for whatever reason (I'll let you be the judge, dear reader), when I saw fushigi yuugi at ~16...it utterly captivated me. I had seen other anime that I enjoyed, but I am pretty sure this was the first shoujo. and something about the setting, the ensemble, the melodrama, all hooked me. I saved up from my part time job as a soccer referree (looool) to buy the box set, and I watched it 3 times. it's 52 episodes...and 2 of those times I watched it in one sitting. I even made multiple dude friends watch this shoujo-as-hell show with me.

this is also the first anime that made me ugly cry. not gonna spoil it, but if you know have seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about

for a very long time this was the only TV show I had ever rewatched! these days cowboy bebop and dragon maid have been added to the list. still, I rarely rewatch anything (see last post). sometimes I think that I should rewatch it...but I wonder if some things are best left in the past? I'm 100% sure that there will be stretches of it that will be painful to watch. I know a lot will not have held up well...the anime is very problematic in a lot of ways, blah blah blah...

you know, I think a lot these days about how we sort of...build stories about ourselves. and those stories are not in any way objective. you know, I was obsessed with fushigi yuugi, and at the time I didn't really let that "mean anything." I didn't read into it, analyze it. I just really loved it, in a guileless way that I became completely incapable of for a long time. I went to college and swore off anime because it was too nerdy, too uncool. I would go on to go through phase after phase of searching for my identity...for trying out this, trying out that. I don't regret it! I am more confident in many aspects of "me" these days, but it's just my nature...but I digress

the point is that at some point, as I got back into anime, I remembered FY and just how much I loved it. and that takes us back to stories, to how we build the narratives of ourselves and our identities. it's very very easy to fall into the trap of sort of...reinterpreting our own past in a way that serves our own conceptions of ourselves. basically, we start to have this narrative about ourselves that becomes "Me." It's the Definitive Narrative. And of course, we are in a better position than anyone else to define that narrative...but it's important to remember that we are also biased. We will change history, we will interpret in a favorable light, or even less nefariously, simply forget. I dunno, I think about this a lot. About how unreliable we can be when it comes to ourselves...we know more about ourselves than anyone else, BUT! we also have the deepest, most vested interest at times in maintaining narratives about ourselves, narratives that others don't really care enough to go through the trouble of biased interpretation etc.

regardless, it's just interesting to think about fushigi yuugi, and who I am now, and how it could serve as an interesting lens for a lot of things. for various forms of queerness, for discomfort with masculinity, even for simple things like...a love of ensemble casts, or a love of ancient chinese settings (I did go on to learn mandarin and live in china, after all!). fushigi yuugi sort of blew my mind in a way that feels very relevant to a lot of the things that I think a lot about these days, but it's always important not to overweight the causality. how much of an influence did it really have? or how much of this is me remembering that piece of media exactly because of the headspace I'm in now? there's perhaps a reason why I didn't think about it much for the last ~20 years. not that any of this matters, per se...I think it's just an interesting example of how we build our personal narratives. I could easily rewrite the narrative to make this a deeply formative work. but was it? yes and no. I think more accurately, I'd say that it resonated deeply with somethign inside of me that took a long time to really understand, that I explored in many different ways over the years. so I don't think fushigi yuugi was the key itself, but rather a window into a totally different world

I probably should rewatch it at some point. I try not to engage in too much nostalgia, as I think it can be a powerful, intoxicating, even dangerous thing...but in this case, I feel it'd be interesting to revisit it as a lens into myself as an adolescent. angsty, closeted in so many ways, yearning, painfully earnest, curious, so desparate to love and be loved...it's all in there, you know? I think if anything, fushigi yuugi was one of the first times where I was given a window into a more authentic self, but I didn't really understand it at the time. all I knew was that it resonated with me, but I had no framework for why

I wish cohost let you upload an image, but then control where in the post you put it. there probably is a way, somehow...oh well