Mygo and my thoughts lately
Maybe you don't need to hear this rambling but you should watch Mygo; good anime hehe.
On April 16th, 2024, I finished watching an anime broadcasted last year called BanG Dream It’s MyGo!!!!!, and immediately the long vanished rush to write something rushed back to my vein. I think, in essence, this is due to my recent up-and-beings and reflections on my work/life so far.
If you have not watched this anime, I would recommend you do so - great story, on-the-point progression, interesting characters, splendid artistic style, and absolutely meme-able voiceovers. Of course, if you speak Japanese, you would understand that MyGo is actually referring to 迷子(Maigo, lost kid).
I got started watching Mygo on April 16th (yes, the same day) because of fandom creations (e.g., fan-made videos piecing parts from absolutely unrelated episodes and forming an another-world story). It’s just hilarious! I’ve also started using some of Anon’s (one of the main characters) emojis on Telegram and WeChat, and they’ve been great and so helpful at times.
Imagine a .gif of a loading circle on top of a cute anime girl when you want to express that “I’m speechless, bruh” (wink).
Well, I was able to finish this anime in one day because I’ve also gotten sick these few days since coming back to Shenzhen, China, from the states in late March. Shenzhen is a southern coastal tier-1 city, and even though my hometown was just some 1-hour drive away (Guangzhou, another tier-1 city), spending the past 8-9 years basking in the breezy sun and cozy wind of San Francisco / Stanford / Bay Area was definitely a luxury too indulging for the notoriously humid yet perceptually arid land I’m currently living on.
TBH I’ve been intermittently sick/ill since June 2023. I think, on average, I had some medical symptoms at least once per month. Work stress here in the mainland is also immense. Even though VC is indeed one of the best jobs you could have, systemic economic downturns, deteriorating international conflicts, domestic unrest, and an increasingly polarized (on a gender basis, legal basis, etc.) and depressed Chinese population have pitched my long-upheld wish of a humanitarian future against a palpably cruel, divided reality.
Both physical and mental distress have surrounded me for a while, and it has shown its effect on me - probably this is why I haulted writing life reflections for already a year. But, quite miraculously, Mygo gave me this incentive to re-commence, and I think it is probably because it took the torso of a pathetically-drenched me out of the mire of reality and cleansed my soul with some non-realistic, yet refreshing, born-out-reality fantasies that delineated the unique, bitter-sweet maturation from teenagehood that each and every human alive could not experience again. It is the part that expires the quickest on the long haul of life, only to be recollected by most of us when we are about to disembark onto the terminal stop - if fortunate enough, to say.
I think Mygo is fascinating because it artfully depicted 青春傷付き (youthful wounds) that is critical to many Asian literatures: the love letter that forever stayed in one’s drawer, the dusking wind concluding elementary school’s graduation, the youthful spirit that is reduced to dependable maturity, etc. Youthful wounds are great because, in artistic creations, they are a vehicle of emotional eruption. If done right, they can reverberate with the reader. In Mygo, we see these wounds through
1)Yakimochi: I don’t like you because my BEST fren Tomori cares about you more than me,
2)Shyness from the truth: Sakki, one of the characters, did not tell her reasons for leaving the original band to others even until the very last episode, and
3)particularly through how the conflict/affinity dynamic between characters played out over the entire anime: “Soyo-san love❤️” -> “Ah, naru-hodo. I am unneeded here”.
beginning of story ⬆️
by the end of the sotry⬇️
I think I should clarify what wound means here. If you have watched Evangelion, I want to tell you that wound here is a subset of the A.T. Field. If you have no clue of what I was talking about, read next paragraph.
Youthful wounds have two traits: youthful, and association with “pain”, “regret”, or “intense situations/memories/etc”.
I think if you look back to the present time 30 years down the line, everything will seem to be cloaked with some nostalgic filters, and that gave these wounds some additional flavor - even though subjectively these wounds could come from disgustingly sorrowful situations, they become savory memories nevertheless in the long-run. It’s like the kind of “oh wow I had that time” from when you get married and looked back to the first argument you had with your first sweetheart (of course no longer in touch for some decades).
I know I am doing a bad job describing what I mean here, but I couldn’t tell you what happened in the anime. Sorri :(
I think I am so touched by this anime because in the adult world, trying to re-experience youthful wounds will lead to demanding liability: inconvenience or even discomfort to others, for example. However, I can’t help but appreciate the literary beauty hidden in youth wounds - maybe because I am a bit narcissistic and indeed grew up under quite an unusual setup. It’s like the kinkier you are, the kinder your taste get.
I guess I just don’t want to grow up - not completely. I am not sure how I can express what I am trying saying here, but I hope you get it. Maybe one day I can write it out.
Looking from a higher perspective, if life is an empty scroll that could only be painted by you with time as ink, then a perfect, professionally done, example serving scroll is simultaneously awe-provoking and dreadfully boring - I think. Awe-provoking being that a person can actually live up to the logical expectation of societal traditions (of course, defined by this-world morals) all the way along. I think we call these achievers elites in this world.
But, I suspect most of the people - of course, theirs stories are not told or heard - are not trophy winners. This is probably why I am bothered. When you get sick, you feel “thinner” everywhere, as if something will snap if not watched carefully. I also do not think we are alive during a good time - that the past 30 years are truly some fortunate, peaceful time in the long river of human history. Breathing space for the non-extraordinaries seem to be shrinking exponentially. The pie will not, and probably cannot, grow bigger indefinitely, and if you are not born fortunately, that is indeed the biggest misfortune in this era, in this time.
I feel so disgusted by myself for saying what I just typed. But since joining the workforce, I increasingly had to admit that it is true.
At times I feel betrayed by the world, the selective&liberal art education I had the immense fortune to receive, and myself - especially my passionate belief that the world is finally getting better - thanks to technology - after thousands of years of endogenous oppression and mishap. Turns out technology still requires humans to make the world truly equitable, and we are genetically never going to be good at this - I want to point out that I am not naive such that I believe in a world where human is no longer the agent in most things, but you get the gist. Our greed, our generational feud, our convoluted (and sometimes sinister) desires, and arbitrary menace are very hard to resolve/contain, such that if economic growth starts to wear, all problems start walking out of the shadow.
I think my youthful spirits are indeed undergoing something transformative - one that is quite harsh, tbh, from what I am feeling now.
Yet, back to the beginnig, I still want to applaude Mygo for offered a temporary safe-house to me in this washing tide of generational nihil. Like I said, it delineated a fantasy of a past time that has turned unwelcoming to me forever. It is a story with a lot of cute girls (daugh, hehe). It is violently colorful, emotion-inspiring, and the songs are great - yes, it is a music-band-forming story. It successfully snatched me out of reality for a while: not because it is too unreal a story, but exactly because it is a realistically reverberating one. Maybe Mygo gave whatever that is still unname-able and lingering in my hollowed heart a smack, took my hand, and showed me that it is important to still believe in something bright.
That just with enough time, wounds - adulty or youthful - will fruit, and you will feel beautiful.
Not everything is bewailing.