FOF Project 2019
Every year I try to dedicate the first week of June to my passions. This tradition started back in high school when I first saw FLCL, which is now my favorite anime of all time. I watched it towards the end of my freshman year in high school, and I can never forget the experience I had when doing so and how it shaped one of the most relaxing times of my life. It’s been difficult and I’ve had little success in trying to do something creative and worth-wile in order to recreate that sense of elation that I got, but let’s see if I can do it again. At first I was thinking about doing something KH related since I FINALLY FINISHED KH 3 but that’ll be on the back-burner for now.
After pondering what I wanted to do in life I’ve tried to take up Philosophy, it being a class I really enjoy and maybe I could find an interesting idea in that realm of thought and see if I could either apply it to my actual life or to use it to enhance my understanding of this medium I so enjoy. Unfortunately, I may end up dropping the Philosophy minor, so I may stubbornly resort to this archive where my smatterings of how life and art reflect each-other in order to fill that gap in my heart and well of anger/despair in my soul.
This year I wanted to do something special for what I call “FLCL Week,” and instead of just leaving it o FLCL and talking about how atrocious season 2 and season 3 was (although I will do some of that here), I want to broaden the analysis or the conversation to other anime ventures I had between last summer and now. After the blunder that was “FLCL: Progressive” and “FLCL: Alternative”, I picked up another anime and got treated with a surprise. That anime was “Love, Chunibyo, and Other Delusions,” or as it’s commonly called, “Chunibyo” (I just realize now how much “Chunibyo” sounds like “Chunin” but now I’m getting ahead of myself). I know it’s not the newest series around, but every time I saw it I thought it was some sort of magical or sci-fi action show because I had always seen clips of the weird battle sequences and thought it would scratch the itch I had for something of that nature (I hadn’t seen Fate in a while and was thinking about restarting it so I had to do something). It was a palatable series with 2 seasons of about 12 episodes per season and thought “I could finish that before the end of the summer.” And right before school started again I did. Between the start and finish I was thinking about the subjects I’d study in Philosophy and started watching Wisecrack videos about different anime that I liked, and one of them was “Cowboy Bebop.” If you haven’t seen “Cowboy Bebop” then I press you to DO IT NOW IT’S GREAT! If it wasn’t the Wisecrack video, it was another video about “Cowboy Bebop” and many of the analyses of the show was about the grim nature of adulthood in how each of the characters are going through different stages of life and why their experiences are so integral to them as characters. There was also a brief discussion of how the series incorporated different genres such as Film Noir and old-school spaghetti Westerns and I enjoyed watching them.
After thinking of each of these three anime series that I’ve witnessed I think I have something to glean from them because I’m the type of person that doesn’t just watch something and forget about it, and now I have some words to share on how I view them. I think the points in time which I’ve seen the shows matter and have warped my interpretation of the themes they’re presenting and I’d like to present them in this manner. This will suffice for my “FLCL Week” project (If I can ever finish it because this thing is RUSHED) and maybe this’ll be the best one yet.
I call this writing project “Chunibyo, FLCL, and Cowboy Bebop: What It Means to be an Adult.” I know the title could use some work, but hang in there with me, okay?
