I am afraid of anime, because of a particular anime called Neon Genesis Evangelion. And I wish to explain everything.
So first things first, I have Autism.
Unfortunately, me being born in 1998, I was born in a time where Autism was still considered as a mental illness, and had barely gained any weight. But it was during a time when enough emphasis was being put on it for special ed to be in effect. Unfortunately, special education was...dysfunctional.
Many of the staff and teachers of special ed were neglectful. Rather than teaching us how to act to the best of our abilities, they treated us as a mere nuisance; less than human. This is because they not only saw us as Autistic, but because they also taught us what they thought how an Autist should act; Autistic, reinforcing this stereotype and riveting this detrimental cycle into our psyche. Whenever I tried to act normally, I would be punished harshly when I made a mistake; a mistake that these teachers would normally overlook in neurotypical students.
But they weren't just holding a double standard against me; but a triple standard, as I was the victim of favoritism. Some of my special ed teachers favored Autists who were more disabled than I am, simply because they were more disabled.
I was never taught how to think for myself, let alone act for myself in school until I turned 17.
I was basically set up to fail in my youth, which is all more the reason why I was so rebellious
Just like Shinji, I wanted to figure things out, but I wasn't allowed to. All because my Autism made me a target for people to exert their own will over me, molding us into their own version of an Autist; peers and teachers alike.
I was bullied in 10th grade relentlessly for my Autism. They called me a retard day in and day out. They used my Autism as a scapegoat to blame me for their problems, as an excuse for them to to target me, saying that it was my Autism that started it, and gaslighted me that my Autism was making me hallucinate their abuse. Whenever I went to the adults for help, the bullies would usually say, "He doesn't know what he's talking about, he's a retard."
The things is however, I was high functioning, I knew how to act. I even had the highest grades on the Dean's List.
Whenever I did something kind, they'd punish me for it. Whenever I did something self-destructive, they'd commend me for it. Whenever I did something acceptable, they'd try to persuade me that it was socially unacceptable and so forth. Up was down, black was white, good was bad, day was night. I was questioning my sanity, my moral compass, my judgement, my mentality, and my memory.
Even when they sexually harassed me in the showers, the adults took no measure to bring them to justice. In fact, the adults did NOTHING, no matter how much I begged and cried to them for help. Rather than taking full responsibility and addressing the situation head on, they'd only ask me what I could do to improve the situation without their help. In my case, it was nothing; I could only avoid them. But since I was at a private boarding school in the middle of the woods, I had nowhere else to go.
These kids were unhinged, if anything the adults were afraid of them. One of them threatened to kill me and another nearly broke my door down to steal my guitar. They even took advantage of the adults' own mental illness, like when the art teacher was back from maternity leave, they use her mood swings to get her to side with them and blame me for their own problems.
But the worst thing they did was blackmail my only friend there to betray me. Just like me, he was also being bullies for his personal problems, which is why I lent him my books as a token of friendship. But when the bullies started treating us like a homosexual couple, calling us "lovers and whores", my friend was completely embarrassed, and began to resent me. It boiled over, and to avoid being ridiculed by them again, he joined them. Something broke in me that day.
I was very suicidal that year, and wished I was never born.
That's why I hate Neon Genesis Evangelion so much, because just like Shinji, all I could do, LITERALLY, was endure, and pray my suffering would be over. In fact, I was just like him in 10th grade; it's uncanny, down to the same personality type; INFP.
That is why I am deathly afraid of The End of Evangelion; because it's like seeing an alternate path I could've taken, had I shot myself, and the entire school up for the abuse they put me through, and the world I could've ended up in; just like The Third Impact.
The only thing that kept me going, that gave me the will to live, was my faith in God.
Two years of therapeutic High School later, I was college bound, and passionate about rediscovering my passion in life, and making new friends, finding new hobbies in life.
But alas, much like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, as my hopes and dreams of living the College dream I'd dreamt of slowly dwindled.
