"Agony succumbs my mortal soul."

12/25

Here is a sequel to my writing about the Persona series and its fanbase. I will expand previous observations with additional data about neglect, violation, and addiction. My goal in this piece is to define personal atomization regarding my experience. I want to know what is individually uncommon about it. Concepts of aestheticization will provide theoretical models for assessing the scenarios. In this way, I recognize my circumstances as in accordance with aesthetic commitment: commitment to a visual, creative, or otherwise individualizing philosophy.

The ultimate goal of participating in an aesthetic, I argue, is the acquisition of a highly valuable conceptual resource. Though, this resource may not hold any satisfactory physical or tangible form. Furthermore, as we will elaborate, the character of the aesthetic itself is relevant to what is done to fulfill it. Thus, the belief in an aesthetic has strong bearing over individual behavior. In fact, I argue that aesthetic informs how carnal, taste-laden items are envisioned, sought, employed, and incorporated into first-person identity. Ultimately will this be explored via lenses of JRPGs and domestic turmoil.

I argue that the aesthetic I participated in during my period in the Persona fandom was of hybridization. I engaged in a melded aesthetic of familiarity and exoticism: middle-class, suburban putrefaction; hentai, video games and savory Japanese snacks. Familiarity of my locality served as the sieve through which novelty could be delivered. For this, the interpretability of the content was shifted. It was colored in a way relevant to my specific situation. Something that was not of my world was broken towards becoming my object. Thus, I could do to it similar as had been done onto me in this position.

This is the aesthetic of familiarity: how I used Persona and similar media was a byproduct of how I learned to consume it. This aesthetic arose firstly in my uncreative, uncritical hoarding of its material. I built a shrine out of PS1 copies of Persona 2 bought off Ebay, my P5R steelbook and two figures of Aigis from P3. This bears resemblance to capitalism and youth indoctrination in general forms. Furthering this notion, I argue that the aesthetic objective I was seeking in moments of hedonistic consumerism was collective belonging into an American commercial culture. Of course, this belonging has no end symbolic achievement and requires maintanence. For this logic, I bought two figures of the same character, or Japanese copies of games for a system I don't even own.

However, more malevolent consumption activates as teenage degeneracy intersects with parental addiction. Not only was I to become normatively imperialistic, but also of dysfunctional gluttony, evidently it would become. For example, my mother worked night-shifts at a bar five days a week and stayed out drinking afterwords. My step-dad drank throughout everyday. He would frequently instigate screaming matches with me and others at home. This data contributes to the meaning of familiarity's aesthetic, I find. The familiar aesthetic was not only one used to satisfy a global consumeristic ritual, but also a domestic urge towards brutalization, and escapism.

In the case of myself over this stretch, the domestic component of the familiar aesthetic is ingrained with hygenic habits. These habits are made in response to first-person sensations for consumption and reality, and also comfort and fear. As previously mentioned, emotional outputs in this context are effectively what is aestheticized at onset. How emotion occurs, then, molds what is deemed conceptually desirable within the creative, self-identifying philosophy.

As an example, I first thought to kill myself when I was twelve-years-old. I would think to do so repeatedly in following years, and would injure or molest my body using various techniques. For my own boundaries, cutting myself is one of the most transparent infringements I have. I argue that playing with suicide - mentally or bodily - is a hygenic habit meant to regulate pursuance of my conceptual objective. Furthermore, I argue that anti-life habits are an aesthetic element formed around the input emotions of reality and fear. That is to say, part of my familiar aesthetic is informed as adverse sensations become valued, leading to acts which affirm them being performed. this mental habit and physical manifestations of it was based on the sensations of fear and reality the aesthetic was formed around. that point, I existed within a predominant aesthetic motivated by insecurity towards authority, trust in its righteousness, and unspoken sanctity resultant from self-destruction.

As part of an actionable aesthetic, I first thought to kill myself when I was twelve-years-old. And for many of the same reasons, I would think to do so repeatedly over the following years. Though this aesthetic is inherently anti-life, I argue that having it has at times given a level of humanization. My existence has been affirmed. Nonetheless, the emotions fed into the validating aesthetic necessitate specific variations bringing violent rituals. Cutting myself is a form of maintenance for this aesthetic, and a cyclical act towards my nonexistent conceptual objective.

The immediately preceding analysis assesses the circumstances in which I possess a familiar aesthetic which is to be hybridized. This familiar aesthetic is earned through sociocultural identification in the form of American consumerism, part of my affirmed identity relying on hedonistic economic patronage. Perhaps more crucially, confrontational domestic despair also shapes a naturally-occurring individual identity. This aesthetic identity is informed by the emotional expressions offered by dysfunctional confrontations. Extensively have the specific variety of these expressions had residual consequences for self-perception and emotional regulation. Furthermore, as these emotional states are normalized and integrated into individual reflex, I argue that actions seeking a final encapsulation of the aesthetic will be habitually exercised. Not only will it be as if the aesthetic's regulatory behavior and carnal imprint is standard, but that it is actively prized.

The character of this consumer aesthetic is given further implication by once again noting the substance itself. In effect, my ignorant seeking of Japanese content was quietly fetishistic. Here we have the other material within the melded aesthetic: exoticism towards a cultural soft-power campaign.

To get into Persona, I must first be held between pillars of both macrocosmic and immediate American cultural terminology. This aesthetic is my immanence: grounding and verifying my existence as a valid identity. Next, draw a connection between my porn situation, sexual weirdness and violation, and Japanese video games. (think dirty examples, pornography, fucking to fuck the screen, Pixiv and thousands of downloads, thousands of animals, "I was a consumeristic American pig" is the sentiment," and then also the lack of understanding, and then after that we get into the actual situation: suburban recluse, northern Indiana suburbanite with an asshole stepdad and absent mother and they're both alcoholics, and you got a wicked trauma bondSporadically 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.

Aesthetic forms a connection between carnal, phenomenological expressions - personal desire, fear, lust, comfort - and higher-order self-identification. That is to say, aesthetic represents the incorporation of urge and vulgarity into the social human being.

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 on Instagram within the niche of the 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 change, 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 no problem. 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 ultimate 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 eluded 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 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.

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 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. Maybe I'd apologize to them.