Warning! Girl invading personal space! Danger! Danger! Retreat!

Today I watched again the beginning of the anime “Please Teacher” (better known by its original name Onegai Teacher).  I was surprised to see that the scene where the class meets its new teacher was very similar to the same scene in my work in progress, tentatively named “When the Student is Ready“.  (This is not at all related to this book which I have definitely not seen before or even heard of until tonight.)

Anyway, the flash of recognition made me briefly wonder whether the beginning of my story was merely a rewrite of this scene in the anime (and manga, which I bought before I saw the anime).  Ove corresponds closely to the hormone-driven Hyosuke in the anime (although they do not look alike, perhaps I should write more about that.)  They are both loudly excited about the appearance of a beautiful young female teacher, and instantly attracted to her.  The other supporting character, Cecilie, fills the same role as Koishi: She is a childhood friend of the main character and pretty obvious in her attempts to approach him romantically, but he is completely oblivious.

Yet a little afterthought shows that these two sterotypes are extremely common in high school anime.  In fact, there are probably fewer teen anime without some version of them than with. In particular, the overly close childhood friend is a standard rival in pretty much any “harem” anime, a genre often based on dating games in which a single boy relates to a number of young women at the same time before some event makes him realize which one is the right one for him.  Much to my disappointment, the childhood friend almost never wins in the anime.  The only exception I can think of is the original To Heart.  Unfortunately, Cecilie can’t win either.  Sorry!  I kind of like her already, but the plot is a harsh mistress.

Speaking of the plot, I am in an unusual situation, for me. Usually when I start a new story, I have several early chapters and the very end, and somewhere between these I run into a big black hole and can’t get from here to there.  But with this, the gaping hole is early.  I need to establish the characters as believable before I introduce the unbelievable stuff. But I don’t even like to read stories like that, much less write them.  I much prefer books that start in the middle of the fantastic action and then looks back on how it got that way.  Perhaps I will reboot the story to make it so.  Reboots is something I do sometimes anyway.  Regular readers may remember that I even once dreamed that the world in which I lived was about to be rebooted! People were advised to hide in the cracks and “not think of authors”…

Perhaps more anime can help inspire me to write about the more or less ordinary lives of ordinary young people.  It’s not like I can draw on my own memories in that regard. By the middle of high school, I already inspired shock and awe (mostly shock, I guess), confusion, contempt, admiration and worry.  In fact, I come across as far more normal now.  I guess I have become better at hiding how alien I really am, even as I continue my alienation. Actually, I guess that when I was young, I did not know how boring humans really were.  Even in fiction, there is no way I would write about characters as boring as my reader’s classmates. If I did, why read my story in the first place?

Oh, and cryptomnesia  means a hidden memory, where you remember something but think you have come up with it yourself or by supernatural inspiration.  Just in case you did not know.  As a friend says to our main character:  “Nobody in your socioeconomic group knows what a socioeconomic group is.”