☞ Departure
01 Initiation
02 Crossing back the Threshold
—————— a (Goodbye Shyness)
03 Rebuild of Evangelion
I grew up on Japanese animation. I say it as if it was the soil I sprang out of, but I did watch a lot of television when I was young, mostly channel 6, the Israeli ‘Children's Channel,’ which featured appropriately much cartoons. I was raised as an only child, my two parents were away working, I spent much time alone after school. Mom said I shouldn't watch so much telly, but my parents never quite forced or forbade me anything. I recall a prevailing notion that ‘reading books was good’ but only retrospectively recognize that what must have put literature outside my reach was that our library was all Russian. I recall fondly the Russian children's books that my mom must have read me on her lap, but my own scarce interaction with the written language would only come some thirty years later. I suppose my parents whom I had long surpassed in the language were not discriminant on Hebrew books, and given the tight buckle, spared on the not demanded. When a complete stranger lavished generous charity upon me it was as I made big eyes before a video game console in a store, Sega's Mega Drive II, but that's another story.
I didn't know the animation was Japanese. I recall the utter puzzlement at the Chinese —as at the time I understood it to be— on the screen at the end credit sequence of Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri, broadcast in Israel as HaLev (‘The Heart,’ like the novel it was based on), a series which we all enjoyed in secret about a whiny Italian boy Marco running to his mother across the globe. I recall it being the last episode, the watching of which must have put me in such a mood that led me perceive the old credits, partially overlaid by Hebrew credits, with new eyes. I find it curious that the Japanese credits had such an effect on me; it was as if accidentally rubbing against a golden idol I discovered that underneath a thin layer it was but tin. An unmasking. I would still be surprised many years later to find out that such series as the one with the canine Three Musketeers was Wan Wan Sanjuushi and that Alice in Wonderland was Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu, in addition to Anime 80-kakan sekai isshuu (Around the World with Willy Fog), Mitsubachi Maya no Bouken (Maya the Honey Bee), Kashi no ki Mokku (Adventures of Pinocchio), Jikuu Tantei Genshi-kun (Flint the Time Detective), Mori no Youki na Kobito Tachi: Herufi to Rirubitto (The Littl' Bits or Erets haKatkatim), Tanoshii Muumin Ikka (Moomin), Ahiru no Kuwakku (Alfred J. Kwak) and Supuun Obasan (Mrs. Pepper Pot).
No one knew these were Japanese. It was long before the emergence of ‘anime,’ a phenomenon that is more a turn of pride than of penetration, not unlike the kind their neighbors would experience: in my childhood every plastic bricabrac was emblemed with, in English, “Made in China,” not a flaunting of achievement in quality but an exerted confession of its original sin. Fast forward and China rises as a global power, shaping the world after its Sino-image, bitch contends to be top dog now. The Japanese had long exported animation overseas but it would be a while before it became distinguished like sparkling wine from Champagne or creamy cheese from Camembert.
My relationship with Neon Genesis Evangelion was out of the ordinary. We were a coincidence. By which I mean to say that that the series reached me was a rather unlikely event; and that its reach, in my environment, was restricted to me. Trust me, and I'll guide you through.
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When I left Israel in my twenties anime was not yet a cultural phenomenon. You could not expect a random even adolescent or infantile person to have the faintest notion of what ‘anime’ was. Well, what was there to know? It's just animation from Japan. But every such distinction prompts an alternate attitude, like calling a beverage ‘craft beer’ makes it different than that which hillbillies drink, or pouring gin into a martini glass with an olive gives a different air than of the scenes depicted on William Hogarth's prints. When I grew up animation was taken to be a medium directed at kids, while anime.. well, what about it? I cannot help but still think of it as a juvenile medium, despite some masterpieces and a notion that it is thanks to anime that since my childhood animation has gained respect internationally as a medium with potential of general appeal.
