"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 my personal life as a Persona fan. My goal in this piece is to explain what concrete relationship my middle-American domestication has with lurid Japanese media. I want to know what was drawn from my local existence which led me to Persona and things like it, namely in the way I used this media, and what significance this usage meant for my human condition. Concepts of aestheticization will provide theoretical models for assessing the data. 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 valued conceptual object. This object, I find, is first envisioned through higher order self-identification. The ego appears to rationalize a reactionary judgment of external reality - approval, disapproval, disgust, respect, etcetera - by producing the object of desire, thus manifesting an aesthetic inclined towards or away from the initial stimuli and its associated sensation. For example, to witness a person being vocally approved of for their appearance by a large group may lead an individual to desire some form of attainment of this object: to look like this person; to date this person; to become friends with this person.

I argue, however, that the desired object may not hold any satisfactory tangible form. Desire for the object may rather necessitate a persistent attempt at acquisition which is never fully gratified. It is important to note that the character of the aesthetic is highly relevant to what is done to fulfill it. Returning to the previous example, then, if an individual's aesthetic object is the other person's appearance, attempting to gratify this desire would likely involve behaviors like dieting, exercise, or even surgery. That is to say, the belief in an aesthetic has strong bearing over individual behavior. Because aesthetic converts impulsive judgment responses to conscious reasoning, I therefore argue that aesthetic, once manifested, goes on to recursively inform how carnal, taste-laden items are envisioned, sought, employed, and incorporated into first-person identity; sensations inform aesthetics inform sensations. Ultimately will this be explored via lenses of JRPGs and domestic turmoil.

I find that the aesthetic I participated in during my period in the Persona fandom was of hybridization. I engaged in a melded aesthetic of comfort and exoticism: middle-class, suburban normalcy; ecchi, video games, and savory Japanese snacks. Comfort with my locality served as the sieve through which novelty could be delivered. In this way, my comfort in middle-America was the sensation producing an aesthetic object, thus producing behaviors and a context for ensuing sensations. I find that the motivating stimuli towards this aesthetic's creation were the lifestyles of my peers and family, myself holding intimacy with these expressions throughout my life. Emulating these people meant behaving as them. Looking forward, some of the behaviors I learned from this practice, I argue, were crucial to the establishment of an aesthetic of exoticism.

I argue that my aesthetic of exoticism is a byproduct of my aesthetic based in comfort. This is a result of the behaviors learned in seeking my initial aesthetic: consumerism, imperialism, and fetishization. In using these behaviors in external life, otherwise unlikely occurrences came to happen for me. I came to put myself in environments where I could engage in one of or all of the aforementioned behaviors, this happening unconsciously, but also voluntarily. In buying savory Japanese snacks, I was able to both enact consumerism and imperialistic fetishization, this action being an enriched means of seeking my aesthetic object. Ironically, in attempting to assimilate with my peers, friends and family, I learned to superficially appreciate international culture: doing so with minimal depth or respect, and a sense of entitlement to use it ignorantly. However, within this act meant for my aesthetic of comfort, the aesthetic of exoticism would eventually develop. As previously elaborated, aesthetics inform reactionary emotional sensations, leading to alterations to what one may impulsively desire. My transformation towards impulsively desiring foreign novelties was not exclusively concentrated towards maintaining my initial aesthetic; rather, this desire would eventually be focused on attaining some facet of foreign novelty in of itself; foreign novelty became a separate aesthetic object. Once more, sensations inform aesthetics inform sensations, thus informing a new aesthetic based on preexisting aesthetic behaviors. Resultantly, the aesthetic of exoticism manifests.

The Persona video game series represents a mutation of behaviors brought over from my aesthetic of comfort. I argue that my engagement with this franchise indicates usage of consumerism, imperialism, and fetishization towards acquiring an object of exotic desire rather than comfortable desire. I have described this specific usage of these resources as a mutation due to the character of their application being distinguishable from that of my initial aesthetic. Firstly, I argue that the intensity of my consumerism increased. My consumerism as channeled through Persona and similar media is symbolized by uncreative, uncritical hoarding of its merchandise. I built a shrine out of PS1 copies of Persona 2 bought off eBay, my Persona 5 Royal steelbook and two figures of Aigis from Persona 3. Furthermore, Persona's role as Japanese media, to me, inherently gratified an imperialistic impulse, implicitly claiming sovereignty over Japanese culture by infusing it with a banal, American hedonism. In other words, I was unable to look at the culture as something other than face-value entertainment, and for that, I felt entitled to it, curiosity ending with immediate stimulus. Additionally, though fetishization was also a characteristic of my aesthetic of comfort - including for the Japanese culture, and Japanese people - I find that the fetishization of my aesthetic of exoticism would manifest as a much more aggressive spectrum. That is to say, fetish, just like imperialism, was implicated in every act to do with Persona, from building a shrine, to playing the games, to seeking horrendous images of its characters; every act was a Japanese fetish.

