Kai’s Local Anime Community

Almost a month ago, FoxyLadyAyame of the beautiful world proposed a carnival blog post project, entailing about one’s local anime community. I’m a bit late but I’m here to show everyone the wonders of my Bruneian anime community.. or a severe lack of one.

For those who haven’t check out my anime history, here’s a recap. When I was a kid, I watched cartoons like Tom and Jerry, The Mask and so on, and it is indeed fun talking to everyone about it. A while later, anime becomes a more widely known medium and I was left out of the discussion circle for a while, until midway through high school, I finally had internet at my home. During this time, I was downloading and streaming tons of anime, and was finally able to somewhat join in the discussions. What’s more, Animax started airing in our TV subscriptions so my anime community suddenly grown overnight.

Ever since then, I had been discussing various anime with my friends. Talks about Rasengan, Bankai, and even the weird powers from One Piece became the springboard of our chat. Aside from the usual shounen, we even talked about deep anime like Death Note and Fate/Stay Night, or for the latter, it’s more about the lameness of Shirou. At one point, Law of Ueki’s fame suddenly skyrocketed in my school and it was basically a hot topic among our friends. At that time, I myself really liked it, but now, I can only feel that it’s around average at best. Time does change a person’s tastes, as they say.

Me and my friends never did much “activities” like a community, aside from watching an anime show together or hijacking the school library to hunt for some manga. Brunei isn’t a really anime-orientated country; there are no anime conventions or any other anime-related events here, and worse, not even a figures stores had ever existed in my town, except for one and the only one I heard of in the city, which was a pretty new store if I’m not mistaken. Then, there’s the distance to consider, the city isn’t particularly close too; you are going to need more then an hour of car ride just to reach the city, so I rarely even go except for some exceptional weekends.

After high school, most of my friends had separated, some of them studied overseas and some chose to work, I’m one of the latter. I still keep in touch with most of them but we seldom talked about anime already. From my “old” community, I’m most probably the only one who still keep up with the latest anime.

From my working community, there forms another new anime community, well.. even though I said “community”, it’s just 4 or 5 people, which is kinda sad, and one of them is even my sister. We talked about anime or games from time to time, but sometimes, we also rant about our work too during our get-together.

If there’s something we can acheive more with this new community as compared to my old one, it’s the power of money. Including me, three people from this “new community” of mine collects figures, which is pretty cool since when I was student, it was close to impossible to afford them. One of my friend from the community collects mostly mecha figures; I went to his house before and saw that he had basically amassed a huge army of mecha, ranging from Gundam, Zone of the Enders, and even Evangelion. Another friend of mine within the same community, had collected two glass shelves full of figures, and more then 50% of them are Bleach figures; she is a long-time fan of Bleach, if you hadn’t already noticed.

Me and my “new community” also planned to visit Singapore this Novemeber for the Anime Festival Asia, though the plan is still unconfirmed as of now. Let’s see if you can spot a Kai if you’re there… xD

Tags: AFA, anime convention, Carnival, childhood memories, community, festival, friends, socialogy

This entry was posted by Kai.

• June 19, 2012
• Anime, Carnival, Musings
• 26 Comments