Anime had not yet been a thing in Israel but it must have been already in the US for it did gain special attention by local producers. A young Israeli channel called Bip, which must have modelled itself after the American Comedy Central, began running ads for an upcoming show called ‘Manga’. Ostensibly, as it actually was an ad for a particular time slot. As some of you may know, ‘manga’ is the word for Japanese comics (if you forgive me the term), i.e. the printed equivalent of anime. Rather than an honest mistake, I think it was a deliberate choice based on the prosodic qualities of the word and likely a burrowing from Manga Entertainment, an American anime distributor. In the ad a woman declaimed hypnotically, monotonically, apathetically the word ‘manga’ over and again over footage from the movie Juubee Ninpuuchou. It was graphic, i.e. violent events of carnage and sex were not alluded to, as in theater, but represented in their sheer thereness, as in ballet.
I don't recall seeking that sensation, but since it was that age I suspect it was not coincidental that I found myself in front of the TV at the right channel at the right time. The year was 2001 and I was twelve.
Before getting to that fateful evening I'd like to provide context, personal and generic. In Israel one was assigned a school based on residential location and a choice of either state school or religious state school. There were exceptional non-local schools, two in Tel Aviv: ‘The School of Nature, Environment and Society’ and ‘The School of Arts.’ I applied, or rather my parents did in my name, to the latter, and I was accepted. I, six years old, refused to go, complaining about the presence of “ugly children” which I must have seen on an open day. Should I say I was bribed? The matter was settled when my parents bought me an action figure of the Power Rangers' Dragonzord (300 New Israeli Shekels). Though my interest in the Power Rangers dissipated with the start of school, until then it was rather vested. I owned one or two VHS of the series, a Megazord action figure (bought by my parents), a flat-chested yellow Power Ranger action figure (given to me by a kindergarten mate), I believe also a green Power Ranger action figure (with a detachable golden chest plate), and I registered to the series ‘Fans' Club’ from which I received a box that contained some stickers and an iron-on logo that my mother fixed into a mauve taupe coloured t-shirt of mine.
The history of the Power Rangers' genre (as well as that of Neon Genesis Evangelion) begins, strangely enough, with Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame. His 1912 fantasy novel The Lost World, about an expedition to an area in the Amazon populated by prehistoric fauna, was adapted in 1925 into an American silent sepia monochrome movie of the same name, where dinosaurs were depicted using stop motion animation. Towards the end of the film a brontosaurus, a “perfectly harmless – – unless it happens to step on us” creature, is brought back to be exhibited in London, where he escapes his bonds and wracks havoc on the city. The American black and white 1933 talkie King Kong, which also included dinosaurs, improved on the special effect. Whereas Lost World had only a couple of shots where the animation and the live footage shared the screen, and even then the dinosaurs and humans were on separate horizontal sections of the frame, King Kong featured many shots where the giant ape and humans overlapped and interacted. The American The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, featuring a dinosaur that awakens from its frozen hibernation at the Arctic Circle by an atomic bomb test and returns salmonwise to its spawning ground, now occupied by New York City, was a huge success in Japan. The following year, 1954, the Japanese Gojira, known to us as Godzilla, was released, integrating into its plot real events from a few months earlier. No atomic tests had taken place in the Arctics, but they did take place at Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Pacific, which, as an aside, is alleged nowadays to ironically harbour a great diversity of animals, including alleged mutants such as single-finned Nurse sharks, supposedly due to its seclusion from human activities — nuclear testing aside. The more than twice larger than expected blast of the hydrogen bomb detonated on the American Castle Bravo test contaminated the crew and tuna catch of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryuu Maru (‘Lucky Dragon No. 5’), causing a panic in Japan. In the film Gojira, per the director a metaphor for the atomic bomb, has been disturbed by a hydrogen bomb testing and, after sinking remote boats, comes to pay a visit to Tokyo. Though the creature was originally meant to be rendered by stop motion, the production developed a new technique, Sutsumeshon (‘suit animation’), whereby an actor would ramble around a miniature set wearing a costume. And so the Kaijuu genre was born.