I will now expand the implications of the aesthetics' consumeristic differences. I argue that my consumerism of exoticism is distinguishable from the casual, often disposable consumerism I find typical of the aesthetic of comfort, characterized by snacks with disposable wrappers, technology planned for obsolescence, and every material item meant to momentarily gratify and be successively replaced. Conversely, I find that permanence and preservation - hoarding - is greater emphasized within the consumerism of my exotic aesthetic. Furthering this notion, I argue that participation in consumerism aesthetically is explicitly correlated with conformity to a specific commercial culture. This notion is sound regarding the usage of consumerism towards my object of comfort, as many people within my locality were doing the same, these people having inspired my initial aesthetic. However, the patterns of commercial involvement towards my exotic object differ; I identify this trend as indicative of my passage into a commercial culture distinguishable from that of my aesthetic of comfort. Consequently, I identify myself as having entered a cultural microcosm equally distinguishable, inhabited by people I would not have found elsewhere, who would convey to me other aesthetic behaviors which we would together participate in. It was a consequence of this relationship that I bought two figures of the same character, or Japanese copies of games for a system I do not own.

A prominent concern of my first discussion of this topic was with my social existence in the Persona fandom. What I did not explicitly discuss was the economic component of my clique's affiliation with this piece of media - and similar pieces of media. I now argue that my consumption of Persona, as well as similar entertainment, was a characteristically economic behavior. Together in my online friend group, economic choices were consistently relied on to define group interests and activities; this denotes the intensified commercial culture distinguishable from that of my home life. Economic participation also defines the shared group aesthetic which we affectively shared between each other. Using anime, VTubers, shitposts and pornography, we bonded over aesthetic objects of exoticism: dating plastic-faced anime chicks; physiques like Guts from Berserk; living in Japan, but not actually Japan; becoming plastic-faced anime chicks. Although not all of these consumption behaviors necessitate monetary investment, intensified desire towards the aesthetic object often led to investment to enrich attainment: Crunchyroll subscriptions for the best anime; VTuber donations to satiate parasocial hungers; the accrual of social capital by posting post-ironic sludge; Patreon and OnlyFans donations to satiate parasocial hungers. Choosing economic participation was a high convenience towards acquiescing into the subculture, insofar that my memory of my friends' personalities centrally symbolizes it. In the Instagram group chats I was in, I recall performing the above acts - watching anime and VTubers, playing video games, etcetera - with people I remember firstly by what games they liked: Persona fans, Danganronpa fans, Touhou Project fans, Melty Blood fans, and/or Guilty Gear fans, and beyond. Where I may have forgotten the names of many of these people, real or otherwise, or anything profound about their lives, the remnant of the anime chicks in their profile pictures remains. Their economic participation, in my head, has outlasted and/or suffocated most of what creative, critical, or significant acts they performed. Resultantly, I argue that my friendship, however abstractly that term applies, was initiated and consistently defined on the basis of similar economic behaviors.

I ask you now to consider what may happen to the friendship when one of its members ceases to believe in this economic philosophy. I ask you to consider what it means to cease believing in this economic philosophy. I personally think that it means disbelief in the consumerism which helped initiate an aesthetic of exoticism to begin with. This is the consumerism of my former aesthetic of comfort. The question becomes why I stopped relying on the correctness of this philosophy. After all, I adopted my aesthetic of comfort based on familiarity with friends and peers, and the reliance that these people were justified. For this discrepancy, I argue that the ending of this understanding, in correspondence with an aesthetic context, indicates aversion as a reaction to the aesthetic of comfort itself. In other words, the aesthetic of comfort as some form of stimuli - the object it is directed towards acquiring, or some behavior used in acquiring it - somehow returned a negative reaction. I narrow my analysis to this: by some means, consumerism as an object attaining behavior registered to me as disgusting, or to be avoided. The means by which this occurs are of interest. As consumerism is an act performed by people, I argue that my issue with consumerism - my disgust for it - initiated via other people.

