child of mana / about
Has anyone really considered the horror that is growing up in the countryside in the mid-00s? If not, let me tell you about it. While my friends who lived in town had decent internet and cable, I had dial-up well into the late twenty-teens and satellite tv that gave us more channels (theoretically mostly because there were only a few that I would have actually wanted to watch) but had completely different numbers so trying to coordinate watching something a friend told me about became a real headache. I can't remember exactly how I got into anime except that I was always into art and they had manga at the scholastic book fair, but whatever the cause, once I was hooked physical media became a lifeline out of my dial-up cursed existence.
I joke, but the world was not really still set up for dial-up by that point. People had moved on from AOL to MSN and my poor sad internet could barely download the program, let alone use it. So I watched Bleach on YTV when it came on and hoarded vhs tapes that would later get given away to garage sales (I weep about this one mostly because I had the first four or so episodes of NGE on VHS, fansubbed. One day I would love to try to track down the specific fansubbing group that they were from but it's tricky because all I remember is physically how the tapes + boxes looked, which is likely generic enough to not be easily narrowed down. (I have confirmed thru looking at other fansubbing groups tapes that mine looked about identical to how most fansubbed VHS tapes looked).
I think this starting point instilled in me a love for physical media that persists to this day. We have good internet now but things are forever at risk of being deleted from streaming, and I have already experienced my fair share of lost media in the internet age (see my post on Milky Fawn and fashion vloggers for more on that). So I download whatever I can, and buy an annoying about of external harddrives. Now that I have a computer with a disc drive, I think I'm going to start trying to burn some of my favourite movies to DVD, so they can be even MORE physical. And then, of course, I buy and collect physical media.
The Otaku (of any variety) can be seen as a consumer, especially in a capitalist sense, and that is true. I and many other buy and hoard things, physical things, but the older I get and the most used to seeing shows and books vanish into near total obscurity, the more I become okay with the idea of building a collection. And I do want to get back to some of the things of old, like tape trading, video stores, etc. Feel free to reach out if that is something you'd be interested in!
This site will be a place for this sort of thing. So, a documentation of my collection, and once I get a decent flatbed, scans of some of the things / pieces I have that haven't yet been made more easily accessible. Watch this space, etc etc.