Reclaiming my fandom self, two kids later

Fandom
A Lego set that looks like a Japanese garden.
This Lego set was my first time building a model since Bryan was born.

I was catching up on Ya Boy Kongming! when the first contraction hit. It was May 2022, and it was one week before my son’s due date. Since this was my second pregnancy, I had a pretty good idea about how much time I had left before I needed to get to the hospital. So I pulled out my laptop and started drafting the Anime News Network newsletter, pausing to breathe through the waves of pain and timing my contractions all the while.

Bryan Casval was born punctually, two hours after I arrived at the delivery ward. Lying in my hospital bed, my husband John dozing on the couch, the baby swaddled in his bassinet between us, I emailed the draft to Peter, who used to format the newsletter before moving on to become Director of Film at Japan Society. “Curated by Lauren and Bryan Orsini,” that week’s newsletter read. It was very cute.

“How awful,” you might be thinking, “the monsters at ANN wouldn’t give a person time off while she was literally in labor!” Let’s stop right there; I was offered a break, but I refused it. In a time when I found myself drowning in pregnancy and early motherhood, the newsletter was my tether to the community. To curate it, I had to read the ANN headlines daily. I stayed on top of which anime people were most excited for, at a time when I was barely watching anime anymore. It was my only consistent fandom gig, and I didn’t want it to be eclipsed by motherhood like so many other parts of me. There was defiance in my decision to work through the pain: I wanted and still want to give the world to my kids, but I won’t sacrifice my entire self to do it.  

Ever since my daughter, Eva Artesia was born (because yes, they are both named after Gundam characters), every moment that I have devoted to my fandom has felt hard-earned, an indulgence of the person I used to be. My children were extremely wanted, to be clear, and I am deeply grateful they exist! That said, nobody with kids has ever noted having more free time than before. Becoming a mom reshaped my life, filling in all the empty spaces with more and more care tasks. As they grow, they continually reshape this tension in my life, a push-pull between my children and my hobbies.

I always vowed that I wouldn’t be the kind of mom who let motherhood define her life, but here we are. Part of it was the pandemic—I lost a lot of work during the lockdown and I couldn’t get childcare anyway, so I became a stay-at-home mom. Since then, I’ve become unrecognizable to myself. ​​I have become the kind of person who gets angry when the kitchen’s a mess—and then I get angry that I’m angry about something so inconsequential. I get mad that my world has become so small that the biggest crisis I can imagine is a filthy kitchen at dinnertime. 

I didn’t have a name for this frustration until I read This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something—Anything—Like Your Life Depends On It. Never have I spent so much time underlining passages and exclaiming YES! as I did with this book. Replace the words “Benedict Cumberbatch” with “anime” and this could be a book about me. Author Tabitha Carvan writes about how transgressive her fandom felt after becoming a mom, since being a mom is an identity that is supposed to blot out everything else:

“[T]his is exactly why it felt so wrong to fall for Benedict Cumberbatch as a mother. Because what could it mean except that I was dissatisfied with my perfectly good life, and worse, with my healthy, happy family? … How terrible! And greedy! And because being a mother went all the way to the edges of me, if I wanted to scrape out a little bit of time or space for anything else, it was at the expense of the motherness.”

My anger came from being boxed in to a role I didn’t choose or expect. I had no idea how all-encompassing the identity and tasks of parenthood would be until I was in it. At first, I kept up my writing, typing on my phone while nursing an infant; watching anime with the sound off to avoid waking the baby in his crib next to me. But as I time went on, I realized that the expected labor of caregiving and cleaning could expand to fill a whole day, week, life. Whole months would go by and I’d realized I hadn’t done a single thing purely to make myself happy. 

My kids aren’t babies anymore, and I’ve had more time to process the ways I’ve changed, who I am now, and what I want to do just for me. With help from my husband, John, and our support system, I’ve been able to have kid-free outings, dinners with friends, an especially indulgent trip to a local Korean spa with my Japanese club, and in a change that feels both frivolous and extremely affirming, I spent an afternoon getting my hair dyed purple. I try to do something fun every day, whether it’s watching an episode of I’m In Love With The Villainess or building Lego. Activities that have no intended outcome except for pleasure. Carvan writes:

“[Fandom] can have unexpected, maybe profound, consequences, not in spite of being trivial but because it is. Because it’s fun, because it doesn’t matter, because it’s purely for you, because it feels stupidly good. Because the joy of it expands. It seeps into other parts of your life, transforming it, and you, in ways that do matter—a lot.”