How others in my locality utilized consumerism, then, occurred as to no longer seem novel or meaningfully identity-forming. I witnessed, or began to comprehend, consumerism I was surrounded by in contexts of putrefaction: slurred screaming matches in the basement; cigarette girls on the porch; gun collections, second mortgages; TV all day in rooms you can hardly breathe in, skeletons with staring eyes melted into the sofa. There are houses and families that smoke and drink too much consistently, that buy too many dogs that destroy the house over and over again, so that what's left is just a canyon of tribal, insane, unraveling people, unraveling like the kids' clothes, unraveling like my clothes when I was a child. I argue that this form of consumerism is meant to defer personal and social responsibility: for what one buys, eats, drinks and destroys, and so on. If this consumerism is still an aesthetic behavior, then I will better define this not as an aesthetic of comfort, but as an aesthetic of escapism. In actuality, then, I argue that the aesthetic object I learned via my locality was not of comfort; I was not comfortable, even if I was familiar. Yet, eventually I was not devastated. I could have been devastated. At times I had been: because it was mine, I was there, and I was familiar with the consequences of being there for any reason, no matter what choice you had. Think about what that means. Devastation is a reactionary emotional sentiment. What was formerly known as an aesthetic of comfort has been corrected; it is really an aesthetic of escapism. I argue therefore that devastation was the emotional input manifesting an aesthetic of escapism: to escape devastation by means of consumerism, imperialism and fetishization; by means of video games, Japanese snacks, and JAV; by means of an aesthetic of exoticism.

I argue that my affiliation with the Persona fandom and its media overall ended with belief in my aesthetic of escapism. Specifically, I argue that with this disbelief, my economic behavior changed in a way to no longer correspond with the connections made in the community. To expand this notion, I believe that our bond's over-reliance on similar consumer behavior formed a skeletal relationship. Being excessively thin in emotional depth, the relationship collapsed for me. I also find there to have eventually manifested a sense of known self-delusion within my imperialism. My active disinterest in anything but a technologically-mediated mirage of Japan was palpably reminiscent of similar conditions held by others I modeled off of. These were the television skeletons, people who died with their eyes open, fused to the sofa, waxing in the easiness of never admitting there's a problem, just consuming existence with entitlement to its novelty and disregard for all else. Thus, the many fetishes as well could be known as lies, my flesh withering all over myself and the furniture as the computer monitor stared through me. As a result of these circumstances, I could redefine the emotional input my aesthetic attaining behaviors were working off of. I ceased to believe that comfort was what I contributed these actions towards, realizing that escapism was what I actually sought. What is important to know about these two identities is that they hold equivalent behaviors, even if each aesthetic is distinguished by what emotional sentiment initiated it. That is to say, I eventually realized that the sensation I defined as comfort was more indicative of a familiar devastation. As a consequence, I believe the aesthetic of comfort to have been a headspace of denialism for myself, where I believed the aesthetic object was something I was familiar and warm with, when really it was something I was eternally away from: an escape from locality in mind or body.

In irony, I will further recall that the behaviors of escapism - consumerism, imperialism, fetishization - were locally familiar to me. That is to say, though wanting away from the devastation in my household, I adopted techniques from those who reduced me. These behaviors were disposable but chronic in performance, and thus allowed me to forever chase the sensation of deliverance from a stationary position, an enriched attainment behavior due to its ease of performance. Thus, the two styles of consumerism could converge. I could claim permanence in time and space by staying in bed all day, hoarding a motionless, digital existence of foreign novelty, and in so doing, I could waste myself fast and easy in the spirit of local escapism. Therefore, I ate savory Japanese snacks, played Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, and got on Pixiv all the time. Spending everyday of middle school in my bedroom, I could rinse out tattered sofas, fighting dogs and parents from my head. I could rinse the smell of hipster beer, vapes and must from any corner of imagination, and chase motionless: dating plastic-faced anime chicks; physiques like Guts from Berserk; living in Japan, but not actually Japan; becoming plastic-faced anime chicks. In my bedroom was my hybridized aesthetic of escapism and exoticism, the two fused together, different parts of the same thing. In its way, exoticism was like a fungal growth onto escapism, this being the ideal circumstance to consume, conquer, and fetishize. Ultimately, I do not know if interest in Persona and similar media could have been possible after my escapist object ceased to be valid, as it is only for this aesthetic that the exotic object was conceived, Persona's role in my life being indebted to exoticism.

My aesthetic of escapism ended in a screaming match with my stepdad when I was fifteen. It was probably over nothing, like they always were, but I remember for the first time saying "Fuck you!" in all rage and clarity to him: "Fuck you, Cory!" or something or other like that. This, I recall, was the moment I got the joke. I could see the irony of familiarity and escapism. My parents went out drinking to seek escapism, I went online to seek escapism, and all three of us occupied the same household, but in secretive distances from each other. We lived on different schedules and looked for other ways to feel minimally and not be involved with each other, the lack of involvement marking resentment in all directions, and if not resentment, then unfriendly apathy. They did this on to me, as I did back to them, and it was with Persona, online friends, and technology that I realized that I did the same.

