The Geeky Childhood Tag

It’s been a while since the last tag post. I’ve been answering in the comments, but there’s nothing like banging out an actual response in the editor.

Thanks (again) to Iniksbane from In Search of No. 9 for the nomination. Since there don’t seem to be any tag rules, I’m going to answer the original set of questions and the new set Iniksbane gave me.

The Original Questions (found via tag originator The Geek Girl’s Guide)

1. Where did your geek come from? Parents? Siblings? Destiny?

I learnt about anime, manga and video games from my mother (because she was the one that received the email containing the files for the arcade game emulator I mention in one of the later answers), but for my smaller forays into other things (graphic novels/comics, VNs/kinetic novels/otome games, gacha games…), I had to discover them on my own.

2. The First Geeky Thing You Got Into

Anime is the one that comes first in my head if you count Pokemon and the like, although I was probably a bookish person first and then an anime watcher later. Or, I guess if we really want to be annoying about it, all those children’s TV shows mean my answer should be live-action TV…(?)

3. Favourite TV Show as a Kid

I had quite a few from all over the world, thanks to the local library’s big stash of DVDs and my mother’s babysitting (the DVDs are how I found out about Sailor Moon, natch)…welp, considering the impact Sailor Moon had on me, there’s your answer.

4. Favourite Movie as a Kid

Mulan, probably. I think I saw the same things in it as I did Sailor Moon – a girl who kicked butt and said it was okay to have guy friends (as opposed to boyfriends, although the sequel did away with that kind of business…).

5. Favourite Video Game as a Kid

There’s this arcade game emulator which basically contains the first video games I can remember playing.

Fun fact: Street Fighter is possible on the emulator, but I only ever touched that after the Amazing Race (season 29, I think…?) had the PC version of Street Fighter V in South Korea. I found it too frustrating to learn how to control the character anyway (since I don’t really know what arcade controls are mapped to which computer keys via the emulator), so I gave up on it.

Anyway, the first of the arcade games in my memory would be Money Puzzle Exchanger (I – speaking in today’s video game vernacular – either main Asahi/Debtmiser or Cecil (?)/Eldylabor if I’m not lazy enough to go with default Sakura/Exchanger. Eldylabor is a bespectacled geek, but also – because this is anime-inspired – a girl with a boob window in her dress), but the prompt asks for a favourite, so it’s Twinkle Star Sprites.

Twinkle Star Sprites could arguably be accused of being a Sailor Moon ripoff, but it’s horrendously addictive and easy to pick up. Even its soundtrack is addictive, yet cute! (I’ll give you this YouTube link to one of the songs that’s stuck over time.)

6. Favourite Book as a Kid

I like quite a few things simply because I love the theme of transformation in them, something that can be traced back to this book of fairy tales I used to have where my favourite story was The Ugly Duckling (yes, that’s how far I have to reach to identify a favourite book…I was bookish enough – but am currently not bookish enough – that I haven’t been able to identify a favourite book in many, many years…except for the time where I picked Ready Player One because I needed it for Japanese class once).

The only problem with that is the titular bird is portrayed as having low self-esteem to the point of being suicidal, something that doesn’t help now that I’ve hit some pretty low points in my own attitude as well.

7. Favourite Memory as a Kid

I seem to remember at one point me and some other friends were pretending to be Sailor Scouts, as kids do…I say “some” because there was definitely at least one who was Mars and I was Mercury, but I don’t remember if there was meant to be a friend taking the place of Sailor Moon herself anymore or who it was. I don’t think any of us were familiar with Jupiter or any Senshi beyond that at the time, either.

The sad thing is that I grew distant from the friend I clearly remember in this memory (the one who’s playing the part of Mars). I see her around every now and again with a mutual friend who joined our shared friend circle in the same school about 5 years later (and then they went to the same selective school together for a few years), but come 2020 I won’t see her (or the mutual friend, who she still hangs out with) as much anymore.

It’s entirely possible that my love of anime – the same one that brings the two of us together in this memory – was the same thing that pulled us apart later on, since I went overseas in the Christmas period of one year and about 10 months later, I was pulled back into the anime/manga world.

8. A Character You Looked Up To as a Kid

Sailor Mercury/Ami Mizuno.

9. A Character That Scared You as a Kid

There was this cartoon series called Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids…the narrator was this old man that kinda freaked me out when I saw him on screen.

Can I mention that I used to believe the computer in my house – before it became afflicted with a virus that gave it a purple screen, that is – would grow legs and chase me after I turned it off? I think that’s probably even worse than the narrator…I used to try to get out of the room that had computers in it really fast because of that, which means my imagination is the scariest thing of all.

Iniksbane’s Questions

1. What was the first toy that you wanted so bad that you thought that you would die without it?

I don’t think I had one.
2. What was the first time that you realized you were doing something geeky?

I never once thought of myself as being a “geek”, although I knew I wasn’t popular from the moment I established myself as a smart kid and avid reader early on. Upon retrospect, I was wearing the “geek” label long before it became cool (as you can tell by my choice of Money Puzzle Exchanger characters), but I don’t think I labelled it as such because I just grew up being that way.
3. What was the first geeky thing you collected?

I guess you could say “books…from the library”…(This is considering the part of my life before I actually started up an entire anime/manga collection…yeah, I know. I’m late to the whole “anime on physical media” thing.)
4. What was the first anime you watched that you knew was anime?

Detective Conan.
5. What was the first hobby that you had to explain to your parents?

I don’t think I’ve had any, although my dad occasionally gets annoyed at how much anime I watch and manga I read.
6. How many geeky hobbies do you have, and when did you start them?

My main one is anime/manga (+LNs…?), which I’ve already explained in quite some detail for obvious reasons (turns out the year I started with manga, according to my library records, is 2010). For some of my lesser pursuits, VNs I believe was 2015, gacha games 2016, books and video games I’ve explained and comics/graphic novels…is the only one I don’t have a year for, but I’m going to estimate around 2010 due to OEL manga fitting that niche.
7. Why do you find joy in your geeky hobbies?

I’ve spent so much time around Japanese-inspired things, particularly anime, manga and things inspired by it, that I find joy in it simply because that’s the way I grew up. To take the anime, manga etc. out of the person you know as “Aria” would leave me with only a small fraction of what makes me interesting, because my identity has been built so heavily around my hobbies (…as opposed to someone I know, who currently doesn’t have any hobbies aside from loitering around a study forum…and they do that and tutor enough that they can call it “volunteering”).

8. When was the first time you realized that you wanted to write about your hobbies?

When I started doing my own personal blog on Blogger, not long after doing the blog for the school project.

9. If there is one blogger you wish you could have had as a childhood friend, who would it be?

Any is fine. Y’all would be good, to be honest.

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Nominations

Just gonna pick random bloggers from #AniTwitWatches. Whoever takes on the nominations can pick one set of questions from the above…or hey, if you have enough time, why not both?

• Shoka (because Irina started it)
• Astral (just…work on this when you’re not so busy)
• Lita
• K
• Yon Nyan
• …and if you want to do it, just link back and I’ll list you here.