I'll leave momentarily giant monsters aside and turn to giant robots. For a long time I had assumed that they had the same origin —in film— and that only subsequently they entered manga and anime. I imagined that the usage of miniatures, essentially trick photography, allowed for a special effect, that the desire to use the effect preceded the idea for a story that could take advantage of it, and that once it was used it created a genre that got imported into manga and anime where the depiction of a giant creature was not any more special than the depiction of the mundane. I was disappointed —thinking it was a better story— to find out that it was not the case. Human-piloted giant robots appear already in the works of Jules Verne (elephant shaped and steam powered, in this case), but their first visual representation was in the 1956 manga Tetsujin 28-gou (‘Ironman No. 28’), featuring a child who remote controlled a giant robot. For completion I'd mention Dai Ningen Tanku (‘huge human tank’), a giant autonomous humanoid robot, one of the villains of the Japanese 1930 Kamishibai (cantastoria-like medium; slide-show + narrator street theater) about a flying Dracula-like red-caped skull-faced superhero Ogon Batto (‘Golden Bat,’ deriving its name from a Japanese cigarette brand), though, unlike mecha, it is not piloted by a human. Tetsujin 28-gou was animated in 1963, and in 1967 appeared the live action Giant Robo which had the same premise. In 1972 began the serialization of the first manga that featured a piloted (as opposed to remote controlled) giant humanoid robot, Majinga Zetto. Two years later appeared the anime Getta Robo, which debuted the trope of such robots combining to create a single more powerful unit. Half a decade later came out the anime Kidou Senshi Gandamu (‘Mobile Suit Gundam‘) that drew inspiration from Heinlein's 1959 Starship Troopers and presented a more sombre take on the genre, depicting the pilots as soldiers and seeking to confront the viewers with the realities of war. In 1982 the anime Choujiku Yousai Makurosu (‘Super Spacetime Fortress Macross‘) began broadcasting, debuting the trope of such robots which could switch between a vehicle and humanoid shape, to which the American 1984 animation series Transformers is indebted.
When the Japanese Toei Company cooperated with Marvel to adapt Spiderman to the Japanese television, the superhero underwent some changes. Though he, too, could walk up walls and shoot strings to hinder his foes, the Japanese Spiderman locomoted mostly by running and by driving his stylized car. To combat his fantastical super villains who, once half beaten, grew to gigantic proportions, he piloted a giant flying feline robot (the Leopardon) which could transform into a humanoid shape. Toei then added this trope of growing villeins and the means to combat them from the third installment (in a series of series) on of its live action tokusatsu Super Sentai series about a team of five that transformed into basic-coloured suited superheroes to combat their supervillain rivals.
In 1993 Super Seitai was adapted in the West as The Power Rangers, whose heroes piloted, once their villain grew up, giant animal shaped robots, the Zords. Beyond lending the concept, the 16th Super Sentai series, Kyouryuu Sentai Jurenja, lent also footage of special effects scenes to the first season of The Power Rangers. Essentially, the American production only filmed the sections between the action. There's one curiosity in the adaptation. The suited Super Sentai/ Power Rangers looked identical to each other, primarily distinguished by the colour of their suit, as well as by the weapon each yielded and a helmet design that mirrored one's respective Zord; the exception was the pink Sentai who had more of a bosom and whose top was a tunic, thus extending as a skirt below the belt. The Sentai's secret identities were warriors from an ancient civilization who wake up after 170 million years from suspended animation, portrayed by Japanese actors. The Power Rangers production used American actors for the unmasked protagonists, and thereby added some colour to the cast. The identity behind the red ranger, the leader of of the team —always appearing in the middle and piloting the Tyrannosaurus rex (rex as in Oedipus Rex, of course)— was a jock, the blue ranger was a nerd (whose actor, as it happens, was gay, received much homophobic treatment from the production and was sent to a so called conversion therapy. It's this that led him to eventually quit, though he was the longest remaining actor of the original five), the pink ranger was an acrobatic gal, the black ranger was black and the yellow ranger, a guy in Super Seitai, was Asian, played by a Vietnamese-American actress. I wonder what another casting choice would have been made if it was the blue and not the red ranger who was the team leader. Since, supposedly, the antagonist human witch Bandora appeared in special effects scenes (if costumes and elaborate backdrop can be called thus), hers were not refilmed but, along with her Japanese actress, were imported wholesale and dubbed, christening her as Rita. Anyhow, the Rangers' Zords could combine into the humanoid Megazord, the T. rex forming its bust. I also had an action figure of the Megazord (100NIS), though it was the smaller version whose legs could come off but which could not —like the toy my friend Tom had— be disassembled to the five constituent Zords. The green ranger and his Dragonzord were not of the initially introduced team and therefore not part of the Megazord, though it could combine with them (and with the bigger version of the toy) into some sort of extra-mega Megazord, the way The Power Rangers series combined many tropes together.