I realized I did the same to others that I hated happening to me: soliciting superficial affection; antagonizing others I felt inferior to; existing banally, creating nothing; absorbing an endless stream of deceptive novelties, and slowly decomposing. Just as I've identified the bonds made in the Persona community, I argue that the connection between me and my parents was also most strongly identified by similar consumeristic habits. They drank, and I drowned myself in anime, shitposts and hentai, not one of us really caring what the other was doing. When there was an emotional sentiment to express, it was mostly elaborated on with antagonistic terms, and that makes it easy to say I don't love my mother. It makes it easy to say I don't know how to compartmentalize her in my head the same way I don't know how to compartmentalize thoughts of Rafael, Phoenix, Eddie, Michael or Conner: fighting game, Serial Experiments Lain, Gawr Gura, Persona 1 and Danganronpa fans. Aesthetics inform sensations inform aesthetics inform sensations inform aesthetics, so that my parents' aesthetic of escapism informed my devastation, which informed my aesthetic of escapism, which informed my aesthetic of exoticism, which informed my devastation.

It was devastating getting the joke, and acknowledging honestly a vacancy in myself: for what I've seen, done, and every scenario I did or did not have a choice in entering. What I identify strongly, however, is that there are as many positions I chose to put myself in as there are those I was taken to. Again, aesthetics inform sensations, and this matters insofar that I don't believe most people acknowledge this relationship as it is ongoing. As a consequence, we lead ourselves on, or are led on by some automated mental circuitry, to acknowledge things that leave a long and profound disappointment in the mirror, thinking this gets us closer to what does not exist. This is not for the first time witnessing scat or bestiality, but for witnessing oneself become desensitized to it: still unpleasant, but no longer unthinkable. This is Labrys Burger, for me. This is every sideways 4chan fetish like a post-modern death-trip, where the escapist object isn't a vanilla American bliss, but something explicitly - increasingly - anti-life. This, too, is hybridization. The dark escapism of slowly killing yourself drinking and smoking was, within myself, enshrined by cynical hours on Pixiv, Gelbooru and Rule34, my Persona shrine an unfounded whimsy. Where I was escaping to was the end of a life. It was my parents' lives, and all three of us could never admit how we destroyed our bodies, and what we wanted to attain.

Thus, I argue that my aesthetics of escapism and exoticism were simultaneous and related entities. I argue that it was repetitive upsets in my home life which led me to escapism, which led me to consumerism, imperialism and fetishization, which finally led me to an aesthetic of exoticism. One of my primary aesthetic attaining behaviors was consumption of media related to the Persona video game franchise, which I performed in social circles of people with similar economic behavior. Our bond was mostly constructed out of similar purchasing habits, resulting in a hollow emotional connection. As a result, the relationship was able to rapidly unwind, especially considering what behaviors I used towards them. My social behaviors were often based on the narcissism and hostility that I learned from my escapist philosophy. When I realized and experienced real disgust for myself for using the same behaviors as my parents - towards the same end - my interest in Persona and its community collapsed, along with my trust in consumerism, fetishization, and imperialism.

Though crushing to start, I believe that this aesthetic death has also allowed me to do many of the creative, critical things I have done since. Thanks to distrust for exoticism and escapism, I have created this website, this place likely evident of a new aesthetic. I don't have a name for the aesthetic I work towards today, but I must admit that disgust for myself, my immediate circumstances, and the normalization of self-destructive behaviors was the sensation producing it. Thus, five years having past the realization of my escapism, I attempt to enrich new behaviors. I attempt to be unabashedly critical of what I oppose, to create things accurate to my reality, and claim full responsibility for my actions and experiences. Everything I've seen and everything I've done, in spite of whatever choice I had in the event, has as much of an external effect as it does an internal one. The residue of each action and expression animates me on its own time, and it is something I have to address. I've just about seen screaming matches in the basement, cigarette girls on the porch, gun collections and second mortgages, and TV all day in rooms without air. I've seen it as much as I've seen anime, VTubers, shitposts and ryona, and have acknowledged the similarities of these contexts. I saw and did all of these things in contexts of chaos. And I can still see these things. Because it was mine, I was there, and I was familiar, I was devastated, and still can be.

"Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it. I went there behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn't know, it took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn't frozen, you are."
- Michael Herr, Dispatches