Anime, Dev, and Other Musings
This article is actually a story from my life. I am a web dev enthusiast and an anime enthusiast. The two of these things have had more of my time in the last four to five years than everything else combined. So I decided to write about how these things have affected my life the way they have.
The first time I consciously dabbled into anime was when I binged Naruto + Naruto Shippuuden in 4.5 weeks, with about 700 episodes, in late 2017. I could relate to the eponymous character a lot because I was at a low point in my life. Naruto was an orphan who was detested and ignored and avoided for most of his childhood and early teens. He was excluded everywhere. What makes the story special is that his sorrows and pain only made him more kind and considerate and empathizing. They also made him work really hard to find a place where he belonged. His kindness and empathy allowed him to forge bonds with a large number of people. The anime helped me realize that most of us are just trying to find our own place, a place where we belong, and you never realize when the littlest of things might make someone feel better, might help them come back from just being on the verge of giving up. Mental health issues are a lot more common than any of us realize.
The anime has some really beautiful and quotable dialogue. The one that has stuck in my head, and has helped me through some really tough situations is -
“A place where someone still thinks about you is a place you can call home.”
One more quote that has stuck with me, and is actually helpful in coping with anxiety according to this, is:
“When people are protecting something truly precious to them. They truly can become… as strong as they need to be!”
The main character deals with a lot of trauma, and the story is about him trying to overcome the trauma and achieve his dreams, and so the anime might pull more strings for some people than it would for others. It is not an anime, it is a way of life. This anime is the epitome of “If you want to make people feel included, you must first know what it feels like to be lonely.”
Another anime that holds a big place in my heart, coincidentally, is also about an orphan. The name is March Comes In Like A Lion. The anime revolves around a teenage boy (Rei Kiriyama), who’s also just the fifth person to become a professional shogi player in middle school, and a family of three sisters (the Kawamoto sisters), who are both dealing with loss and grief. The story of this anime is the most beautiful story I have experienced. It captures the multitudes of sides each person has really amazingly. It also shows how families (not just the biological ones) help people in navigating through life without actively trying to do that a lot of times. It talks about how people are fragile and how people are also very resilient, how people are extremely unforgiving and cunning and how people are extremely kind and loving, how the same person might have different personalities at different points in time because of circumstances, how being looked out for can be inspiring, how a family is like that room with the heater in winter, which makes outside feel colder than it did before, how people are too hard on themselves and forget to celebrate small happiness-es, how you can find warmth in the most unexpected of places.
“Even after a long long time, something can save you, coming in like a storm from an entirely unexpected direction.”
Everyone feels lost at some point in their lives, lost and aimless. Everyone has bad days. Everyone goes through a lot of things. And sometimes, all their lives are just recovering from what they went through. Sometimes people don’t find ways to recover from their wounds and scars for a long long time. And then suddenly, surprisingly, something happens that helps them realize how they can heal from all the hurt and pain they carry, and then life becomes beautiful and bright again.
What March also captures and talks about, is that there are extremely few people who are just bad without any good. Behind each and every person’s current actions and mindset are the decades and years of life and circumstances that have formed their current versions. This anime is a very accurate description of emotions and struggles and happiness-es in real life and is very heart-warming. And if you’re feeling low, I would ask you to go to March town.
Although the most inspiring anime that I have come across is Haikyuu. It is a sports anime about volleyball. It has very accurate descriptions and animations of the movements of players and the rules of the sport. But more importantly, it has great character development. It is a story about hard work, determination, and perseverance. It is a story of contrasting developments as individual people. The story tells you that some things in life are always achieved as a team, and the better team is the one that does good work collectively than the one which is a group of individuals who do good work. It is important to rely on your teammates, you won’t be able to do everything alone (in life as well). Healthy competition is important, and it includes collaborating to be a better version of yourself and helping others do the same. It also talks about how different things work for different people, how some people are more hands-on and some are more methodical. From Haikyuu, this ended being stuck with me:
“Talent is something you make bloom. Instinct is something you polish.”
These are the three anime that have impacted me the most as a person. But in around December 2019, I felt a strong urge to share the thing that has helped me go through some really tough times and made me a better person, i.e. anime, in a way that would encourage more people to try out the medium, and get immersed in it as I have. So I turned to the only tool for this in my arsenal, web dev.
I decided that to do this, I will create a feed of quotes and news from the anime world. I had dabbled in flask and selenium for a project on an e-commerce price comparison tool just one semester back, so I built a simple CRUD application in flask using tinydb and used beautifulsoup to scrape various anime news outlets, and I wrote the front-end in plain html, css, and js along with the materialize CSS framework. I have been developing web apps since 2016, but this was the first time I made a web app for something I was passionate about. So I started to add features to it that I thought I would like to learn about.
The first feature I added was making it a progressive web app. Just a basic installable web app with a custom offline page. At this point, it was still a multi-page web app. Then I made it into a single-page application, and learned about different caching strategies, and implemented them.
In the quest to make it a better web app, I also learned react, and implemented the whole app in it with a totally different UI. The CSS framework I used this time was halfmoon. I integrated various APIs for other information related to anime, like which anime will air this season, which anime have aired in the last 24 hours, etc.
To take things one step further from there, I started looking into cross-platform app development and learned flutter. And then I got interested in the ionic framework as well as react native. So I looked into both of them and learned about them. I built an app for the website in flutter but I thought it would have more fun if I built using react native, so I built an app with that as well.
While the PWA or the app aren’t live or available on the play store or the app store, I ended up learning about all these new technologies in the span of 3 months since starting with react in October 2020. Anime still continues to inspire me, and I am still a web/app dev enthusiast, so after all this time I thought I should start expressing my love for anime and dev using words instead. So here we are. I'll keep posting about anime, dev, and other musings here.