It was primarily by Gundam that Hideaki Anno (who would later also remark Godzilla and other Kaijuu films) was inspired to create with studio Gainax the 1995 Anime series Shin Seiki Evangerion (‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’), featuring giant robots piloted by teenagers in order to battle gigantic enemies.
Thanks Doyle.
At Omanuyot, The School of Arts, Kosta was the closest of my three best friends; in the figurative sense, as well as in the more literal geographical one: he lived around the corner and we took the no. 5 school bus from the same stop. Kosta was also the closest in a socio-economic sense; we both immigrated with our families from the former Soviet Union in our early infancy, grew up in Russian speaking homes and in similar households. Our affinity was far greater than our mere proximity, though I cannot say what it was based on. Though he humoured me at it, he lacked a genuine attraction to the boyish infantile interests that fascinated me, whether fantasy or computer games. Perhaps that's an indication in itself, a fellowship that transcended particular activities. I suppose we watched a lot of TV together and found what to talk about.
Of the three friends, Ron was the first I met. We were born towards the end of the calendar and thus around the beginning of the academic year, one month apart, which put us in the same group of class laureates. I recall an evening meeting at Dafna's home for the purpose of organizing a spectacle to be enacted at school or a party to mark the seasonal birthdays. Despite a lack of attraction towards sports, there was a dynamic energy in me that found its release with Ron. A friendly teasing in second grade developed into a systematized hybrid of Hide & Seek and Tag that we played until our graduation of middle school. It waxed and waned, some periods we played just the two of us, at its peak popularity close to all of the class's boys played the game. The rules were simple: the seeker counted at the beginning of the game closed eyed, then went to find the others. Once one was detected, he ran after him. If he didn't catch the other within 20 seconds he had to let go and seek elsewhere. If he did, the other became the seeker, had to count down closed eyes and so forth. Since the catching happened often in hidden corners —the entire school was our playing field— the other players would not necessarily know who the seeker of the moment was, adding a dash of paranoia. At the later years an embellishment was added; when the bell rang the end of recess, it was the runners' goal to get into the classroom, the seeker forbidden from standing too close to the door. Otherwise Ron and I shared an interest in fantasy and computer games, particularly in Starcraft, that we both played and discussed at length together.
Ofek was the first friend whose acquaintance I made through mediation and based on interest. Warcraft II, which I had been provided with the computer we had at home, was a fantasy themed, like Starcraft real time strategy game: players controlled their pieces from a top down view, constructed buildings and units to gather resources and annihilate the enemy. The first map was a kind of tutorial, its objective was to construct a barracks and four farms. Since unlike the town hall, which could produce workers, or the barracks, which could produce warriors, farms —which technically raised the cap of the number of units the player could produce— didn't do anything other than display enigmatic numbers, I didn't build any. A simulacrum of humanity's meaningless existence on earth and its great climate-change inducing devastation, I killed the scattered enemy units on the map, exhausted all the gold mines, chopped down all the trees and filled the map with promising but useless town halls and barracks. I enjoyed the banality of the way I played the game, if only because it was visually pleasing, the soundtrack was great, but even not knowing any better I was certain that there was an afterlife, that is, a next level, if only because all the games I had known had them; and, certainly, I knew no game that did not terminate in either “game over” or with a declared victory. Before the beginning of one sculpture class Ron brought me to the table to which Ofek was seated. In my mind the scene is akin to an unfortunate man being brought to a crime boss to plead for his help. Ofek told me what I needed to do to complete the map, told me that on the second I had to bring the blue orc to some circle, and suggested that my mother could translate the mission objectives for me, that is, from English. I did give it a skeptical go; my mom gave it a try, but unlike, supposedly, Ofek's mother, could not render the same service. Interest in video games was a commonality; Ofek and I were among the more enthusiastic Pokemon players in class, playing on our Game Boys in recess. Once I discovered accidentally, while being sick at home, Warcraft II's map editor, I created maps for him to play, delivered on 3½" floppy discs.
