![]() My middle school self wanted to be pretty and dangerous like Kurama and wanted to kiss people who were pretty and dangerous like Kurama. ![]() With a flick of his wrist, he transforms the rose into his signature rosewhip, a long green vine studded with thorns, and slashes down his enemies. Because of his fragile appearance, opponents often laugh when they see him-how could anyone so pretty know how to fight? Unfazed, Kurama pulls a single red rose out of his hair. Part of a group charged with protecting humanity from demons, Kurama plays the role of the soft-spoken strategist who makes sure that his more impulsive teammates don’t get themselves killed. ![]() My greatest love was Kurama from the show Yu Yu Hakusho -a fox demon who has inhabited the body of a slight teenage boy with long red hair and green eyes. I still watched it by myself, though, embarrassed by how obsessed I became with some of the characters. I knew cool girls weren’t into anime, so I stopped bringing it up with my friends. I copied the other girls as best I could, but my halter tops never fit as well as theirs and I couldn’t figure out how to put on my own eyeliner. Mostly, though, I felt gawky, like someone’s younger sibling who was tolerated because they had nowhere else to go. My favorite part was eyeliner because I liked that my friends sometimes put a hand on my shoulder or cheek to steady me. The process of getting ready was always drawn-out and involved crowding into someone’s bathroom so that we could do each other’s makeup and flat iron each other’s already straight East Asian hair. Suddenly, instead of reading manga, we were going to dances. I wasn’t expecting puberty to change that. We spent our sleepovers watching Adult Swim and brainstorming the plot of our own manga, something about a group of girls who save the world but also end up killing each other. Back then, my friends were also into anime. At school, I doodled these characters in my notebook, and at night, I pored over, eager to learn more about their lives. ![]() I spent hours sitting too close to the TV screen and fawning over the bubbly heroines’ brooding sidekicks, like the demon slayer in Inuyasha who loses her entire family or the cyborg girl in Sailor Moon who has the power to destroy the world so that it can be reborn again. In middle school, I collected crushes on anime and manga characters. ![]()
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