11/26/24

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

This is a story about Japanese video games, parasociality, the internet, and youth isolation.

When I was fourteen, I started an irony account on Instagram themed around the Persona video game franchise. It was 2020, during the pandemic. I was out of school for almost the entire year and the first half of 2021. Growing up withdrawn, I was comfortable in an antisocial reality. I experienced this in tangent with immersion into an encroaching teenage identity concept: the literal transition from middle to high school.

That conceptual identity took various material rituals, like exoticism and trendy music. My specific flavor became anime and punkish hypnogogia, spending the spring rocking out to The Garden and Mild High Club. I also watched Kill La Kill.

Sporadically at 2:00 AM, I'd already gotten used to reruns of Dragon Ball and Naruto. "Cool Japan" had done its work on me, a suburban American raised on screens. However, anime was not yet a commitment, and it wouldn't be until I somehow got into Kill La Kill. The sex and violence part of it was relevant to be sure. So, being suggestible and bored, I watched it, obsessed over it, and started an Instagram. I even bought a sweatshirt off Redbubble.

Initially, It was just drawings of Ryoko Matoi and weird, benign character edits, or some shit like that. The important thing, however, was opening that door to digital weeaboo spaces for self-expression. Resultantly, the material ritual furthers itself.

A copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES was downloaded onto my PS3. It was the first "anime game" I played, for some reason. I also had a copy of Persona 5 (both remnants of a similar moment my older sister had), but 3 generally had more of a vibe. I remember it that way at least, and so that was the one I played first. I also liked the music better.

Pretty fast, I threw myself pretty hard at these games. Thus enters the hardcore material phase: an escalation I would assume is very common, leading to an alike burn-out. The aftermath was palpably individualizing, however.

Going back to 2020, I have an Instagram, a Fuuka Yamagishi pfp, 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 message. It was weird then, is weird now, but was probably weirder then, having made actual connections in that situation. That is to say, in 2020, I entered real relationships that started and ended in Instagram's Persona fandom.

Come early fall, I saw a survey posted in a story asking for GC members. I think it was 9/11 to the day, in fact. So, I asked to be added, to see about new friends. The agreeable numbness of anonymous scrolling and posting had gotten a new angle. Sure, the comfortable sterility was still there, but some kind of greater participation was to be had.

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 went 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 was more-or-less bound to it.

There's something about having a like function when messaging. Whether receiving explicit approval or being ignored entirely, my digital presentation was to be mechanically shifted. Group validation is probably always strategized, usually softly, but what it became in this new, competitive virtual setting was a lot more robust. Human affirmation, I now believe, was critically gamified. In my head, it was given an empirical representation: likes, comments, reactions; you could develop a system to milk it, surely. To get the most utility and desired attention out of interactions, my opinions, humor, and the diction with which I messaged was to be monitored. Who I was here never really represented myself outside of it, then. However, the problem becomes that I was never really outside of it.

Surely I compensated to fit in, not fully processing the fact that I was, or what that meant. However, that's not to say there weren't cracks in the simulation. I still had dissonant opinions. Separate from increasingly transient, pricey media interests, I still behaved the way I did as a full individual with other shit going on. These were the things that kinda split me from the whole. I preferred the Game Cube Resident Evils to fighting games; I preferred PilotRedSun and Umami videos to lame romance or shounen anime. That has not changed, by the way.

In hindsight, I never did make meaning of alienation growing up. I still don't know that it was loneliness, but feeling a sense of disconnection from others - especially in my immediate family - normalized itself well enough. Also in my home life, with the insecure connections I did have, was the learning of easily infringed boundaries. So, when I got the opportunity to notably expand my circle, there was the reflex to reset or modify my personality to fit the scenario. This is that phenomenon, and something I have had to unlearn: seeing group acceptance and belonging as equivalent to erasure of self; supplanting my interests for the will of the collective, or trying to.

If not addiction, then it was definitely a form of conditioning. Paired with other means of escape, it was 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.

After it all, however, part of what restrained the relationship 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. Anything of that level of vulnerability was uncertain enough with real people. Doing that over the internet, with somebody I imagine as real more than know as, was a whole different level of hyper-reality. 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 subsisted for awhile.

As alluded to, it wasn't a sustainable experience, myself only becoming more integrated into the idea of the relationship 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 week 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.

Past it all, I gave it up. I'd exhausted my interest in Persona. I'd wrung the idea firmly of its substance so that there was little else to draw from it: nothing to talk about, post about, or add to the conversation. I was tired, and 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 no return.

I think there's interesting commentary to be made about the effects isolation, indoctrination, and desperation have on a person, especially someone young on the internet. Here, 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 at 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. If I could, maybe I'd apologize to them.