The Blackberry Walk

Life is a series of adoptive fathers when you're growing up. To survive and have the breadth of character the modern wired-era world necessitates, you have to keep finding new fathers, new role models, to look up to, admire, and follow in their footsteps. Eventually, you receive all the nourishment your virtual father can offer after which you leave them and go searching for someone new to apprentice under, someone new to give direction to your future. I often think of it like parallel train tracks, each with a junction to the next track. When you're on the track of 'father A', you end up learning and becoming like them and should you never take the junction to the next track along, they will be your guiding light forever more. However in time the numinous fatherly projection fades, and you begin to see the flaws of your sensei. You see where they've gone wrong in their own life, how that's affected their thoughts and views and how they're just a human too - not the bastion of wisdom you once supposed. A healthy youth, as they age, keeps changing to the next track up, from father A to father B to father C, absorbing what they can from each father and proceeding onward to learn evermore about our complex world. I'm writing this idea down, since I've been rewatching an old father of mine - Digibro - whilst I've been revising for exams. Digibro has always been kinda insane, and that's been never truer than the present. But back in the day, he was the only anituber I ever watched. He has a force of personality and unashamed will to be who he is which I do still respect in many ways. Furthermore, he got me to think about anime in a more critical way. Once I was one of those people who watched everything to completion, because anime was so much fun to watch. Wrapped up in the fantastical stories, like many are at a young age, everything I watched was novel, exciting and deeply absorbing. But having a critical eye is important, otherwise you can't get at what is really important. You'll spend your time dilly dallying not knowing that something just isn't worth your time when there's a wealth of great anime out there. So he was the man with the message I needed at the time. He was a father of the past. Watching over his Asterisk War series now (watching the show simultaneously), I've realised I disagree with almost all of his points. Now don't get me wrong - Asterisk War does suck - but much of Digi's analysis in what I've seen so far has been pretty vapid. Endless discussion of plotholes here, plotholes there, nitpicking tiny little things. I'm not planning on giving my own analysis of Digi's analysis, but my point is mainly that with time - in this case roughly three and a half years, I've gone from superfan to disenchanted. And time does do that. You learn things about the world, find newer, greater, smarter, more nuanced people who can deliver their view with a new force of character, replacing the older fathers whose content you've exhausted. Looking now, I don't see Digi's content with the same praeternatural glow I once did. In many respects I disagree with a lot of his views on anime and the world. But I respect him as a past father who gave me a hand up on the ladder towards adulthood, as a stepping stone who has gotten me here. Thanks Digi for your help. You may like Weathering with You and you may have gone a little doo-lalley from all the weed and a possible 'creative illness' over lockdown, but thank you for helping me get here.