When my housing program shut down, my college was put on hiatus, and I was transferred to a Trade School. It was meant to be a fresh new start. Unfortunately, most of the people there were Mormon, as it was originally a school for Mormons. As a result, they shunned me due to my Episcopal origins. I had very few friends.
No one wanted to do anything fun with me, no hiking, biking, swimming, gaming, movie theater, restaurants, not even Bible Study. It's like each and every one of them were reclusive shut ins.
And then there's Grace, the drama queen, the enabler, the gossiper. She was a nitpicker who'd police over me all the time and call me out for my problems when she didn't have the goddamn decency to admit her own narcissistic behavior.
She crossed the line when she and her fellow posse created a rumor of me being a sex offender just to have my Mormon gf break up with me. That lie all but destroyed my social life, and for the second time in my life, I was depressed again.
So forgive me when I say that I genuinely cannot stand Asuka.
You see, the ringleader of the bullies in 10th grade; Eric, was the one who started it all, plotted against me to make my life a living hell.
But it wasn't until years later I found out from a former colleague that the entire fucking time, Eric too has Autism.
So just like how Asuka belittled and teased Shinji for her own personal hatred of her own trauma, since Shinji was a constant reminder of it, Eric bullied me to near suicide for something he had, that he wanted to hide from the rest of his peers. That is really low.
So...if people from the fandom aren't willing to defend Eric for making me suffer his bullying for his own personal hatred, why were they willing to defend Asuka for her own personal hatred she projected onto Shinji? Just because she had a crush on him?
It literally makes no sense. I just cannot comprehend it.
Their point was that, "Asuka and Eric are different. They're not the same person."
And to their credit, I can understand why. On one hand, Asuka mistreated Shinji because of how much he reminded her of the trauma she was trying to shield herself from, but on the other hand, she also teased him because she cared, and wanted him to grow a backbone, which albeit, wasn't the best of methods, given his predicament.
But what really irks me is how Asuka calls him "Gendo's kid", as if she's jealous of him for having a father figure; all while completely oblivious to the truth behind their relationship, which to me is the final nail in the coffin.
But as far as first impressions go, what I got was "LOL, you're getting triggered by a fictional character? You probably have the hots for her. Get lost you fucking pervert."
The more they shamed me for my inability to love, or idolize Asuka like they did, the more my hatred for her grew, and eventually I began to lash out at people who kinned Asuka, threatening to hurt them badly, which...in hindsight wasn't the best way to deal with it, I admit. I just want to know if what I felt was justified given everything I've said so far.
But it gets worse.
In January of 2020, my childhood friend took his own life. It pained me, as I knew him since he was born. This was the first domino to fall.
I then stumbled upon Evangelion, and learned about The End of Evangelion. I saw many reviews on IMDB and YouTube, claiming it to be one of the greatest animated movies of all time, and how it saved many people from suicide, helped them overcome their depression, and in some instances, "cured" them. I also saw claims of how it was the "true" ending, the "better" ending.
I was hoping that these reviews were trustworthy as the people who posted them, and that this film would help me overcome the loss of my childhood friend.
It didn't.
Instead, it triggered my grief for him, and forced me to relive every single traumatic memory from 10th grade in one's sitting, all over again...just like Asuka being mentally violated in Episode 22, I legitmately felt...mindraped.
I was scared, confused, terrified, wondering how this could've happened to me. I was at a loss for words
So I went to the one place I went to, where I hoped people knew about Evangelion better than I did; the fandom on Discord.
But as far as first impressions go, what I mostly got was "LMFAO, ain't no way you got traumatized by an anime bro. GTFO you pussy."
This devastated me, as I felt there was something seriously wrong with me. And that's when Covid-19 swept the country, after I saw End of Evangelion nonetheless.
As you can imagine, I was going stark staring paranoid that Evangelion was predicting my reality. So I went to the Evangelion fandom for help, in the hopes they would be able to provide some form of emotional comfort, because I wanted to know for sure, that this wasn't the case, that Eva was NOT predicting my future, even though it felt like it
Unfortunately, most of the comments I had gotten were, "It's all in your head, none of it is real", "You're just a frail weak little boy." Some of them were, "Dude, we're just kids, we're not professionals, seek a specialist."
The only problem was that my current therapist wasn't working for me.
And during the time, I was living in a housing program for the mentally handicapped, which shut down during the Pandemic. Unfortunately, their insurance didn't cover everyone's mental health, and as a result, most of us were forced to be confined to our apartments, and only allowed outside of the building for grocery runs.
I was losing my sense of identity, as well as my sense of reality, because of a severe lack of human contact, which is all more the reason why I depended on Discord for emotional refuge, and it didn't help I had annoyed people on one end who couldn't care less, and cyberbullies on the other.
I remember distinctly, in one of the servers, a couple people asking me, "Why do you relate to Shinji so much when he jerked off to Asuka?"
I did something as regrettable too.
When I was 13, I inappropriately felt a female dog's privates with my hand. She took off running, and I regretted what I had done, so I turned myself in to my mother. She explained that although what I did was out of curiosity, it was still wrong nonetheless.
Since then I have never done it again, and corrected myself since.
I gave the fandom my honest answer, in the hopes that given the context of EoE, much less the fact they brought up such a question in the first place, that they'd understand why EoE is all the more triggersome to me, because this memory I have repressed for a long time.
The fandom went absolutely berserk, and created a rumor of me being a "dogfucker", and spread it from server to server in attempt to get me crossbanned without me getting a word in edgewise, in attempts to sabotage my efforts to be accepted by the fandom at all, to which they had mostly succeeded.
In my paranoia, I began to try and outrun the speed of the rumor was spreading, in attempts to have people hear the truth before they heard the lie. Unfortunately, they too decided to spread the rumor in spite of hearing the truth; a lie made from a truth
For four years since Lockdown, I've been stalked, doxed, and threatened to be hunted down and killed by people from the fandom which made me all the more paranoid.
I became unhealthily obsessed with Evangelion, in the hopes I could bring myself, force myself to like it, in the hopes the fandom would accept me, and welcome me as one of their own, espeically during Lockdown, to maintain a sense of human connection; a sense of community.
Goingdown the rabbit hole, or in YouTube terms, the "iceberg", I discovered underlying themes (or fan theories) of gnosticism, Carl Jun's archetypes of the subconsciousness, Libido and the Oedipus complex by Sigmund Freud, existential dread, Judeo-Christian esocterism, dissolution of the ego, The Hedgehog's Dilemma, among other things.
Me, being a philosophy enthusiast, was hoping that my findings would persuade the fandom to accept me as one of their own.
Instead, they called me crazy, treated my findings like the ramblings of a madman.
I felt they were truly the only community I could find help, as they were the only ones who knew Evangelion.
From that one lie, more lies spread, and reached the ears of good people, turning them against me
For instance, they cyberbullied me for the suicide of my childhood friend, claiming I was a pedophile since most of the fandom I've interacted with are teenagers, whom I was begging for help.
Worse still, I've had minors trying to incriminate me by attempting to bait me into grooming them.
But the absolute worst thing they did, was that they took my letter for help, which I titled, "Message in a Bottle" (as it was supposed to be an SOS to the world), copied it word for word, and posted it into the copypasta forums on social media.
The following link is the real letter, the one I wrote myself, and posted on many Youtube videos to try and get any sort of help I could:
https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/21312/Message-In-A-Bottle-Reprise/
The following links however are FAKE. Compare the dates of each submission, and you'll see the truth.
Some depressed guy's take on eva - MadGhosts
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/w8sbsp/some_depressed_guys_take_on_eva/
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/wv14gx/neon_genesis_evangelion_nearly_drove_me_to_suicide/
Because of what they did, now more than half the entire fandom on Discord thinks I'm a troll, and more people who I could've earned their trust turned against me…
Discord, for one, was one of the places that gave me anxiety, which sucks because the whole reason why I began using Discord in the first place was because of the fact I was shunned by everyone in Trade School.
What really...makes me anxious is...any comments when people say what I'm feeling, seeing, experiencing, "isn't real", because that's been a fear of mine that started in 10th grade, an old wound, a weakness that people in the Eva fandom exploited
One of my greatest fears is that nothing of me is real, including my own self. When people downplay my experiences and say that "nothing is real" in regard to my thoughts and emotions, it makes me question my existence. I don't think they're fully aware of the extent of damage they're throwing to me.
I'm insecure because of how much I've been gaslighted in the past into thinking my Autism was making me hallucinate.
To make matters even worse, my ex-girlfriend....her name was Brianna Lancaster. And in a way, she was also a lot like Asuka, except less abrasive.
Her drunk biological father abandoned her at birth, and her mother and stepfather died in a car accident. She was forced to look after her little brother, while attending college. Her grandparents were paying for her college but were also extorting her for her salary money too.
She was suffering clinical depression. At the time, she was living in Charleston, SC, and I was living in Phoenix, AZ.
We first met on Discord in November 2019, and fell in love in January of 2020. We continuously made plans for us to meet up, until Covid-19 put a dent in those plans. Sometimes, Brianna was elusive when giving reasons of why she'd turn me down after agreeing to work on a meet up place and time, which happened five times in the span of our seven-month relationship.
I just couldn't handle being rejected by her anymore, so I broke up with her. Months later, she sent me a letter via email confessing she had commitment issues, given her...traumatic history. Even so, I forgave her in spite of her flaws and secrets she kept.
She was grateful, happy that I committed myself to be there for her, to encourage her to keep living no matter what, and listen to her woes. She even once said to me, "I'll never leave you, even when I die.
Then one day, she went silent.
In August 2021, her online friends contacted me an informed me of her suicide…
After my childhood friend took his own life, this broke me even further…
Admittedly, I made the mistake of Trauma Dumping in those servers, as some of them were polite enough to tell me that they weren't mental health professionals, and that I should take my problems elsewhere other than Discord servers for help.
The only problem was that I was confined to my apartment, only allowed outside for grocery runs. And that the therapy waitlists were backed up by MONTHS, even online. Trauma dumping was a defense mechanism as I was paranoid of being lied about and stalked.
They also said that Eva fandoms weren't the place to be talking about triggering topics such as depression and trauma, as there might be some people in the Discord servers that were easily triggered by them too. This made little to no sense to me, as those two topics were among the most obvious underlying themes of Evangelion in the first place. Their excuse? "Some just want to watch the series for the robot fights."
So I continued to Trauma Dump, out of paranoia of those plotting against me to sabotage my attempts to be accepted during Lockdown, and out of insecurity, as many fans have told me that I am the only person in existence to have ever been traumatized by an anime film.
I didn't want this to be the case, so I tried harder to make them understand, as I felt misunderstood. The more I did this, the more annoyed they became, and it grew into a vicious cycle.
I've held a personal vendetta against the fandom, grinding the axe, doing everything I could to try and expose them to the world wide web for what they did to me; for the good people of the fandom to realize they've been deceived by the bad people; that they may take leave of the fandom for good, to rally to my support, so that those who plotted against me can be left to rot in their own degenerate filth. I've strongly felt that the fandom deserved to burn, to be cleansed, for what it did to me…
I've felt this way for a long time, and this primal unbridled instinct for justice; retribution, has consumed me for a very long time, which led the fandom to hate me even more…
Only recently have I begun to let this go...and after everything I've been through, it's harder than you think, as I often feel unjustly robbed of the support I should've gotten during Lockdown.
So, forgive me when I say that now I have trust issues with anime altogether, and can't enjoy Mecha anime like I used to. I'm simply afraid of what will happen to me if I watch any more anime, given how Evangelion had a heavily negative effect on me, and how the fandom on Discord Reddit worsened it by tenfold.
The thing is however, I want to be able to enjoy anime again. I'm just afraid of being hurt again, being the victim of cyber-sabotage, afraid that no matter how hard I try, things will only get worse.
So...I've been looking all over for someone to watch anime with...just in case I have another panic attack, or trauma induced headache..
Is it ok if I feel this way?
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