I’m not taking time for myself for any productive purpose, like being a better parent. Still, I’ve found that it does make me a better mom because I’m less likely to yell or lose my patience after I’ve taken time for myself. I’m even showing my kids the side of me that’s more than a mom; this summer, we took my oldest kid to Otakon, where she was starstruck getting her picture taken with one of her favorite characters, Luigi. 

Remembering that I’m more than just a mom felt transcendental to me, but it might be a strange confession to my readers. In November, Otaku Journalist will be 14 years old. My oldest child is four, so I’ve been blogging here for a decade longer than I’ve been parenting; which means you might not think of me as a mom at all—or even know that I have two kids, as some of my convention friends were surprised to learn at Otakon. I’m so different from the person I was when I started this blog that I wasn’t sure I could still come back. But I’m ready now. I’m here. 

‘Frieren’ Brings Us Face To Face With Mortality

Anime

The first thing we learn about the titular character of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is that she isn’t human. Frieren is an elven mage with a greatly elongated lifespan; her appearance remains unchanged even after half a century has passed in the show.

Frieren thinks nothing of setting an appointment 50 years in the future, and remains stone-faced when her friend Himmel laughs at the thought—that’s the better part of a lifetime for a human like him. Frieren was fortunate that Himmel was still around to meet her for their 50-year reunion; death could have come for him at any time. He’s matured into a wizened old man by then, but Frieren doesn’t seem curious about what he’s been up to in the meantime. Fifty years is nearly a lifetime for people, but within her understanding of time, that’s barely a blip.

The human lifespan is so short that we can measure it in weeks. A fantastic, if sobering, book I read recently put this fact into stark perspective with its title: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. “[W]e’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans,” writes Oliver Burkeman, “yet practically no time at all to put them into action.” And 4,000 weeks is the best-case scenario. We aren’t even guaranteed tomorrow. 

What would you do differently if you didn’t have to worry about the constraints of your own mortality? You probably wouldn’t worry so much about maximizing your productivity and making every day count. That’s why it’s no sweat for Frieren to spend 4 years training her apprentice, Fern, or to take 6 months out of her travels to scour the forest for a particular species of flower. 

However, Fern is human and in a hurry. She needs to improve her magical powers now. She wants to stop dawdling over flora. When Frieren promises to stop searching for the blue moon weed flower “soon,” Fern, who has quickly become accustomed the the elven mage’s concept of scheduling, asks, “How many years is soon?”

A frustrated Fern later complains of Frieren: “She’s a mage who possesses the power to save many people. She shouldn’t spend her time searching for something that doesn’t exist.”

The emphasis is mine because I want to draw your attention to it: the idea of time as something we spend is a purely cultural one. In our modern world, we’ve collectively decided that a work day is 8 hours, regardless of whether those hours actually need to be filled with work. Before clocks, people would work when tasks required doing—and those tasks would take as long as they took. It would have been absurd for a farmer in the Middle Ages to imagine “clocking out” in the middle of the autumn harvest or prolonging it to meet an imagined hourly quota. 

Clock time is so ingrained in us that it’s hard to imagine other ways of keeping time. In Saving Time, Jenny O’Dell looks to the natural world as an alternate. During the Covid-19 lockdown, she notes, people bereft of regular markers of time like commuting and weekend trips turned to observing the plants and trees growing outside their windows as the seasons changed. “What is a clock? If it’s something that ‘tells the time,’ then my branch was a clock,” she wrote. 

Our society had a reckoning with time in 2020, when time seemed to develop this surreal, stretchy quality. I remember thinking how much the lockdown felt like my first maternity leave with my newborn daughter when the clock did not govern when I slept or woke, worked or played; only she did. Whether she wanted to nurse or nap, whether it was 3 AM or 3 PM, she would do what she needed to do with no regard for a clock she didn’t know how to read. Burkeman calls this “deep time” as opposed to “clock time,” and after his son was born, he noted “the otherworldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.”

After a lifetime in clock time, it is still hard for me to comprehend any other kind of time-keeping; the swiftest way to define it is that it’s when we are time. In deep time, time isn’t something we mark off the calendar; it’s something we exist within, and it propels us forward whether we “spend” it or “use” it or not. Of course, this is always true: even while you’re writing a to-do list about what to do with your time, you’re already doing it; time is already ticking away. 

