Otaku Journalist Interviews: Traps

Fandom

Wendy, a friend and Maria at Anime USA 2010.

Edit 3/13/2016 — Since writing this article nearly six years ago, I have come to acknowledge the term “trap” as an extremely offensive one. However, there is nothing offensive about crossdressing at conventions, or in the interviewee’s genuine interest in the hobby. I am preserving this post with that caveat.

One of the best parts of an anime convention is that everyone feels okay being themselves. Fans have built a culture of acceptance that invites all of us to put our personalities out on display. More than that though, we feel comfortable showing this part of ourselves on the outside through appearance and dress.

Perhaps this is why I’ve always encountered a larger than usual population of traps at conventions. I’m not talking about crossplay, either. I mean ordinary women’s convention attire that makes me do a double-take. When I encountered these three attendees above at Anime USA, they asked me to guess who the trap was. The answer? All three.

So I asked (and this is something I could only ask a person in the familiar atmosphere of a convention) why they were dressed up that day. All three of these lovely ladies had fascinating answers, but since I didn’t have a notepad on me I simply took down their email addresses on my cell phone. Two of them, whom we’ll call Wendy and Maria, responded to my query. Here’s what they had to say:

Otaku Journalist: When was the first time you decided to cross dress?

Wendy: First time… Wow, i started young… Maybe 13 or 14 years old. It wasn’t public, just something i did while home alone. I stole mom’s bra and old clothes that didn’t fit her anymore until i could afford to buy my own girl clothes. My first public outing was actually at a convention. I had a lot of support from friends in my anime group but once i was there i just loved it.

Maria: At an anime convention. Everything and everyone around gave me so much self confidence to just be who ever I wanted to be. You dress up as your favorite character… or person… or anything. So why not? I cosplay too, even as guys still.

OJ: Do you only cross dress at anime conventions?

W: After my first successful public outing at my first anime convention, I decided with the support of my friends to cross dress at our community college. And later at the local shopping mall.

M: No, I feel more comfortable in my girly clothes. I always just wanted to feel like myself and dress the part. I love being cute. (Or at least I try to be >_<)

OJ: What sort of reactions do you get? Can you think of an especially interesting one?

W: Reactions are priceless. I wish I had a video camera for all the people I’ve met while cross dressing. Mostly they’re all positive, really funny reactions. I love the “OMG!!! I thought you were a girl!” at the top of their lungs, then turn a dark shade of red, from a guy reaction. Happens a lot. Interestingly enough, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there was this one time a group of friends and I were coming out of a movie theater and I’m bouncing off the walls talking about the awesome movie we just saw and out of no where this car runs up on the side walk almost hitting me and this guy jumps out with a tire iron yelling obscenities at me. Again I have my wonderful friends to thank for basically saving my life.

M: Some terrible ones, some amazing ones. The whole platter… I’ve gotten a death threat or two there, and I got a “more power to you” a million times at a con. As far as the bewildered goes, in the bathrooms when people question which bathroom they chose.

OJ: Which bathroom do you use when you are trapping? (Is it called “trapping”?)

W: Bathroom is easy. I have a male part, albeit you cant tell when I’m dressed up, therefore I go into the male stall. Those are some great expressions too. Ever try peeing while standing up in a corset and a puffy skirt? It ain’t easy. (No clue if “trapping” is the proper term.)

M: Both, either or. I can see why people would be worried about me going into a female bathroom. But… I just wish to be normal and be me…

OJ: Do you think dressing up as a trap has any tie to your sexuality?

W: Yes and no. I am and probably will forever be heterosexual with gay tendencies. If that makes sense at all. Dressing up just makes it easier to be attracted to any humanoid male or female. I am defiantly most deviant when cross dressing.

M: In every single way. But I look at sexuality for the term sex. I am not interested in sex and the trap part of it really isnt for the sexual fancies… it’s for me. I really am not interested in sex like I said. I’m really in life just to have a fun time being me. You know?

—

I am so grateful to Wendy and Maria for opening up to me about their hobby. It really goes to show that even when two people are participating in the same activity, their experiences can infinitely vary.

By the way, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t interview any female traps. Well, if you’re on Twitter, you know that I’ve dressed up as a “reverse trap” before myself for a drag show in college. (Yes, that links to a photo.) However, as Wendy, Maria and I discussed, there’s not as much risk in it for girls.

