No one likes to be different, abnormal, or weird,
right? We all are hard-wired with
innate, primeval desires to belong to, and be accepted by, something or someone
we respect that may be bigger than ourselves. Just like beauty, however,
difference, abnormality, and weirdness is in the eyes of the beholder, and our
judgment and justification of what constitutes acceptance is often defined and
shaped by our environment. I learned this lesson in a very practical way
several months ago at... an Anime USA convention.
Last fall, in response to the earnest pleadings of my YSA
daughter, I decided to earn a slew of valuable parental brownie points doing the
dad thing and accompany her one long Saturday to an Anime USA Convention at a
prestigious downtown DC hotel. For the previous few weeks I had watched her
transform herself into “Fi,” a Legend of Zelda character, and in a temporary
fit of calculated insanity my interest was piqued by other potential oddities I
might find at the convention. I planned
to spend one whole day of quality time with my Kindle and some unread books in
a nondescript corner lobby while she socialized the day away with an eclectic
collection of formally normal human beings outrageously dressed up as imaginary
elves, magicians, trolls, superheroes, super villains, and just about anything
and anyone else that could be imagined, and even some that couldn’t.
I was not prepared for the subsequent onslaught of oddities.
I was completely surrounded by thousands of the strangest creatures I had ever
seen, from the Batman-Kung Fu master mashup costume to the quaintly dressed
Little Bo Peep wielding a bloody axe and a second set of arms coming out her
back. The only other “normal” person I
saw was a middle-aged man wearing slacks and a classy V-neck sweater, obviously
a hotel guest, taking a little fluffy dog for a morning walk. He started to walk past me, then after telepathically
acknowledging that we were the only two normal humans in the hotel, turned to me
and said; “ I know this looks like I’m walking a dog, but actually its really
my son in dog suit.” It was his humorous homage to trying to fit in.
After two hours of professional people-watching the expanse
of abnormality unfolding before me, it slowly dawned on me that in this
environment, I was the one that wasn’t fitting in- I was the outcast, the
outlier, the abnormal weird one in a majority world of Anime characters. I
caught them oddly staring at me! How did
it make me feel?
I found myself struggling to comprehend and understand their
differences. At irregular intervals I arose to stretch and walk around the
convention floor carefully catching snippets of conversations depicting the imaginations
at play. I learned more than I wanted to
about this strange entertainment discipline called Anime. I even casually
struck up a few adhoc conversations and concluded that most of the participants
were friendly and contagiously accepting of anyone, even that strange looking
guy roaming the convention floor dressed in Levis and a light blue sweatshirt
armed with a Kindle. Some even tried to figure out what character I was
pretending to be.
I could not approve of the half-naked young women dressed up
as imaginary forest fairies, nor could I stomach the three-headed troll
wandering around the hotel carrying around a bag of bloody, decapitated noses
he claimed to have won in a bar fight. However, there were many more
participants like my daughter acting out healthy fantasies, if even for a
single day at a prestigious hotel in downtown DC. Right is still right, and
wrong is still wrong; it sometimes is just packaged in unexpected shapes and
sizes. It’s OK to be different. We don’t have to be like other people or even
embrace them; we just have to accept them as a fellow member of the human
family. I haven’t been inspired to
invent a wild costume of my own and join my daughter at the next convention; I
look forward, however, to attending more conventions loaded with more cordial and
clever discussions on what constitutes being “normal.”
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