Ron and Ofek lived on the other end of the city, in the more affluent north. It was mostly I who came over to them, riding together the no. 6 school bus. There were several factors that played into this. First, at least when I was still in kindergarten, I was extremely jealous of my things, agitated when another touched my toys. Second, I felt anxious as a host. I felt responsible to entertain my guest, and could not relax until he was gone. During my school years it was only Kosta and Ron who I could have over without being constantly on my toes. Third, my northern friends very trivially had more stuff: more toys, more video games, more snacks, and generally nicer houses to be in, multistoried affairs with a yard or garden. I don't think this asymmetry was ever discussed, the dynamic developed naturally whereby I was always invited or asked myself to come over rather than the other way around. And fourth, my father made it possible. I recall one week when I went over to Ofek's place three days in a row, without prearrangement. I'd phone my father from Ofek's place and notify where I was. What it meant to him was that, regardless of whatever other plans he had had, he had to come and pick me up in the evening, half an hour drive in each direction plus the time upon his arrival of me begging to be let to stay just a few minutes more.
On third grade Ron and Ofek attended Dungeon & Dragons class at the community center. ‘Class’ is not quite the right word as nothing was being taught, merely a game was played —not even the kind for which one could ‘practice’— but the format was similar. I heard of it, got interested and began attending as well, joining their school bus once a week and having lunch at Ofek's. The participants were around our age, it was led by a Dungeon Master, I think his name was Tomer (who would later be so kind as to lend me a CD of the game Diablo), who I now assume was in high-school, though he might have been younger — at that age even the kids one grade above seemed ‘big’ to me. We were about a dozen altogether, really too big of a group for playing a roleplaying game properly. In a typical manner, when I created my character I was like the Dalai Lama who comes to the pizza shop and asks, “can you make me one with everything?,” opting for an elven warrior-mage-rogue, which meant I had leveled up only once, perhaps twice, by the end of the year while my peers' characters ascended the ladder of specialization. I suppose I have never been much of a team player, aiming rather at self-sufficiency.
I probably didn't speak too much, recall sitting rather at the other end of the long table from Tomer, but remained enthusiastic enough, more than my friends anyhow, to go to Advanced Dungeon & Dragons the following year. I'd come to Ofek's place after school, go to the center alone and be picked up from there by my father. I'd notice the day's changing length; it would get darker over the center's grassy slope from week to week, night, then it brightened, still day, as I waited for my father. That same year I also attended animation class with Ofek at the same place, drawing with markers on a clipboard of transparent papers. My final animation was of things morphing into other things.
It seems astounding to me now that it happened, and nonetheless it did: my request to run a side-adventure for some of the other players, i.e. to DM in parallel, was granted. I don't know for how many sessions I did so, but I think it was a prescedent that then led some of the others kids to do the same.
Nonetheless, even though my friends hadn't come to that second year, roleplaying games, specifically AD&D, became a popular activity among us. Various groups formed and dissolved over the next years, always containing the three of us, at times some more people. Usually it was I who DMed, sometimes it was Ron. With the latter I discussed role-playing often, how to do it right, discussed character. Especially retrospectively it warms my heart that we all had this hobby. Though in the 80's there was a moral panic in the US about devil-worshiping and what not around it, promulgated by Christian organizations who feared imagination and ironically suspected an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality among the youthful players, it is essentially a system for collaborative storytelling. I wanted to say that the game's rule books, which I borrowed from Ron, were the first books I have read —greatly preceding my reading of literature— but I had already read the few computer games' manuals that I had, those that had lore in them and were in Hebrew, with relish.