Frieren can afford to measure her time in the increment that it takes a sapling to become the most ancient tree in the forest—she’ll still be around to watch it grow. But there is a significant way that Freiren is beholden to clock time: her friends. Though she is more than a thousand years old, the humans around her will reach 100 if they are lucky, which means she only has a small window in which to get to know them. She does not seem to value her own time, but she is learning to value their time, since they won’t be around forever. 

Like most humans, I don’t like to think directly about my own mortality. But after reading Four Thousand Weeks and Saving Time, I’ve begun to realize how much my acceptance or denial of my eventual death informs my every daily decision. So often I feel like time is racing by, especially as I’ve watched that same snuggly newborn I mentioned earlier turn into a quick, talkative kid in just four years. My daughter, and now my son as well, are unrecognizable from how they looked and behaved even a year ago. My daughter is as fascinated by her own growth as I am, asking if it’s her birthday again yet (her birthday is in September). She once touched her fingers to my cheek and said, “When I grow up, I want wrinkles on my face just like you, Mommy!” Unlike with Frieren, my passing lifespan shows on my face. What’s more, I try to see this as a good thing. For humans, aging is a privilege because getting old is not a guarantee. 

Reminders of our mortality are everywhere. Just this past week, I’ve welcomed a new baby into my extended family and comforted a friend through the loss of a family member. Even so, I spend too much time on things that don’t really matter to me—I finish books and shows I don’t like for completion’s sake, or fritter away an hour on social media. I have more in common with Frieren’s mindset than I should, even though I don’t have her kind of time to spare.

So what do we do? Embrace our limits. As Burkeman writes in Four Thousands Weeks: “[O]nce you no longer need to convince yourself that you’ll do everything that needs doing, you’re free to focus on doing a few things that count. This works for Frieren, too; although she might not have the same mortality-imposed limits, she learns that she only has the length of a human lifespan to make memories with her friends. 

Remember when Frieren reluctantly stumbled out of bed before dawn for the sunrise festival? We can understand why night owl Frieren doesn’t care about making the most of her days when she has so many of them ahead of her. But she soon learned there was only one morning she would be able to see that particular sunrise reflected in Fern’s elated face.

Motherhood changed how I write about anime

Anime, Writing

This will be my third Mother’s Day as a mom. 

This time last year, I was still recovering in the hospital after giving birth. (It had been an easy birth, and I remember drinking a smoothie while watching an episode of Ya Boy Kongming! on my iPad.) My son’s birthday wasn’t so close to Mother’s Day last year; I remember hauling my nine-months-pregnant self to a solo lunch that day. With my son squirming around in my belly like something from Alien, I craved a semblance of solitude more than anything else.

A lot has changed since then. My daughter is in preschool now. My son is no longer a baby, and every day he becomes more independent. That I have the time and energy to write again is evidence of how much they’ve grown up already. In some ways, my life is “going back to normal” after having kids, but in other ways, I realize I am irrevocably changed. 

I never wanted to become the kind of mom who only talks about being a mom. But right now, it’s what I most want to write about when I write about anime. The article I am most proud of out of the last few years is about motherhood: How Chihayafuru frames breastfeeding as an early parenthood challenge. I’m finally finished nursing both of my kids, which gives me the perspective to realize just what a huge, emotionally draining, time-consuming undertaking it was—and one which my kids will never remember, either! While I want to respect my kids’ online privacy with my writing, this article was about my breastfeeding journey alone: something that will be invisible to others and forgotten even by my own kids, but which I wanted to memorialize in an essay. Because it was hard, but I did it anyway, and I got through to the other side!

Since I spend the majority of my waking hours doing the invisible and endless labor of motherhood, it certainly affects the way I see the world. On Wednesday, I wrote in my latest Oshi No Ko review that I felt sorry for poor Ruby breathing into a nebulizer after a punishing endurance workout. “Is that what it is?” a commenter wrote in the forums. I had clocked it immediately because sometimes you give portable nebulizers to little kids when they have coughs—and my kids have been sick a lot. Since I find myself identifying with parental figures more than protagonists while I watch anime, reviewing Oshi No Ko has been a particularly interesting experience for me. Even now in episode five and beyond, after A Lot Of Stuff has happened and the story’s focus has shifted to her son Aqua, I still see his mother, Ai, as the main character whose star power haunts every scene. 

