Category: Anime

2018 was not a particularly productive year for me. I didn’t write any new books and I barely kept up my blogs. Instead, I watched a lot of anime and took a nap nearly every day.

At first, I thought maybe my endless fatigue was a symptom of depression, or complacency, or another problem that lay squarely inside my head. But as I kept losing weight and my hair started falling out, I realized I needed to get help. From June until December, I saw four different doctors. I received a few different diagnoses—some of which were way scarier than others.

Thanks to support from my family and friends, I kept trying until I found a doctor who was able to diagnose me while taking all of my symptoms into account, not just one or two. In the end, I was diagnosed with a thyroid disorder called Hashimoto’s Disease. I like to joke that of course I got sick with a disease first discovered in Japan, but as a woman in my 30s with a family history of the illness, I fit the profile. In hindsight, I’m surprised the diagnosis didn’t come sooner.

December was incredible. Hashimoto’s means that your thyroid isn’t producing the hormones your body needs to function, so after my diagnosis I began taking synthetic hormones. Right away I noticed a change. I replaced my daily nap with a daily run, something I used to love to do before walking got me winded. As I began to regain my energy, I realized just how deeply the constant sleepiness had started to feel like a part of my personality, like a part of who I was.

In Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, Tanaka-kun is defined by his fatigue. It is more a prominent point of his personality than any interest or hobby. All of the people in Tanaka’s life must work around his inseparable fatigue if they want to be close to him. What’s incredible about the story is that even though Tanaka’s personality can be inconvenient, nobody tries to change him. Instead, his best friend Ohta literally carries him where he needs to go! If you’re born that tired, I guess it’s normal. Meanwhile, my own listlessness, which came on suddenly, was an enormous problem in my life and something I devoted my remaining energy toward trying to fix.

Of course, Tanaka-kun isn’t a medical mystery drama. It’s a very sweet low-key anime with jaw-dropping backdrops far nicer than it deserves (thanks to its setting of Hiroshima Motomachi Senior High School, an architectural marvel). It also sounds great. I could never skip the intro or ending song, which were both light and slow but just rhythmic enough to be addictive. Tanaka’s fatigue had parallels to my own, but escaping into his world was much more fun.

Then in January, my exhaustion came back. Watching Tanaka’s daily life wasn’t so fun anymore. The fog of sleepiness had just started to lift and it was doubly frustrating to lose my energy. I’d just started to get excited about the things I was going to accomplish in 2019, and all of a sudden my life was once again about how much work I could get completed between naps.

I was disappointed until I figured out what the problem was: I was pregnant.

The thing about thyroid disorders is they mess with your fertility. I had just about given up on starting a family of my own. But after I started taking the medicine, that problem vanished, apparently within weeks. And because we have a specific societal image of what it means to be pregnant (morning sickness, which I haven’t experienced and which is rarer than the movies would have you think), I didn’t realize that for me, the main symptom I’d have would be run-of-the-mill sleepiness. Apparently, creating a tiny human body can take a toll on you.

Pregnancy turned out to be a lot easier to diagnose than Hashimoto’s, and I have mostly gotten this second round of fatigue under control. (At least until my daughter arrives—I have a feeling that she’s going to be an excellent source of sleepiness for years to come!) But it’s made me a little frustrated with Tanaka. I am more than my tiredness, and there turned out to be a diagnosable cause for it—twice. But Tanaka doesn’t look for treatment. It’s treated as his personality quirk. Maybe he just has anemia or something! Along with Aoyama in Clean Freak! Aoyama Kun, I’d like to see him get some medical attention for a symptom that makes for an entertaining show but is probably making his life more difficult than it needs to be.

Tanaka may be inextricable from his symptoms, but he is still capable of change. At pivotal moments he realizes how difficult his listlessness is on Ohta and vows to walk himself to class (after all, it’s the least he can do.) It’s at these times I have the most sympathy for Tanaka. I know how hard it can be to do basic tasks when your body is screaming to lie down.

