Year-end post, why I haven't been writing/posting anything, and other weird stuff
WARNING: This post is going somewhere you wouldn’t expect. Okay, maybe you would, but this is really a jumble of thoughts and feelings and other shit, so if it doesn’t make sense to you, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Anyways.
Yesterday I chanced upon an Adele feature by Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes. Of course, it tackled her rise to fame and success, and the songs that brought her to where she was, most notable of which were Rolling in the Deep and Someone Like You.
Someone Like You has become, like, my Akame theme song since Akanishi got married.
Still confused with what this is about? And just now I realized how stupid this would sound to some. Or many. Or all. It’s been, what, ten months? Since what has been dubbed the ‘Jinpocalypse’ (Srsly, whoever the fuck called it that?) and here I am talking about Akame feels. Fuck me, right? Well sorry, Akame shipper talking.
Anyway, going back.
Recently, my playlist has been all happy, rainbow, unicorn music. Hey! Say! JUMP, a bit of Arashi, loads of K-pop, some KAT-TUN. No Someone Like You. No The One That Got Away (Katy Perry). No Wherever You Are (One OK Rock) or Payphone (Maroon 5). No angst-filled songs because I don’t like angst. Not anymore.
It’s probably been more than a year since I last read an Angst-genre fic. God knows how many times I stopped reading In His Care because my heart couldn’t handle the angst. Why can’t they just end up together? I would always ask myself, or some supreme being out there, as if Akanishi and Kamenashi were dolls I could play with and shove into a dollhouse room and lock them up there for all eternity until they admit to their feelings and yay smut! Heh, that would have been awesome… oops, my psycho is showing.
So why? Why the deliberate aversion to angst? Because fuck the world. Akame is, in real life, already overflowing with heartrending, gut-wrenching, tear-jerking angst. Why must I make myself suffer? The fic universe is the only place where Akanishi and Kamenashi become lovers and have sex and maybe have babies. Why should I kill that imagination with more angst?
Do you get where I’m coming from? No? Maybe because you’re too much of an M. (I am, too, but we’ll get to that later.)
However, after sitting through that Adele feature and hearing Someone Like You over and over again, later in the night I lay in bed thinking about, guess what, Akakame.
There was a time in my life when Akame was my main concern. Again, why can’t they just end up together? I used to think (and maybe I still do) that if they just owned up to their feelings and admitted to even just dating each other in the past, I’d have one less problem in life and the world would be a better place.
For a while now, I haven’t thought of Akame as much. I’ve been busy with work, friends, whatever else I find to do. I haven’t been writing fics as much.
Last night, I finally worked up the courage to ask myself: Have I stopped shipping Akame?
I’ve told a friend that I don’t have enough ‘feelings’ to write about them. I’ve been looking for something that would awaken this seemingly dozing sentiment; I’ve been trying to reconnect with that special place in my heart for the admiration for what’s sometimes hailed as the greatest JE pairing ever.
Don’t get me wrong, this is all personal. In real life, I’ve long accepted the fact that Akame doesn’t exist. At least, not anymore.
As I’ve always said, I can never be sure what they were and are, but I believe that they were once close enough to call each other best friends. (Fuck you, Junior days) Now, I don’t know what happened behind closed doors (I can only hope for some steamy smut), and what happened in the years after for them to drift apart as we all saw, and I guess there’s no point in trying to crack codes that don’t exist. All I can see are those DVDs, fancams, candid photos. I don’t want to overextend anymore.
To sum it up, yeah, Akame is now a happy delusion for me. And to go back, I’ve avoided angst because I didn’t want anyone to take away this happy delusion. If only in my imagination, I wanted them to be what I wanted: together.
Talking with the same friend, I realized that my avoidance from angst might have been unhealthy after all.
In life, I try to do things the easy way, where easy meant less emotion involved. For reasons some might already know, I am scared as fuck to get too emotional, whether it be extremely happy or sad. Emotions, for me, involve a great deal of management, and being my OTP, Akame has a great hand in steering those feelings.