Ai has been treated more kindly than most anime moms who occupy minor roles and are quickly forgotten, or who exist only within the protagonist’s memories. But there have been some standouts. If you see this post, I’d like to hear from you: who is your favorite anime mom? That was initially going to be the topic of this post—a list of some of my favorites—but my kids have been sick for what feels like a month and I’m tired. And it’s Mother’s Day weekend! So I’m going to go to sleep instead.

Lead image: screenshot from Oshi No Ko episode 1.

How I’ve been spending my 2023

Writing

This January I read the life-changing book Atomic Habits, which challenges you to improve your life by reminding you that your habits, the tasks and routines you repeat every day, form your identity. This resonated with me deeply. Over the past three years, the bulk of my time has been spent on parenting and care tasks. As a result, I’ve felt more like a frumpy mom than the author of Otaku Journalist—even though I’ve been the former for far less time than the latter!

My life has gotten significantly easier in 2023. Eva (3) is in preschool now, and Bryan (almost 1) has a regular weekly sitter, which means I finally have time for leisure, work, and writing. And yet, I’ve been struggling to return to Otaku Journalist, even though I crave the connection that it brings me to the community, the feeling that I’m participating in something bigger than myself. This is because it’s been such a long time since my habits have reflected my identity as a member of anime fandom. 

I’ve started and put down this post several times over the past week. Now it’s been eight months since my last post, and about five years since I updated this blog regularly. I think that calls for a status update. Here is what I’ve been up to in 2023:

Working again

This entire time, I never quit curating ANNouncements, Anime News Network’s weekly newsletter. I am still proud of wrapping up a draft while I was in labor! It has kept me feeling informed about what’s happening in the fandom even when I felt my most disconnected. Lately, I’ve also been writing weekly streaming reviews for ANN as well: Tsurune 2 last season, and this season I lucked out and got the controversial but fantastic Oshi No Ko (just trust me, bro).

I’ve been doing some contract work for Forbes. I worked with a great team on the Forbes AI 50 2023 list, and I’m truly thankful that they paid reporters to work on it instead of trying to have Chat GPT hallucinate an article or something. I even returned to my Forbes blog after three years—I interviewed Elena Vitagliano, who I previously interviewed on Otaku Journalist in 2013(!) about becoming the first European woman to be published in Shonen Jump+. If you haven’t read her manga yet, it’s in English here (just flip past the Japanese version). 

Gunpla 101 is still active, even though it’s been a year since I’ve been able to work on a model without worrying somebody will eat the tiny pieces. That means I have edited and published an impressive list of contributors (and I am always looking for more paid writers)! If nothing else, I publish a monthly update on the latest kits and news in the Gundam-verse. 

I’ve also been keeping myself sharp with a select group of web design and development clients, mostly maintenance and upgrades on existing WordPress websites. 

Watching, Reading, Making

(This section is full of affiliate links so this is my obligatory notification.)

Forgive me: I quit my Crunchyroll subscription with a lot of noise, but I recently got it back. For a few seasons I stuck to HiDive, but it’s hard to compete with a near-monopoly. Since then, I’ve caught up on the biggest and buzziest: Chainsaw Man, Trigun Stampede, Mob Psycho 100 3, and the mesmerizing Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. 

I’ve been reading a lot of manga and Webtoons. Some of my favorites recently: She Loves To Cook And She Loves To Eat, My Dress-up Darling, and Akane-Banashi (free on Viz). Links go to digital versions because that’s all I read these days: my baby likes to eat paper. 

After a long time of only playing MarioKart 8 (my daughter is obsessed with it and wants a Player 2), I’m finally playing a new video game: the “cozy-horror” fishing game Dredge. Well, it’s more like I’m watching John play it while I knit socks. 

I’ve been making an effort to be more creative this year. When I’m helping my daughter design new Mario Kart levels in Magic Marker, I’ve been drawing on my iPad. Earlier this year I shared a few of my digital artworks, back when I still used Twitter. 

Looking to Reconnect

Where is everyone hanging out these days? I quit Twitter and I don’t have a Bluesky invite, so I’ve been spending most of my time in Discord servers. I also don’t want to waste my limited free time on social networks where nobody I know is (which is why I blocked Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook from my phone). 

