I am, as has been mentioned before, not a particularly stoic sort of person when it comes to emotional moments in my entertainment. Basically, I’m a weepy-feely crybaby who’s about as impressionable as soft-serve ice cream, and considering that I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember, I see it as an inherent personality trait rather than a character flaw to be excised like some socially-unacceptable wart.

Mind you, I don’t actually like crying to my entertainment. There might be something off with my brain chemistry or some such, but when I start really crying about something, I become pretty much useless for the rest of the day while I wallow in misery and self-pity (and, for some cases, self-loathing). That final bit of closure, the part where, from what I hear in a theoretical manner, lets people feel all better after a good cry, never does come around for me. It’s filed away in my mind along with the other stuff which I kind of understand the basic concepts of in a detached intellectual manner but which I cannot truly grok for myself, like American football or female menstruation.

I’ve cried at plenty of anime. (Duh. My entertainment options at this point are books, anime, and video games, in that order. Nothing else.) We’ll just put aside the obvious gags about crying MANLY TEARS or crying because it’s that or punch the screen in frustration, and focus instead on the occasions where tears are what the show wants to evoke. As is the nature of the really powerful scenes in fiction, spoilers will unavoidably abound, and until I get around to reinstalling that spoiler plugin which I never actually did use (and which I think was discontinued due to the plugin author losing interest), I’ll just couch everything in terms as non-spoilery as possible.

There are obvious culprits in various anime like Gunslinger Girl or Neon Genesis Evangelion, where the entire purpose of character development appears to be an exercise in seeing how much the plot can thoroughly screw over every significant character. Slightly less inimical to my tastes are the Key stories of Air, Kanon, and Clannad, where the screwage has been prepared earlier offscreen according to the cookbook, and the consequences of said screwing are explored in the series.

And then there are the less objective moments which strike a chord close to home, which I would say is, in the main, a common source of passion for an anime fandom. It’s the kind of thing where, in its milder form, one can go “I know what they mean”, or perhaps “OMG that is so true“. A friend of mine loves Neon Genesis Evangelion because the last two episodes of the anime hit his state of mind at the time dead on; I often wonder if my own (less than celebratory) views of NGE would be more charitable if it did not appear to be speaking in alien tongues compared to my worldview of the time. I know I’ve made more than my fair share of comments on how, for example, Lucky Star might be a lacklustre series if one does not Know What It Is Talking About.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that four years on, I am still incapable of watching Someday’s Dreamers. I borrowed the series from a friend back in 2003, and I watched it once, returned it, and have decided never to watch it again. Not because it’s bad; in fact, I can’t even decide on an opinion about it overall. I can look at the rather pretty art style as much as I want, I can listen to the soundtrack (very good, I must add) without much emotion other than standard approval and enjoyment, but I cannot rewatch the series; I am literally not able to, without encountering the above problems with regards to crying at my anime.

There is one scene, somewhere near the beginning of the series, where Yume has just moved into her tutor’s house in Tokyo for her summer break apprenticeship. Yume is alone in the kitchen, since her tutor is busy with something or other, and she has had pizza ordered for her. While eating the pizza, Yume remembers the first time her family had ordered pizza back home in the country, and the exclamations of surprise and wonder at this strange new-fangled food: “How do you eat this with chopsticks?” “Don’t be silly, you don’t eat pizza with chopsticks.” Family, eating together. Yume, now alone in the kitchen, stares at the pizza in front of her, and breaks down and cries.

At the time, I was in my first year in university in the US. It was just a Fact, a Thing Which Is, like gravity or tables. I didn’t really think about it that much, and I had lived away from home for extended periods before, so it wasn’t that big of a deal at the time.

Watching that scene, suddenly the feeling of being halfway across the world from my family and the place I called home slammed into me. Imagine a year’s worth of homesickness, saved and stored and bottled up, unleashed all at once. There was no reason or logic behind it, since it wasn’t as though I would never see my home again (indeed, right now I’m back for good in Singapore and with my family and learning why we can’t really stand each other for extended periods of time), or that family was never more than a phone call and either twelve hours’ worth of time zones (for Singapore/Jakarta) or about four hundred kilometers (for my sister in Pittsburgh). There was nothing but emptiness, depair, loneliness.

I missed all my classes that day and the next. When I recovered, it was like a bad dream I had no intention of revisiting.

No other anime has yet caused me that sort of distress again, mainly because since then, I have been actively avoiding any anime which is supposed to “make you cry”. I inadvertantly watch a few, but for the most part the depressing parts come from empathy with the characters, rather than personal experiences. I don’t know what else might set off yet another bout of emotional crippling, but based on some timid poking of mental depths I’d rather not explore too deeply, I’m keeping away from anime which deal with loneliness, broken friendships, or lack of self-worth.

This is why I always give people a strange look when they tell me that my refusal to watch sad anime (or, to be specific, sad parts of anime) means that I am “missing out”. Better for me to miss out on an outstanding anime, I feel, than to lose hours or days of my life in catatonia.