A couple of years later —we already had internet at home, dial-up, the kind that made music as you connected and which dropped if somebody called— I discovered adnd.co.il. I'll remind my audience that there was a time with internet but without search engines. Incidentally, I remember the first time I ever saw the Google homepage, from a distance over the shoulder of a classmate, in the computer lab, which is surprising since the page was unassuming and at that moment I didn't know what it was, to say nothing of being able to tell how important it was going to become. When we got internet set up our provider included a thickish booklet that listed websites with half a page descriptions, expending the Hebrew library at our home. Otherwise people used websites called portals, which likewise listed urls grouped by categories. I discovered adnd.co.il the same way I would discover a few years later the site anime.co.il, by typing the address into the browser and crossing my fingers.
Adnd.co.il had articles and character sheet templates for download, but its retaining power lay in its PhP forum. I registered as the_black_one and became a very active member. Under one's name and avatar was displayed a post count as well as a ‘rank’ which got promoted at post count intervals. The idea of spamming and its admonition was circulated in the forum, I knew better than to post rubbish, but I brought myself to find something to say on every thread in which I was not yet the last commenter. It was there that I learned to type, to distinguish between the Hebrew letters daled and reish, vav and nun-sofit. It was there, too, that I received my first writing advice, put very politely by one N. Beltov, which I immediately adopted, about one or no exclamation marks being enough to make a point!!!!!!!
The earliest palpable memories of my shyness are related to this RPG community, and I wonder if it indeed only emerged later in life, that is, around early adolescence, rather than being there all along from infancy. When I was twelve I decided to go to an RPG convention. There had not been many in Israel, and I think that that one was the first to be organized by people from adnd.co.il rather than by the Organization for the Promotion of Roleplaying Games in Israel, with whose older forum the former shared the Israeli online RPG community. But beyond the mere affiliation it is probable that I was personally invited to attend. I had strode around my room for perhaps an hour before picking up the phone to call, predicting and accounting for every possible development of the conversation, in order to register for the convention and for particular games.
It was a one day convention outside Tel Aviv, so it's rather certain that my father drove me in the morning and picked me up in the evening. I went alone; it had not occurred to me to invite any of my friends. For the morning slot I signed up for Navot's DBZ game, for the arvo slot to Adam's. These two persons will be imminently introduced. The convention's attenders were markedly older than me, I can say that age-wise I was an outlier. It was not a surprise, I was aware of the demographics of the forum, people discussed the army and university. Two of the players in Adam's game, a kind of a whodunit mystery, were of the forums' biggest celebrities, the couple Itay and Idit (AKA Itayts and Idits), which added to my awe; I sat quietly throughout the game and by the end of it had lost the thread of the plot. It was a gesture of sympathy towards the scarcely participating player by Idit, at the game's finale when we team of investigators expressed whodunit and how everything was tied together, when she suggested that I should let speak. I blushed so radiantly that I could feel the warmth upon my face, and swallowed my tongue.
Incidentally: while Kosta required some coaxing to deign create a character —on our school bus home, for an immediate tabletopless adventure— he eventually joined our gaming group and even signed up to the adnd forums under my watch, the only of my friends to do so, with the user name Shablul mutanti zohem, ‘Wrathful mutant snail’. Or was that his user name on another site, and here he was Egoz muskat nis'har, ‘Upset nutmeg‘? This happened rather late but before the end of middle school. I wanted to say “this happened a few years later,” but that would already be the end of middle-school. Such is childhood, growing up — so much happens so fast. Anyhow, it so happened that soon thereafter——— but I'm not sure how it happened. Kosta must have gone to a convention to which I didn't go. It was now puzzling at first, but I seem to almost recall the sensation of forgoing attendance lest I'd reexperience the deep embarrassment of being called upon during a game and be lost for words. I was running away, like Ikari Shinji. As for Kosta, he went, made friends, and became the darling of the older than us boys and girls of the community, including well known names that had thus become tantalizing through his acquaintance: within reach but out of hand. I was envious of him, almost to the point of resentment.