I’m even planning to go to an anime convention in person. Between parenting and COVID-19 lockdown, I’ve taken a multi-year leave of absence. But I finally feel ready to return to Otakon, at least for a day, and even resubmitted my panel. We’ll see if they are willing to give me a second chance on the panel I backed out of presenting in 2021. If I do go, I might even bring my oldest kid, who is REALLY into Mario; the cosplay there might make her day! 

It’d be cool if the slow demise of Twitter led to a return to anime blogging, but I highly doubt that; looking at my own habits, I only read anime blogs when I subscribe to them and get updates in my inbox. But if you have found this post and read it all the way to the bottom, this is my way of saying hi. I’m still here.

What I’ll do instead of watching the fall anime season

Anime

Last week, in a burst of emotion, I wrote my first blog post in a year.

In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to boycott the fall season (or at least the bulk of it, which is on Crunchyroll), at a time when I already feel isolated from the anime community. But consuming anime to talk about it only one of the ways I can reconnect with my fellow fans. I can also write a new blog post and share my thoughts in something longer than a tweet. 

Previously, I thought my fall would be totally consumed by anime. I joked about not even having time to sleep because I’d be watching so many shows. Now that I’ll only be watching a handful, here’s what I’ll be doing—essentially what I’ve been doing—since last updating this blog.

Curating ANNouncements

Curating the Anime News Network newsletter is my only remaining fandom gig and I take it very seriously. I have held this role for 74 weeks straight. I did not take a week off when I was in labor with my son—I was honestly afraid that  if I did, they’d find a replacement curator that they liked better! So I wrote ANNouncements #54 while timing my contractions, and then John drove me to the hospital. If you received that newsletter, you’ll see that it was written by “Lauren and Bryan,” though I have to say that he wasn’t very much help.

Parenting my two small children

Wait, I have two of them now? And they’re both named after Gundam characters? I guess it’s true what they say: everything happens so much. I spend 90% of my waking hours taking care of them, and that’s a low estimate. With a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old, I’d say it’s a mix of janitorial work and answering philosophical questions. As the archives show, I didn’t plan to be a stay-at-home mom but then quarantine happened, I lost a bunch of gigs and didn’t get new ones, plus childcare is super expensive in my area, so here I am.

Reading webtoons

I was one of those high schoolers with a sizeable lineup of webcomics on my RSS reader. I read everything from Wendy to Penny Arcade. Now I’ve lived long enough to see both of those creators get cancelled, and I’ve also moved on to reading better comics, just in another format. I was an early webtoon adopter because I started writing about them for Forbes in 2018. Now I look forward to 9 PM every night, when the new episodes come out. Right now I’m enjoying Unordinary, Everything is Fine, Not Even Bones, and Hand Jumper, to name a few.

Books are also good

Ever since I had my daughter, Eva, I have been reading a LOT more. Like webtoons, ebooks are something that I can do one-handed on my phone, while rocking or nursing a baby. For the previous decade or so I had not been reading very much, maybe ten books a year, and now it’s more like 40. When you start reading again after not reading for a long time, at first it’s hard to find new stuff to read. But now I’m in a cycle where I keep preordering or reserving interesting new books (like Nona the Ninth and The Sunbearer Trials) and being perpetually behind. 

Ye olde anime backlog 

As it turns out, there is a lot of anime out there that isn’t on Crunchyroll and isn’t part of this stacked fall season. So it’s time to catch up with that. I’m hearing good things about Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I still haven’t watched Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway’s Flash and I make a point of watching every Gundam show/movie, so it’s overdue. I’ve got a bunch of anime shows and movies on my Plex server that are due for a rewatch, too. For example, October is the perfect time to see if the spooky/sentimental Mushi-shi still slaps. 

Watching part of the fall season, actually

Since I started writing this post, I learned that a few of fall’s buzziest shows will actually be on services other than Crunchyroll. The Urusei Yatsura reboot will be on HiDive. Mob Psycho 100 season 3 will be on Hulu. I’m REALLY hoping Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury will air on the Gundam official YouTube channel. So it’s not going to be a total fall season blackout for me. 

I still think that deleting my Crunchyroll account was the right thing to do, but it’s hard to go without. Re-reading this blog post reminds me that I’ll be able to stay strong. I have zero expectations that my little boycott will sway the Crunchyroll C-suite or anything, but at least I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that at least I’m not supporting their anti-union practices.