As someone who follows a few Tumblr microblogs, there
is a specific sentence I’ve seen pop up multiple times. In the encouraging
style users of the website usually bring the message, the sentence is “Asexual
people aren’t broken.“ After all, this is an
anguish many asexual people feel: if you grow up in a society that greatly
values traditional relationships, certain inter-gender behaviors, and reproduction,
you may feel like there’s something “wrong with you” if you don’t experience
any of that. However, existing somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum
myself, I’ve (luckily) never really felt this way. I feel myself being envious,
wanting to be in a kind of relationship I’ll probably never end up in, but I’ve
rarely felt like there was something wrong with me when it comes to my sexual
identity.
When it comes to consuming media, I have a weird
relationship with, ahem, relationships. Love
Actually quickly became one of my personal favorite all-time films, as its
various love stories can really bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I watch romantic
stories in the same way as other people do, however. To me, a romance is not
very different from a common fantasy trope. Romance is like magic: it’s
fascinating and beautiful, something worth indulging in.
I am perhaps lucky in how much I can enjoy a good
romance, as not everyone can, but I bring this all up because there is another
theme I just can’t muster the same feeling towards. That theme is food. I don’t
care about food as its own topic, and I have difficulty understanding or even
imagining why so many people put so much value on food. In everyday life, this
has created some weird social interactions with people who care strongly about
what they eat every evening, but more interestingly to me is how it affects how
I consume media.
When Digibro described why he found Log Horizon such an amazing anime, he talked for three minutes about
how its use of food was “the most true-to-life thing [he] could image,” and
here I realized something was going on. In the first episodes of Log Horizon, all the characters in story
are transported into a world where all food tastes the same. This was presented
in a very over-the-top manner inbetween the more serious scenes, as though it
was a gag. Eventually, however, the cast came across a character who had
discovered how to give food taste, which was followed by the characters truly
ecstatic to eat something with taste again for the first time in days. Digibro
said the following about the scene: “So when [the characters] first bit into
[tasty] food and literally cried, I felt a well of emotion knowing that I too
would have cried my eyes out.” This line, and the ones around it, really stuck
with me… because I can’t relate to them at all. When a character in Log Horizon bit into a burger and said “this
is going to change the world,” I felt nothing but a bit of amusement. I would
have been happy in this world, because the sound of eating wet rice crackers
every day doesn’t sound bad at all. I just thought Touno Mamare, the author of Log Horizon, was some kind of food geek
when I first watched the show. but when I watched Digibro’s video, I felt like
there was something wrong with me…
This is not to say that I don’t like good food! I am
actually very picky about my food, in that I really don’t want to eat something I dislike. I have found that
simple food, ranging from simple chicken to noodles to literal crackers, are my
favorite kinds of food. I would never make something out of a cook book, or
order something I don’t fully trust in a restaurant. I will probably never
spend the effort of cooking something complex when a simpler meal can suffice.
Why bake a cake when you can buy something similar in stores? The way I experience
food is fairly mathematical, where I can grade all food on a scale from 1 to 10
and I don’t need to worry of anything ever getting rated higher than the things
I’ve set at 10. Sure, you can get bored of certain types of food if you eat too
much of it (which is more likely for some foods than for others), but those are
pretty much all the variables I need. In fact, allow me to draw up a chart.
Yes, I could live forever on noodles or even crackers
(though I don’t think my body would like me much if I tried). I already eat
three slices of bread, two of chocolate paste and one with peanut butter, every
afternoon for the past ten years. I see no reason to step away from that,
because it works. I don't like trying new kinds of food, because I run the risk of getting something I won't like, and there's no value in finding something new I do like because I already like plenty of food.
When I see a
scene in which food is the major focus, I try to imagine that what is being
enjoyed is music instead. There’s a scene in the first Scott Pilgrim book in which the character Knives Chau experiences
rock music for the first time. Watching Knives get entirely overwhelmed by the
sound of probably pretty shitty music was infinitely more relatable than the
scenes Digibro spoke so highly of above and though it didn't have the same kind
of build up as the food scene in Log
Horizon, it had way more impact
on me because it is something I care about. There’s a scene in episode 1 of K-On! in which one of the characters is
deeply inspired by watching a concert on television, and though it was largely
played off as a gag, I can’t say I didn’t feel for her.
So what I’m
really getting at here is: less food, more music. More importantly, this has
been an issue I’ve really been struggling with for a long time now. You cannot
believe how much value people put in food in our world. Anime in particular has
a heavy emphasis on food, and though I find a show like Shokugeki no Soma positively ridiculous and Amaama to Inazuma is adorable because of its gorgeous facial
animations and because social interactions is where the heart of the show lies,
these still make me feel… broken.