Back to the sofa, 2001, twelve years old in front of Bip channel. What came up was My Funny Valentine, episode 15 of Watanabe Shinichirou's Cowboy Bebop, which Wikipedia calls a neo-noir space Western. I had never seen anything like it. Its mature attitude and that it dealt with adult characters were a novelty by themselves. It depicted a love story that occurred between people and not fairy tale aristocrats, told of longing, deception, lawyers, doctors, financial distress and, yes, guns and space ships. These details sound scarcely extraordinary now, but at that moment was aweinspiring. It was like seeing a miracle. I had no idea what I saw, only that it was great and that I had to spread the word.
The next day I wrote about it in English class, which coincidentally was at the computer lab where we were assigned to write a composition that allowed for such an expression. But it was a different outlet of my excitement, that very evening of watching, that shaped the events to come. Calling a friend for a chat was a possibility at that period, but it was likely too late to call anybody's home, and just preceded the time when we kids had cellphones. It also preceded the time when instant messaging became popular in my class with MSN Messenger. And so I turned to my ICQ, where my contacts were mostly members of the forum.
Whom I sent messages to, overflowing with enthusiasm, were picked at random. They weren't even persons that I had chatted with much before, either. Nonetheless, coincidentally, they were just the right people, to whom what I expressed was not meaningless, at a time when ‘anime’ meant nothing to anybody even within a rather nerdy community such as of roleplaying games. It was like a hit jackpot twice in a row.
One of the two was Navot, who some many years later would be officially involved with the Israeli production/ broadcast of Pokemon on the Children's Channel. Following my excited expression he introduced me to Dragon Ball Z. It was not what I had been after, but for a while I was not aware of it. I didn't get to be quite disappointed since it never ended for me; the series had many episodes, of which I have not even finished the first season, of which many episodes were dedicated, as far as I remember, of the protagonist facing the antagonist, his long lost brother, both superman-like extraterrestrials, talking about how strong they were. Many episodes where nothing happened, to put it simply. It's how I imagine kabuki, with some symbolic movements and much ado about nothing, but this is likely unfair to kabuki. A rap battle in prose. I now learn that what's behind this is that as originally the weekly broadcast TV series had to wait for the development of the manga it was based on, many fillers were inserted. Twenty years after its inception the series was rereleased with the stuffing removed, cutting the numbers of episodes from 291 down to 167, a reduction of almost 50%. Anyhow, it was not what I set to uncover but it entertained me for a while with the same sort of appeal that Pokemon had had before it.
The other person I messaged was Adam. If it took a while before he introduced me to what he would, it was because he let his cards be shown slowly. He told me of Kendo, which he had been practicing for a while in Eilat where he lived, only when he, at the same time, told me that there was a club in Tel Aviv. I had developed a close relationship with him, indeed much closer than I did with Navot, and would eventually even visit him, my parents releasing their child to travel to the southern end of the country to the friend he had met on the internet. I think he enjoyed the feeling of being a mentor, and that the curation of information was part of retaining a mystique. He let me waste my time on that many DBZ episodes before he finally extended a recommendation of the series Neon Genesis Evangelion. And the rest is the story of this text.
As an aside, our lives would if not quite cross then touch each other, independently, twice more. The first time was through the aforementioned Dafna, whose birthday preceded mine by three days. One day Adam asked me if I knew her. They had had an online contact and apparently developed an intimate relationship that was carried out mostly remotely, though they also visited each other. I believe it was then that I realized, though only vaguely, that Dafna looked Asian. I think of this whenever the idea of ‘racial blindness’ comes to mind; it was only some decade or more after graduating middle-school that I realized that all the adopted children in my class had had a south-east Asian appearance. I also first realized that Rita, the Power Rangers witch, was Japanese as I was writing this here. Thenceforward Adam's middlemanning, whether passively or actively, also changed the dynamics between Dafna and me, though not much came out of it. I only recall her asking me in the hallway to close my eyes. I believe I opened my eyes before she managed to lay a kiss on my lips, but I'm not sure.
The second time was when I discovered that Adam studied animation at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem alongside a good friend of mine, Tal, when I saw a stop motion exercise they made (with a third, unrelated, Dafna) and starred together in.
Somehow everything seems tied together.
Really enjoying this.