And now, the obvious problem would be, if you’re never really happy or really sad, what on earth do you feel all the time? The answer:
Nothing.
It’s difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it, and even for those who have, it will always be relative and different. But in any case, maybe this will give you a glimpse:
Imagine that you’re up in space. Never mind the lack of oxygen; you can’t feel anything so your lungs don’t hurt. You’re not wearing a space suit, by the way, and the planet Earth is nowhere in sight. You’re floating around, watching random, faraway stars glimmer and disappear. There’s no one else there but you. You’re not moving, because how? You’ve only learned to move your legs against firm, solid ground. You don’t have wings to fly. You don’t have a jetpack or whatever.
What you do have is a watch. On your right or left wrist, whatever floats your boat.
The watch shows you what time it is on earth. And what use is that, you ask, when you’re not on earth anyway?
The thing is, you only have one way to go back to your home planet: you will it.
You just need to wish for it really fervently, and in the blink of an eye, you’ll be back in your home, browsing your dashboard or spamming your timeline. It’s simple, right? NOT.
How do you know if you’re wishing for it strongly enough? It’s possible there’s some tiny part of you, a little voice in the back of your head saying that you want to stay in outer space after all, because the world is fucked up and your favorite pairing isn’t together and people hurt each other and your MP3 player just broke and just fuck the world, you can stay here and float around for the rest of eternity without anyone or anything able to hurt you.
But nothing up there can make you happy either, because nothing ever happens. Not even a star explosion.
Bleak, right?
That kind of scenario is perpetual in many aspects of my life, and it sucks that I realized just now that it’s exactly the same thing that’s happened with my shipping feels for Akame.
Abstaining from angst has led me to not feel happy over the small triumphs in the fics, has basically led me to not feel anything at all for them. Funnier still is the realization that, in shipping Akame, if I don’t have angst, then I have nothing at all. And why?
Because in real life, all that’s left of Akame is angst.
Maybe, maybe, I believed it when, upon Akanishi’s shotgun marriage, people declared, “Akame is dead.” Maybe, unless Akanishi’s a cheating bastard. Or unless he still has his little-boy-feelings toward the boy (now iconic actor) who was once his best friend. If so, we can hope for a divorce in a year or so, but aren’t we such little bitches if we wished for that? How would you feel if you married your ichiban and I told you I wish for your divorce in a few months’ time?
In real life, all that’s left of Akame is angst.
And that’s probably what could make me write again. What could make me feel again. What could make me properly ship them again.
In life, I avoid being emotional for fear of instability. But you can’t avoid emotions forever, unless you, you know, die. And dying is never an option.
I’ve avoided Akame angst because I wanted to keep dreaming in this happy bubble, but that’s led me to not feeling anything. And without feeling anything, I might as well stop shipping Akame. And to stop shipping is not an option. It has never been, ever since I took a hiatus and came back with a vow that I will go down with this ship. (God I love puns)
So here I am, just confirming to myself - and cluttering the interwebs with such affirmation - that I am ready to feel again, if it means crying over Kame breaking up with Akanishi because they’re not meant to be, or Akanishi cheating on Kame with Meisa because that’s how AU works, that’s how angst works, that’s how I need to pay for all the smut fics I enjoyed.
In real life, Kame is eternally busy and Akanishi is married. Fic angst can’t hurt much worse than that, right?
~end~
oOo
Thank you for reading through that. You officially know me better than most people IRL. Apologies for all the confusion. And somehow I feel that this post will only be comical to non-shippers. Well, whatever. To each his own crazy.
That being said, please do know that I am currently working on Akame fics. (Yay! LOL) I know it’s been four months since I updated Dead Simple, but I haven’t given up on it so please don’t give up on me, too. Also, still in the works are a couple of collabs I’m doing with friends. And there’s always the Random Universe series which would be updated soon, too.
Thank you for reading my fics, whether you leave a comment or not. Being in this fandom and writing for you guys is one of the best things in the world, so let’s continue that into next year and the years to come. :)
Happy New Year!
-Faith