Damn, it’s been three months already but it still feels weird to be writing “2019” as the year.
March 2019 happens to be a month with 5 Saturdays, so it’s time for a full personal post. One of my dearest readers asked me to elaborate on my observation on influence of peers vs. parents on us and I think I’ll start from there.
It’s actually nothing much and it’s not an absolute conclusion since sample size is very small. Just that, according to yours truly, we tend to listen more to people whom we identify more with. In case of family, it might be siblings more than parents (as happens in my family), in case of friends, it might be 2 years senior more than 10 years senior.
I hadn’t really thought about it much initially, since people tend to tell me time and again how I behave like a parent in general (can’t help it, I have grown up with a lot of kids younger than me apart from my own younger sibling). But the incident 3 weeks back compelled me to look at it from a different perspective and I realized, people do listen to me, they just happen to be my immediate juniors.
Perhaps, because they think that I have gone through/ am going through similar situations as them. More junior people have their immediate seniors to identify with and guide them, I shouldn’t have meddled too much since the beginning. Without going in further details though, I think I learnt an important life lesson.
In other news, I got to talk to founder of a company in anime space 2 weeks back and it was an absolutely delightful experience. Although I consume so much east Asian media, I don’t really get to interact with people from that space (regretfully) apart from fellow watchers of course .
Finally, as an user of a small platform, I got to give my feedback to them about their website and anime in general, so it was great. And I could finally rant that slice of life is so underappreciated as a genre that anime like My Roommate is a Cat would never rank in top 10 for seasonal rankings.
I also got to talk a bit about the piracy issues in India. Trust me people, Indians are ready to buy manga and anime, it’s just out of reach for them right now. It’s obviously easier to buy figurines directly from Japan because no translation or anything is required and there is no margin involved for Indian merchants. Just a small shipping fee and you’re done.
Manga and light novels on the other hand, need to be translated. I don’t really know if English versions are sourced from US or somewhere else, but the prices in India obviously include the transportation costs and profit margins for an Indian seller apart from its original cost. Hence, they seem a bit overpriced to us in general.
I have seen a rise in people actually buying manga. But since they’re so readily available online, and translated to latest chapters even, vs. translated manga volumes being at least 2 volumes behind the Japanese version, people obviously prefer reading them online.
With this, I was doing some calculations and realized, following anime and manga, legally, is a pretty expensive hobby, especially in a country like India. For different series, you gotta subscribe to different services: Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu etc. And then to buy merchandise is another big expense. Thank God for public libraries in US which have some stock of manga at least, if not everything.
I guess March has been a month for many realizations for me. Hmm…. I should write all these down some where.
The last thing to say today is, I started Doctor Prisoner and OMG, I am so hooked. Although I have been hyping the series up for all my k-drama watching friends, I just hope it stays on the course it is now and doesn’t disappoint like other k-dramas which started out strong but went downhill really fast.
Anyway guys, have a happy weekend and hope people in northern hemisphere are enjoying the spring. Bidding goodbye to March….
Edit: Ugh, I was trying to close my post at such a good note. Anyway, was scheduling it for tomorrow but it got published right away for some reason. Enjoy the post one day early. XD
Today’s song: Taeyeon released a new song and although I loved it and MV is super pretty, I couldn’t really listen to it more than 4 times in a loop. But still: