Is this just an excuse to show off my room? Maybe
There are some things I have been thinking about recently. My bedroom walls are populated by posters featuring anime and visual novel characters(RIP the printer’s ink cartridges), the number of figures on my shelves grows slowly, and a dakimakura lays indolently on my bed. Like someone in those Otaku no Video mockumentary interview segments, I can say I’ve been an otaku for 10 years, and in that time, my collection grew to a state young me would’ve found unbelievable. Lately, some visiting kids have been wandering into my room and exclaiming, “oh! You’re an otaku!”. I wonder what that word means to them. I surely didn’t know it at their age.
Back in those days, I did look up to those mystical “people who knew about anime”—even though one of them was my own father—but it would still be a few years until I started saving photos of other people’s poster-plastered bedrooms to some long-gone pinterest board. Occasionally, I’ll get an itch to go and collect them again — unsourced pictures, youtube room tours recorded on shitty cameras, long-abandoned flickr galleries and blog posts, all these little peeks inside people’s personal living spaces–brought together by the fact that their owners could be described as “otaku”. For me it’s something like a version of “I Spy”: “That girl on the poster by that shelf, I say, pointing at a picture on my screen, she’s from this really old visual novel...”— though no one, it must be admitted, ever thinks my character-recognizing abilities are as cool as I think they are.
When it comes to my own room, though, I'm of two minds. Sometimes I think that it'd be better to have the decor be more muted, and other times, something makes me look around and realize just how much time I've spent building a space that reflects what makes me happy. It's like a physical proof of who I am. It almost feels like I'm being embraced.
How is it that wherever I look, I see someone I love.
(if you're wondering why these pictures are so busted: I took them ages ago on a shitty gopro clone my dad bought for some work thing)
Once my friend said he watched Link Click because of all the posters I put up—”it's like the Times Square in here”, to quote his words. My brother usually complains about “the gay catboy winking at him everywhere he looks” (he means Tomoe). One time I came across my mom staring at a picture of Shiki and Akira and asking “are they boyfriends? Or do they want to kill each other?”. Sometimes, I'll take a picture of something unrelated and people will comment on whatever characters you can see in the background. A room is meant to be a private place where no one else can come in and judge you, but I like times like these when people look at mine. It's a bit of a paradox. Maybe this is why pictures of itabeya get shared around so often. Or maybe it's just because people find them aesthetically pleasing. Who knows.