our empathy for the greater good.
Art isn’t about a price tag. Art isn’t about how much something sells for, how many awards it wins, or whether your favorite YouTuber liked it or not. Art is experiencing that magic again, the magic of the first watch, first listen, first experience. If it was all about ratings and grades, we wouldn’t have known anything about Van Gogh or Da Vinci.
Let go. Let go of expectations, let go of your grades and scores, let go of laughing at the show, and instead, enjoy it for what it is and the magic that it brings.
Anything can be an enjoyable or good anime, it’s your perspective and other people’s influence on you that makes you think differently.
Thank you for reading.