“Girls wear pants all the time,” Maria said. “But you don’t see a lot of guys wearing skirts.”

I’m want to make “Otaku Journalist interviews” a recurring series. Anyone have an interesting hobby and want to be interviewed? Let me know and put “interview” in the subject line.

My latest adventure: NaNoJobMo

Journalism

Updated 7/11/2011 – all links have been changed to laureninspace.tumblr.com, the address I changed my Tumblr to.

“Success is when you say you’re going to do something and then do it.” Somebody once gave me this advice and I’ve lived my life by it ever since. In all the major successes in my life, I have followed this model. So when I decided to do something this November, I realized I would have to tell people about it first.

I am going to do something about my unemployment.

I’m not unemployed, per se. I’ve been working at my local gym since July. I stand at the front desk, smile at everybody, and answer the phone. However, this is not how I expected my life to turn out after obtaining my masters degree. (Interesting fact: Three other minimum wage employees at my gym also have a masters degree.) So I wouldn’t say I’m a NEET in a Welcome to the NHK sense of the word.

For the past three months, my job strategy has been to rack up experiences. I wanted to do as many unpaid jobs as possible and add the work I did to my resume and portfolio. However, these aren’t leading to jobs, just a cooler looking portfolio. Not to mention, more great stuff to blog about. But I digress.

This month, I’m going back to the old fashioned style of applying for jobs. I’m using a series of search engines to apply for a different job every day for 30 days. You can hold me accountable by checking out the Tumblr I made just for this project: NaNoJobMo. Yes, I know that title doesn’t make sense. You can read about it in my mission statement.

So check it out and get on my case if it isn’t updated. Suggest jobs if you like. And finally, otaku readers, don’t worry! Tomorrow we return to our regularly scheduled fandom and subculture oriented programming.

Otaku in DC: Dupont Circle’s Ginza

Uncategorized

I enjoyed revisiting Hana two weeks ago, so I thought I would take a trip to another of my DC picks for Japanophiles. This shop is called Ginza, and they specialize in hard-to-find Japanese goods. You can find them at 1721 Connecticut Avenue.

I found this store last April when I was walking to a restaurant with John. We noticed some anime inspired figures in the window display, and decided to check it out. We weren’t prepared for the treasure we found inside.

You see, ever since we could remember, we’d always wanted a kotatsu. But online, they’re extremely expensive, tough to ship, and possibly dangerous due to the difference in foreign outlets. Many people suggest making your own to avoid the hassle. So when we saw one in the store for an affordable price, we did a double take. We ended up bringing it home — yes, a space heater/table — in the middle of spring! We haven’t had many chances to use it, but I’ll have to post about it very soon.

Most of the furniture is kept upstairs. You have to ask the owners to see that floor, but it’s worth it for the unique items. Downstairs, as in the picture below, there’s a lot of smaller goods.

The wall of stationary is full of unique paper products. I love the variety of origami paper.

There are always new yukata here whenever I visit. I think these must sell out frequently since I am always seeing new patterns. The store also sells scrap fabric for making your own Eastern inspired sewing projects.

I love the selection of bento boxes and bento-making tools. I especially like a large three-tiered “picnic bento” that can store a picnic lunch for a group.

I would buy these sushi and Japanese snacks erasers, but I would never have the heart to use them to actually erase anything.

Even if this Pachinko machine isn’t functioning, it’d still make a wonderful piece of art.

Thanks to Ginza for allowing me to take pictures inside the store!

How to start a career in anime journalism

Anime, Journalism

From left: Patrick Macias, Gia Manry, Colette Bennett

For many of us, it seems like a fantasy. Watching and reviewing anime as part of the daily grind. Getting paid to cover anime and gaming conventions. Making money off of things most otaku pay money to do.

A lucky, hard-working few have made this their reality. This includes three journalists that I deeply admire:  Patrick Macias of Otaku USA Magazine, Gia Manry of Anime News Network, and Colette Bennett of Tomopop (and more!). I sent out email questionnaires to all three of them about how they started — and maintain — their careers, plus their advice for the rest of us. This is what they told me.