In times of good health, I thought of myself as little more than an ambulatory brain, but my physical condition has a huge effect on my behavior. I realize this is something only an able-bodied person would just be figuring out now, but better late than never! I am more than my symptoms, but it doesn’t always feel that way. On days when even medicine doesn’t help, I might as well take a cue from Tanaka and just go with the flow.

Free! -Dive to the Future- marks a new era in Haru’s life. Our swim boy protagonist is attending college now, a major milestone in anybody’s life. But while college is normally a time to branch out and experience new things, Haru is spending an awful lot of time with his old friends.

You could call this lazy storytelling. Or perhaps smart marketing, to not give up on the characters Kyoto Animation has spent so much time developing and selling merchandise for. But for a few viewers, myself included, I’d say this experience is pretty true to form.

I’ve never liked change. When I was looking at colleges, I only searched nearby. I ended up picking a place about an hour from home, the University of Mary Washington. Several of my high school friends also decided to go there, and I was so incredibly relieved. Once again, I could stay in my comfort zone and spend time with people I already knew.

Today, I’m regularly in touch with exactly one person I met in college: my husband, John. He was the president of the college anime club that I and some of my friends attended. If he hadn’t made his way into our group, I might not have gotten to know him.

It’s not that I’m snobby or even particularly shy, but I’ve always had a difficult time making new friends. Growing up, I was bullied a lot because I tend to get very enthusiastic about things I like, which made me a target. (A great example of this is when I studied abroad in Italy and made zero friends. On the way to Tuscany, I kept excitedly pointing out the animals and birds, assuming other people would also care, not realizing it was obnoxious. People called me Nature Girl and either laughed at me or ignored me for the rest of the semester.)

For most of my life, I was like Haru. I think it’s easy for plenty of fans to relate to this introverted, socially anxious swimmer. I wasn’t reserved the way he is, but I could relate to how cultivating existing friendships feels like a safer bet than making new ones. I used to think this was the most low-risk strategy, too. I used to think there was actual strategy involved, and that the right one earned you a group of friends who never judged, fought, or left you.

For me, the most prominent example of how unlikely this is occurred this week in 2017 when a friend of mine died unexpectedly. It took us until November to find out why: a congenital heart defect. She was a wife, a new mom, and an incredible friend. Not a day has passed this year that I haven’t thought about her. She would have teased me so much about being on my anime blog again, in a post about Free! of all things. The enormity of her legacy could never fit into a couple of trite blog posts, but I bring up her impact again because on this anniversary, I am reminded that change happens no matter what. The people you love have a fixed amount of time in your life, and no method of making friends, or closing yourself off from others, will ever make you “safe” from heartbreak.

The Free! franchise has always been surprisingly good at portraying nuanced relationships, and -Dive to the Future- appears to be a story about exploring the intricacies of friendship. None of the characters we meet are new (though two might seem unfamiliar if you haven’t seen the movie). But while Haru has been growing up, they certainly haven’t been standing in place. Even when you’ve known somebody since middle school, the unexpected can strike. People grow apart or together. Acquaintances can become best friends. Best friends can become rivals. Friends can stay by Haru’s side for years, like Makoto, or travel thousands of miles away from him, like Rin. Change is inevitable.

This past year, I’ve been trying to embrace change for the first time in my life. My Japanese English conversation group has become a surprisingly big part of my social life for a group of people who are constantly speaking to each other in their least fluent language. I’ve met people through anime conventions, groups like Anime Feminist, and my local entrepreneur circle. My core group of friends from high school is still very important to me, but the way I interact with them has changed, too. I try harder to reach out, to not take people’s friendship for granted. I can’t keep friends with me forever, but I can appreciate them more while they’re here.

An anime where nothing changes would be boring, so I get how people might be concerned to see the same old characters returning and making an exciting new setting all too familiar. But as someone with a similar lived experience, I’m confident there’s more than enough to explore.