"Suffering is pretty much the name of the game in this chat."

When I was fourteen-years-old, I started an irony account on Instagram themed around the Persona video game franchise, but there's more to it than that. This is a story about Japanese video games, anime, parasociality, the internet, isolation, indoctrination, etc.

I turned fourteen in 2020, during the pandemic. I was out of physical school for almost the entire year and the first half of 2021. Growing up introverted, I adjusted easily to the pandemic's antisocial reality. In fact, I found comfort in more regular solitude.

I also somehow found Japanese media. Without context, my only basis for anime had been reruns of Dragon Ball and Naruto on Toonami. I based my opinion on it mostly around what other people said.

Eventually, though, the internet gets me into Kill La Kill, having first seen it in an advert on Toonami about two years prior. Now remembering its existence--and being suggestible and bored--I watched it, obsessed over it, and started an Instagram.

As will be a repeated theme, however, I quickly get burnt out and want more content. So where do I turn? What is next past this month-long stint?

A copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES was downloaded onto my PS3. It was the first "anime game" I thought to play, for some reason. I also had a copy of its sequel, Persona 5 (both remnants of a similar phase my older sister had), but there was something about the niche of P3 that spoke to me. Or maybe it wasn't that. I honestly don't know what it was, but that was the one I tried first.

With little time wasted, I threw myself almost entirely at these games, a process thst escalated to what I would assume is a very common, though very individualizing burn-out. It felt like it was only mine when it happened, and it was tiring enough to make me dispose of what felt like an entire identity, even if it was only aspects of one.

But let's go back to 2020. I have an Instagram, a Fuuka Yamagishi pfp, some really awful memes, and the trouble is impending. Without realizing, I've supplanted social interaction for spending hours passively watching others on my phone. I'd become a voyeur to an artificial media landscape, that which I use to broadcast this very message. This mode of communication reminds me of the uncanny valley: human-like in appearance, but not.

The implications are even more brutal when you enter relationships that start and end on a platform like Instagram, which is exactly what I did in 2020, within the niche of the Persona fandom on that platform.

I was about to make new friends. The pleasant numbness of anonymous scrolling and thoughtless posting had ended that summer. Come early fall, I saw a survey posted in a story. It was one of the accounts I followed, and they were looking for members of a new GC. I responded.

I was probably the second-youngest member of the "Fortnite Pizza Party" group chat, mostly composed of Persona fans in some capacity, most of which had pfps of anime girls, most of which were young men, from what I remember. Conversations typically started and revolved around anime and Japanese video games, though inevitably extended beyond these areas if the conversation lasted long enough, and conversation never really stopped. It was always there, you could always say something else. Therefore, I never really left, because with a cell phone, I felt constantly tied to it. It became very important to me.

There's something about having a like function when messaging. For other people to explicitly respond positively or ignore your words entirely became massive to me without my knowing. Validation and group approval began significantly dictating exactly what I would and wouldn't say. Who I was in this position never really represented who I was outside of it; the problem, though, is that I never really was outside of it.

That's not to say there weren't cracks in the simulation. I still had dissonant opinions, I still behaved the way I did purely because I was what I was and couldn't help it, though I did passionately compensate to fit in, not knowing why or even fully processing the fact that I was.

I didn't know how lonely I was growing up. "Lonely" was something of a bad word in my head, something inapplicable to me. Being attention-starved or feeling alienated didn't occur to me until I started reflecting on my social behavior, attempting to reset or modify my personality to fit a scenario I latched onto. This is that phenomenon: feeling lonely enough to do anything for group acceptance, supplanting my personality for the will of the collective, or trying to.

If not addiction, then it was definitely a form of conditioning: an easy avenue for gratification, cheap validation coming from seeing your message liked by five or six approximate strangers. At its worst, the entirety of my day was consumed by posting in the chat when active, or waiting for the conversation to revive when dead.

Part of what restrained the relationship, in hindsight, was its lack of depth. I was in an odd position with these internet "friends." We got along well, we got to know each other well, but I, myself, almost always upheld the boundaries keeping our bond from becoming richer. I didn't join video calls, I didn't play video games so often, I didn't engage in other friendly activities because it made me uncomfortable. My insecurity in that position prevented me from going down that avenue, and so I didn't. I kept taking my hits of stimulus, my likes, minimum of social interaction, and I subsisted for awhile.

Ultimately, it wasn't a sustainable experience, and as I eluded to, I only became more and more integrated into the idea of the relationship and its interests until it collapsed for me. My frustration and capacity to be narcissistically antisocial, as I'd been conditioned to think and act over this process, resulted in a series of momentary ghostings, leaving the chat, deactivating my account for a weak or so, and then begging to come back. It became a process of complacent self-hatred, tearing myself apart for my weakness and only guaranteeing that nothing changed. Even I could recognize the redundancy of my actions; I can only imagine how they felt.

Eventually, though, past it all, I gave it up. I'd exhausted my interest in Persona entirely. I'd wrung it out firmly of its susbtance so that there was little else to pull from that experience: nothing to talk about, nothing to post about, nothing to add to the conversation. I was tired, and unceremoniously washed my hands of the endeavor. I was willing to throw it away, slowly, until eventually I felt it didn't matter anymore, having degraded myself extensively for nothing.

I think there's interesting commentary to be made about the effects isolation, indoctrination, and desperation have on a person, especially someone young and lonely. With the internet especially, things can get weird. A stranger can feel like a friend; an anime girl can be a tangible love companion; a group chat can be a social center; a like can be a status symbol; I can be shaped by people I hardly know.

My first username was Lisa_Silverman_Fan53. This changed multiple times, with the longest lasting being Fan53_Account. In hindsight, there's horror in having such thorough documentation of this moment in time. On an old cell phone, I have hundreds of screenshots, messages taken out of context, inside jokes, shitty memes, voice recordings, etc. I can still sign back into my old account any time, and look at the remains of a really bizarre, specific experience over a year in my life. You really had to be there.

It's also weird knowing I can be rediscovered by those old friends, that this website, this post can fall into the hands of Rafael, Phoenix, Eddie, Michael, Conner (I think that's how it was spelled), Ethan, Danny, Rivers, and the rest. Hey guys, sorry for being an asshole.