Saturday 26 July 2003

Pic of the day: "There is no dream as boring as that of another person". From the anime Da Capo, which takes place in a low-mana world where the main character can only watch other people's dreams and conjure sweets, otherwise he's just another boy. Oh, and the cherry trees blossom all year long.

Daydreams of familiarity

Youth is a scary time. You have to break out of your birth family and start your own family. (Actually these days this is not likely to happen until you're grown up, but it still fills your head and your body to the point of bursting.)

There is only moderate help to get from the following anime, which I will briefly describe. This is not really a review but rather a comparison to my own life (or lack thereof). So I will be brief and just bring up the relevant part.

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Onegai Twins: Boy is abandoned as toddler, his only link to the past a photograph of a baby boy and girl bathing outside a house. He grows up to be a programming genius, and in high school as he locates the house in the picture he is allowed to buy it and move out of the orphanage. He spends hours after school programming computers to pay the mortgage. Then one day a girl rings the bell. She has the same picture and the same startling deep blue eyes, and believes that he is her twin brother. But later that night, another girl arrives ... with the same picture and the same eyes! Grumbling, the boy allows them to stay until they can find out who - if any - is the real twin. The anime has too much twincest innuendo for my tastes - the Japanese seem to be rather forward in their cartoons - but the basic premise is interesting: Instant family, just add a programming job! (It did not work quite that well for me, although it did work a little bit.)

Da Capo: As the anime starts, the male protagonist is already living with a "sister" that is not a blood relative. No effort is made (during the first three episodes at least) to explain how two high-schoolers are living together. I guess she could be his stepsister or one of them is adopted. She mentions "our parents" working overseas, so some of them are alive at least. The anime simply skips this problem by introducing another: His female cousin returns from America and demands his affection. More instant family, just add more relatives.

Happy Lesson: Reviewed before. (There is now a follow- up series running, Happy Lesson Advance.) I will just mention the relevant part. High school boy loses both parents to death. He inherits the house and enough wealth to finish his studies, but emotionally he is broke. His teacher finds him kneeling in the rain, crying his eyes out. She decides to take care of him. The other single female teachers think this is a great idea, and so all five of them move into his house and compete at being the best mother. Their personalities and talents are very different, and together they fulfill his every need ... almost. At such an age, new needs manifest that a mother cannot meet, and how will they react to this? With utter disbelief, it seems. Anyway, the premise here is: Instant family, just add teachers.

I trust you see the picture by now. These animated series are a subset of what foreigners at least call "harem" anime, where the main character (usually a young boy) is surrounded by affectionate characters of the other sex. While this may seem like a wish fulfillment, the series usually show that things are not so simple after all: The boy must sleep on the floor because there are women in all the beds; they constantly barge in when he is bathing, but if he accidentally walks in in one of them in a less than dressed state they scream "pervert!" and throw things at him. The women will be best friends when they plot against him, but then suddenly compete for his attention, each demanding to be alpha female in the pack or else!! In short, having fun at the expense of the "lucky" boy.

But I think the wish fulfillment may be at least partly on another level. As you may have guessed by now, the striking thing about these stories is how easy you establish your new family. Breaking out of the birth family is taken care of by fate, and getting a new "family" also just happens. There is no long period of trial and error, fear of failure or rejection. It just happens.

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And now let us talk about me.

Actually, that may not be necessary. I wrote some pretty exact thoughts on this topic on 21 August 2000. I will just add a bit here. That was never MY family, in the meaning a family of my own. It was other people's birth family. So even at that it fell short of what would be natural for a man to want. Even so, I did enjoy being together with my friends there. Especially the girls, of course. ^_^ But as I wrote, that part of life also have to come to a close. It was a side track, was it not? Looking for familiarity in the wrong places.

There is a phrase in the Bible, first in Genesis but later quoted and confirmed by Jesus, saying "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh". It seems on the face of it to be a great irony, that I have left father and mother more completely than almost anyone. (At least anyone who grew up in a harmonic, loving family rather than being beaten and kicked and raped and starved.) If I were a case of severe maturational deficit, it would seem natural for me to cling to my birth family, or failing that, a substitute of some sort. But my clinging days are long gone. Yet, the second part did not naturally follow from the first. That's OK by me, I guess. The whole wife thing seems ... well, not sure how to put it, but it seems a bit much. Like a big dinner when you only really want a snack.

I only wanted a little familiarity. Someone who wasn't afraid of me or contemptuous or envious. I guess I did not even know that was what I wanted, until I got it. Or indeed until I lost it. And now I watch these teen movies and I don't know for sure when I grew this old. And I can't say whether this blur is tears or the falling of cherry blossom petals. I rub my eyes and they are dry, but the vision doesn't come back, like a dream you've woken up from.

Ah, but there is nothing as boring as other people's dreams, is there?