Getting started

As an unpaid anime blogger, I was very interested in finding out how the journalists had made the transition from free work to paid work. Patrick, who began his career pre-Internet, had the most experience in this department.

While he kept his day job writing for a nationally syndicated news service, Patrick spent his free time contributing articles about otaku themes to fan publications for “little or no pay.” This led to him getting a position in San Fransisco covering Asian films. Around 1997, this publicity got Patrick hired at Viz Media’s editorial department. Since then he has gone on to co-own a media company, become editor in chief of Otaku USA Magazine, and write two books.

“I got lucky early on with regards to having my work syndicated and getting decent pay for it,” he said. “But there was little to no fiscal reward for my Japanese pop culture writing for a long time.”

Gia Manry’s career path began while she was still in school. She wrote news for a popular Harry Potter site for free because “it was fun and good experience.” Later, she started blogging about manga, but applied for jobs at the same time.

“I started my first manga-related blog (a very niche one) around the same time I applied to Anime Insider, and I got to work for them about five months later,” she said.

After Anime Insider shut down, Gia wrote for a couple other anime sites, started her own anime news site, and finally ended up at Anime News Network. While she makes a living off her work as an anime blogger, she said she does occasionally work for free.

“I’ve also volunteered my time for causes I appreciate, and I have worked for free when I had things that I wanted to say and had full control over where and how I said them,” she said.

In Colette’s case, blogging became a second career. Stuck working a job in L.A. that she didn’t enjoy, Colette said things turned around after she met a graphic novel artist and admired his lifestyle.

“He really inspired me. I talked to him often about my dream of writing about videogames. And one day he said ‘Why don’t you start a blog?'” she said.

Colette started a blog but took it one step further. As she worked, she emailed a link to her blog to the editors of all her favorite video game websites, advertising herself as a freelancer willing to cover gaming events. Eventually both Kotaku and Destructoid offered her jobs. She chose Destructoid, but contributes to several other blogs including Gamasutra. She didn’t make money off of the original blog, but it certainly contributed to her eventual job.

“I think working for free is a good experience to start out, but I think everyone needs to have a cut off,” she said.

The typical workday

This career is no joke. When I found out about each journalist’s daily routine, I realized that each one of them is an incredibly hard working person. It shows that not just anyone can succeed in the field.

Patrick said he wakes up at 6:30 a.m. each day to begin checking email, blog statistics, and social networks. He pauses to do housework until 10 to 11, when he gets down to the day’s writing and editing.

“Unless I have a really pressing deadline, things start to slow down around 5 p.m., at which point I start thinking about dinner,” he said.

For fun, he has been playing Modern Warfare in the evenings after work. His day usually ends around midnight.

Gia gets up between 7 and 8 and commutes to work — as she joked, her commute is “bed to computer.” You might think that with a trip like that, it’d be tempting to go back to bed, but Gia is truly dedicated.

“It would be so easy to lock myself in the house for weeks on end! I’m sort of obsessive and when you work on a job you love, especially an Internet-content job, there’s always something you can be doing,” she said.

With that in mind, she makes sure to run errands, exercise, or visit friends in order to step out of the house for a bit. But afterward, her workday continues until the evening.

Colette did not specify a wake-up time, but based on the number of sites she contributes to on a daily basis, her workday runs long.

“On a normal day, I start by checking our schedule and going through my RSS feeds to send tips to the staff. After that, I usually return emails, contact any distributors or advertisers I may need to follow up with, edit the work of my writers and then work on reviews,” she said.

Aside from managing a staff, Colette said she spends a lot of her day focusing on site-building. And of course, she takes photos of toys for Tomopop five days a week. “Really stressful [part of the] job,” she joked.

Advice for the aspiring

These three journalists have truly made it, but what hope is there for the rest of us?

Patrick thinks the growth of anime journalism is very limited. Even though the fandom itself is strong, he said, the industry has its own problems.

“Some are common to the entertainment industry at large (such as digital piracy, loss of advertising and sponsorship, competition from other media) while others are unique to anime and manga (the bursting of the ‘manga bubble,’ the closure of several high-profile anime distributors, the difficulties of dealing with Japanese license holders),” he said.

However, he did have advice for the aspiring anime journalists who can rise to the challenge. Learn Japanese to get a leg up on the competition, he suggested. And develop your own unique writing voice, so you don’t get lost in the crowd.

