Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
People often form personal connections to artwork they see at particular points in their life. Connections that cement that artwork as a symbolic motif for that period of their past. I think everyone's "favourites" consist almost entirely of such artwork, no matter how objective you may believe your taste to be, and once something has entered into your mind as one of these symbols it rarely will ever truly leave you. You can return to that artwork at any time in the future and be brought back into that time of your life when it was important to you. Some may be more painful than others to revisit, but most will be glazed in that most ethereal emotion we call nostalgia.
For me many of such works of art from my teenaged years onward are anime, with distinct portions of my life usually having an immediate and strong connection to some anime or another. The most recent of those anime is Bocchi the Rock. Airing in the Autumn season of 2022, it was one of the last anime I finished before I started my new career, which started with six months of pretty hard training in January 2023, and continues to be difficult but rewarding now, where I am still really in an the position of an apprentice. I hadn't really realised just how much importance I'd placed on BTR during these years until recently when I went to see the two compilation films in cinema. It was a great experience, and even though I've watched the show three times over and the first film once before (in Japan!), I had a novel experience. Because I know all the scenes, and especially the music, off-by-heart, I could anticipate every moment as if I was watching a play I had spent months rehearsing. The musical numbers particularly (and the films have a lot of them) brought me to the realisation that it now feels like BTR is a part of me, and me a part of it. It's difficult to explain but I don't mean it in some insane way, rather that myself and the characters have both been through the same hardships and challenges at the same time (2022/2023), and now we are reminiscing over them. The scenes have taken on a different quality than when I first watched them, as if I now have a wider perspective on them and the spirit behind their emotion. Let me explain in a different way through a more concrete example.
For Kessoku Band, "the big performances" are the culmination of their efforts. Throughout the show there are several such performances, two lives at Starry, the Starry audition, and the School Festival. Any time between them is mostly spent preparing for that next one (or goofing off). During such preparation phases the girls practice playing, gain new skills, and make new connections with people from the music world of Tokyo. And during the big performance they have to rely on this practice, skills and friends they've made to succeed: the climax of their effort. The performances are all masterfully crafted in BTR: every little character action is purposeful, every slight change in the song has a meaning, every audience shot contains some result of the work they put in. In the second Starry Live, for example, we see Hiroi-san's mentor-like concentration on Bocchi's playing, while in the school festival performance we see Kita's new emotional connection with Bocchi through the little glances she makes over at her throughout. These little things popped out at me only on later rewatches, making them very rewarding to come back to. They're all also just really good on a surface level, once you're invested with the characters the drama and excitement of them is greater than any shounen fight scene could be. But they also act as great exemplars of a more generic form of "big performance". In my job (piloting ships) we similarly have "big performances", albeit non-musical, where we have to captain ships in a simulator while being assessed. As well as being generally difficult, they're also purposefully made to be anxiety-inducing to see how you can perform under pressure: you stand there in the dark simulator waiting for the adjudicator to start it up, a million procedures and verbatim rules flying around your head, as your colleagues sit at the various other stations (on the helm, at the radar, with the route chart etc) in silence. These assessments generally only last thirty minutes or so, but by the end you are physically exhausted and it feels like the time has flown past. To me these assessments were deeply associated with Kessoku Band's performances: me working together with my fellow trainees in a big set piece we'd been working towards for weeks; and all those intricacies of the preparatory work, new skills, and connections with others we see in BTR's lives were also evident there. There's no doubt the creators of BTR had a personal experience with such big performances, whether that be in a band or within whatever hobby or line of work they're in. Because that's the thing, the holistic experience of a "big performance" is universal, and can only manifest when you have invested your full soul into an endeavour. Its that moment when you have to stand up on stage in front of people, and do what you've been training to do. It'd be one thing if you didn't really care: a school presentation doesn't have the same weight, even if you are still nervous for it. No, the true "big performance" is when you display that which you have put your life into: its like baring your neck to a hawk, or being laying out your life to be judged.
But despite its universality, BTR came at the exact moment in my life when it would have meant the most to me: a moment of change and overcoming nerves over the newness of it all. A time of callow and nervous apprenticeship. And so Bocchi the Rock has crept into my psyche in a way few other artworks have. I feel like the BTR era may have ended with my recent cinema trip, but who knows. I sit here with my BTR coasters I bought from the Radio Kaikan on my first trip to Japan, and the little piece of scrap plastic I kept from my cinema trip to see the film in the Ueno Toho cinema, which I kept for some reason despite it literally being a piece of rubbish (I use it to keep coins in). Mementos from a time of my life I'm still in: it seems strange to think of it that way. But to return to the beginning, we all have our own BTRs, art so instrumental for us in a time and place it becomes forever linked in with those memories, such is the relationship between man and art. Over our lives we can each build a unique patchwork tapestry of such works of art, building a personal history of ourselves far more evocative than any list of facts and dates would ever be.
