tags: thoughts, personal, anime
I learned today that apparently the Doctor Stone anime finished. Like, two days ago, as of writing this. I really loved the first season when it came out. I was in my third year of high school. I hate to admit it, but I really wanted to be like Senku. I was a plucky science-minded kid – obsessed with learning about the world around me, and desperately needing to be the smartest in the room all the time. I was part of robotics teams, did my own personal projects. I was the target demographic.
I never watched past the first season, despite how much I resonated with it. Those sorts of subjects became… painful to engage with. My grades started slipping around then. Granted, I was still above average, just by a bit. But still, I couldn’t coast on minimal effort anymore.
I’m not going to feed you the whole “gifted kid to burn-out adult” narrative, because that stuff is genuinely so stupid. (You were told you really smart when you were a kid? But when you grew up you actually had to try?? Let me play the world’s tinest violin; my heart weeps for you.) But what I am going to say is that my mental health really did start declining at that point. That didn’t help my grades either. I wrote about this extensively in one of my earliest posts. It’s a little rough, not very edited, overly flowery with its prose, and ultimately kind of pretentious. But I still think it really captures my thoughts at the time, and I believe it still accurately reflects how I view “identity” in a broad sense.
Anyways, because of my grades slipping, and probably because of the fact that I only got high 80s at best (before the grade slipping), I didn’t get into any of my dream universities. I didn’t get into… any university. I was ambitious and naive, so I only applied to three. For engineering. I remember crying myself to sleep those nights.
I got into UofT, though. UofT Scarborough. They offered me an alternate offer in their physical sciences program. I remember I had never even seen the campus until I moved in! I didn’t even know Scarborough was a place. Nor that Toronto even had separate regions like that. Despite only growing up an hour away. That was a hectic year.
It was… painful, to say the least. My mental health took a nose dive. I had some people close to me have to call me to get me to calm down a few times. To stop me from doing anything drastic. I look back at those years with an almost bittersweet nostalgia. It was hard to look at physics when it was basically psychological torture. Looking back at it, I don’t know why I struggled so much. Well, I mean, I know why, but I don’t know why. Not “why” in a meta-cognitive sense. Frankly, I’m not really sure what “why” I mean anymore.
The general point I’ve been gesturing at was that certain topics became hard to engage with, even though I used to love them. Those years totally shredded my sense of self. I remember for a while I would very publicly talk about how stupid mathematics and the sciences were. (Very juvenile, I know.) It was definitely some kind of coping mechanism.
Circling all the way back to Doctor Stone (crazy pivot…), it was hard to watch what was basically an anime version of my idealized self go on and be successful in any capacity. I would see the new seasons come out, but I could never bring myself to watch them.
But I’m in a much better place now. I got out of academic probation, even if it took my four years and a two suspensions. I crawled out of that hole and didn’t stop even when it would have simply made more sense to do something that hurt less. I don’t like to pride myself on very much, but if I had to choose one thing, it’s my ambition.
And now that I’m in a better place, and the series just ended – Let’s get back into… Doctor Stone!
Yeah, I know it’s kind of a weird place to end it. But wanted to start some kind of format where I talk about anime I’ve dropped over the years and the circumstances that led to it, and my thoughts on the series as a whole. It’s also a nice bonus that, since I watch an ungodly amount of anime, there’s a place for me to catalog the ones I’ve seen. Because I lost count years ago.
Anyways, here’s some stuff I plan to get back into and hopefully write about:
But for now, I’ll start with Doctor Stone. It’s a little silly how nostalgic I’m getting just thinking about it. I can remember how giddy I felt when one of my friends compared me to him.
This is a bit more of an informal post. Most posts with the thoughts tag without the essay tag are pretty stream-of-consciousness. I have an essay coming up soon that goes into some cultural theory surrounding fandom culture and language, but no spoilers! Sometimes I fear that acknowledging that you do something (in this case, engaging with cultural theory) makes it disingenuine. It’s a silly way to think, but I don’t want to be thought of as a pseudo-intellectual who fancies himself a cultural theorist, dropping “takes” that are nothing more than a personal opinion trying to validated through excessive jargon.