“You have to know more than your audiences, who already have vast amounts of information at their fingertips via Wikipedia and Google,” he said. “Way too much of what masquerades as ‘anime journalism’ nowadays is just people rewriting press releases or recycling content from news aggregators. You really have to bring something unique to the table in order to stand out.”

Gia said she gets questions from aspiring journalists a lot. She said there is only a handful of sites paying content creators right now. Plus, she adds, it’s not only a difficult industry but a difficult economy overall. With that in mind, she doesn’t believe anime journalism is a growing career venue.

She said she wouldn’t suggest anyone quit their day job to go into anime journalism, or even writing online. She said that this field rewards only those who love it and are willing to work harder than anything for it.

“I think a lot of people also don’t realize that working in a field you love is hard,” she said. “Don’t get into this field to make lots of money, and don’t get into this field because you like anime so it’ll be easy to write about it. Expect to work your butt off to prove you’re worth hiring over all the other fans, and expect to care– for better and for worse –about what you’re doing.”

Colette was slightly more optimistic.

“Anime journalism is a viable career venue, but a very small one,” she said. “However, since there is a flood of news coming out of Japan at all times, I think there is always room to do something.”

Colette suggests aspiring anime journalists read as many blogs as they can on a regular basis, and figure out what they cover and cover well and, more importantly, what they’re missing and what they can do better.

“You’ll need a way to stick out since the market is full of people who want to do the same thing, so consider something innovative,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to stand out.”

—

My interviews included plenty more questions than the three listed. Would you like to hear more about these talented professionals? Let me know in the comments.

Tatami Galaxy and the quarter-life crisis

Anime

Note: This piece is a Japanator Feature.

Is there any one of us who looks back at life and wished we could have done something different?

Most of us realize this is a futile way of thinking and move on. But if we had incredible angst and the ability to time travel, our lives might look a bit like The Tatami Galaxy, noitaminA’s Spring 2010 anime series.

The story stars a college student who is never named, (perhaps so the viewer can more easily relate to him,) who is constantly searching for the ideal college experience, as he puts it: “that rose colored campus life.” However, each path he takes and each club he joins leads to an ultimately negative experience. However, the one bit of luck that our protagonist has come across is the ability to press CTRL+Z on the entire experience and begin again from his first day of college. He does this no less than nine times in an effort to find happiness at college.

But even by attempt number two, our protagonist is falling into the same patterns. He’s always encountering the same people, facing the same problems, and living in the same 5-tatami-mat room.

As I watched the protagonist hopelessly alter time without changing himself, I began to realize that he was having a quarter-life crisis.

Before the recession, identity crises were for the middle-aged and called “Mid-Life Crises.” But in an economic environment which is forcing graduates like myself to dwell in a sort of limbo as we hunt for jobs, these struggles are occurring far earlier. Between school and a career, the present fades away as we contemplate the past and idealize the future. What could I have done better so that I would have a job right now? Where will I be in five years? What paths should I be walking right now to succeed, and how many?

This phenomenon has popularized psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s idea of Emerging Adulthood, a proposed new life stage that takes place in the twenties:

“Having left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and worldviews.”

Sounds a lot like a quarter-life crisis — and the plot of Tatami Galaxy — to me. The protagonist might be a bit younger, but his story consists entirely of exploring different paths to achieve the life he wants. However, even with the ability to travel through time and try again, he’s not able to succeed until he realizes, as Arnett believes, that emerging adulthood is an internal struggle:

Just as adolescence has its particular psychological profile, Arnett says, so does emerging adulthood: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.” A few of these, especially identity exploration, are part of adolescence too, but they take on new depth and urgency in the 20s. (via The NYTimes.)

Parallel to Arnett’s beliefs, the protagonist comes to realize that it’s not our surroundings that decide our fates — this comes from within ourselves. We will be stuck repeating the same patterns over and over in our exterior lives until we find it within ourselves to change our behaviors and beliefs.

The Tatami Galaxy is a lesson about being present. By rewinding time, the protagonist is essentially dwelling on past events and hypothetical desires. When he realizes that “now” is the only time that exists, he’s able to move on. The story can only conclude when the protagonist realizes that he is the cause and sum of all his experiences — and accepts it.