The Temporal Friction of Enjoying Things

(or, "i am not permitted to speak with authority")

I, like many others, only read the foundational manga Berserk some time after its creator Kentaro Miura passed in 2021. Berserk's influence is far-reaching and deeply embedded; I was aware of much of its iconography simply by association with other works. This primarily secondhand knowledge led to a strange sensation as I entered the back half of the series.

The "Berserker Armor" is a particularly noted bit of imagery. The manga's protagonist Guts takes on a nearly bestial form whenever he taps into the armor's power, fighting with increased power and ferocity at the risk of his body and mind degrading. The silhouette of Guts wearing the armor has been visual shorthand in Asian media for the mere concept of a berserker for quite literally decades.

I had assumed the Berserker Armor would be a major plot element looming over the story... but it didn't appear at all until nearly two-thirds through the series. Its forbidden power is used perhaps two or three times (in quite short succession) before Guts and his cohorts set sail towards their next destination. The next arc of the story doesn't really involve Guts at all. I wondered how the image of the armor embedded itself so deeply in the public consciousness for so long when it seemed like such a comparatively minor plot point.

So then, the realization: that's simply how long it had been. I binged Berserk over a few weeks. I could simply read each chapter, in order, without breaks longer than a day or two. For people reading the manga contemporaneously? Months or longer could pass between chapters. Armored-up Guts ripping apart monsters would have been the last time they'd seen the manga's main character in years. And it's very cool. Little wonder it endures.

My experience of reading Berserk is fundamentally different from people who had been reading it for years and lived through all that intervening time. Even discounting that, we are simply different individuals. This is, I think, self-evident. But the feeling, the weird disparity of time, experience, and influence, puts me strangely ill-at-ease. I'm never quite sure how to deal with it when it arises.

Recently, I've been playing a fair amount of older games. I went on a run with the Shin Megami Tensei series and wrote several blogs about its entries, eventually reaching Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Whenever I had conversations about the game with those who played the original English version on PS2, they always carried a certain tension, an unspoken premise upon which all discussion of the game seemed built: "Nocturne is the best one. It has the best vibes, the deepest story, the most compelling gameplay. Everybody knows this, has known it for decades. If you think otherwise, then isn't that a problem with you?"

It is obvious that my entire post about Nocturne orbits around this unease. There is nothing I could possibly say, no sentence sharp enough, to discourse (or dissent) with 20 years of mythmaking. And at this point, should it? Or is its mythic reputation too important to do anything about other than address directly? Anyone who has been thinking about something for that long certainly has more validity than a greenhorn like myself. It's only natural. Clearly.

I admit, it's not as if I haven't been on that side of the equation. I sought out fan translations of Fate/Stay Night in the late 2000s. Now I deal with the F/GO kids, the anime-only crowd, the people who can just go to Steam and buy Fate/Hollow Ataraxia like it's no big deal. They speak with confidence about that which they do not understand. They do not know what it was like in the '00s, when Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel were spoken of in hushed tones. They weren't forced to deal with the Mike Debacle of 2012. They didn't read (the original) Tsukihime. Did we fight the (proverbial) war for this?

There's a kind of psychological itch when somebody suddenly shows interest in something you've known about for a long time. It only grows if the person in question suddenly deep-dives or binges to a degree where the breadth of their experience eclipses your own, and grows yet further if they have greater social cachet than yourself or are simply a better Shitposter. One is tempted to say something to the effect of, "Quiet down, you just arrived. You weren't there. You are not permitted to speak with authority."

Uncharitably, it's basically fandom boomerism, a gatekeeping reflex. I may just be a fundamentally petty individual, but I'd like to think this is a universal feeling, even if only to avoid pretending that I don't feel negative emotions. The driving "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" question of social media comes to mind. One also recalls Shel's post about identifying with periods of time, where we assign (perhaps undue) importance to things simply because time has passed.

This feeling doesn't only flow from grognard to newbie; I've felt it in the other direction as well. My brain will invent any reason possible to explain why I'm correct. It simply often then proceeds to overcorrect and invent a reason to explain how thinking I was ever right in the first place proves that I'm actually wrong forever.

I've been a Gundam enjoyer for a comparatively scant 10+ years, and I haven't seen anything close to its full catalog of shows. I haven't even seen everything in the main Universal Century timeline. If someone deep dives on the franchise and marathons every mainline TV anime within, let's say, three years or so (a rather rough count puts this at between 1-3 episodes per day), then... well. By raw mathematics, they know more than me. Should I not (spiritually) capitulate to their opinions, their takes? Is not a fresh, unsullied perspective on a work more valuable than a stale, stubborn stance?

The aforementioned boomer contrarian inside me says "No, they're doing it wrong." When I watch old shows, I usually go out of my way to watch them one episode at a time, once per week. This is my attempt to get closer to the mindspace of how they originally aired, for better or worse. A real-life week passing between episodes feels fundamentally different from the binge model. Tension builds. You start getting excited for next time... it just also means you spend literally a year watching Aura Battler Dunbine.

No great point is proven by doing this. People should be free to experience things in the ways they choose. The various contexts in which any given person interacts with media is what allows for different opinions, different insights. There is no One True Way. I know this. So why am I so occupied with proverbial parity of experience?

There's no reason two individuals cannot simply have different opinions about something, no reason one person's opinion would have a higher level of "validity," as if that's some kind of quantitative and qualitive metric. Yet, cynically, is that not genuinely how things work in the discourse-driven one-upmanship of social media's engagement arena? I, a random dipshit blogger, have no validity to my statements compared to a Respected. The temporal vector, whichever direction it goes, can provide a certain amount of legitimacy, at least until the engagement threshold is cracked and people start thinking you're right no matter what you say.

I think a more enlightened person than I would recognize that none of this actually matters. One cannot read, watch, play, or post their way to Nirvana. But humans are just human, and it's hard for even a grown-ass man to kick the craving for validation. Despite myself, I try to soothe the irrational anxiety of feeling like I wasted my past or like I'm ruining my future by putting time and energy towards something as relatively trivial as blog posts on a website. I'd like to become the kind of person one day who is simply excited to do new things, share old things with new people, and live in the present.

Give it another few years, maybe.