aerasio

Reality Check

I saw this T-shirt in the yesterday, it said, "Universal Studios! Escape From Reality!". This kinda brought to mind this whole idea of escapeism that has been around for a pretty long time but has become fairly prominent in recent years, though not glaringly so.

Take the whole anime/manga cosplaying craze that just popped out of nowhere and swept up hordes of teenagers. Its entire point is in emulating supposedly perfect people who by-and-large can and will never exist in the real world (even ignoring the fact that most of them have blue/red/white hair despite being ancient chinese/japanese or having impossibly good physiques, especially in the cases of teenage anime girls). Yet people still invest loads of time and money to turn themselves into physically facsimile replicas of their favourite characters.



A cosplayer and the character he's cosplaying.

Look again to the craze over the American and Singapore Idols even if there are plenty of other artists who are better singers or for that matter better looking, and also the related and established lifestyle of band-chasing and fandom that so many teenagers these days are enamoured with. For many of them, the highest attainable point in life is to say meet or touch these famous celebrities who to them embody perfection and all that is good in this world. People spend their days caught up in the world of their favourite celebrities, devouring scandalous gossip about them from tabloids and magazines and talking incessantly about the same things regardless of their credibility or importance.

Another big example I think would be computer games. Especially in Singapore and Korea, gaming has become a really big hit among people my age. For some, the highlight of their week is that 5 or 6 hours spent with their buddies battling it out in cyberspace every saturday afternoon. A more important example is the brand of gaming defined as the massive-online multiplayer role playing game or MMORPG. These games consume a huge amounts of time due to their highly addictive and repetetive nature. Many people spend whole days immersed in these games, ignoring their real friends for virtual ones and real life for their game.


A screenshot from Guild Wars, a popular MMORPG

I'm not saying that any of these activities are inherently bad or anything. I'm a fan of manga's and anime's and i think they're really great areas of artistic endeavour and are really good entertainment. I'm a fan of science-fiction and fantasy books and used to read very little outside those genre's which both usually take place in fantastic places which cannot possibly exist with characters that are victim to impossibly perfect plots. I watch American Idol (though i avoid Singapore Idol cos I think they suck) and admire the singing of the showcased contestants though I think they have nothing on other musicians and singers, especially afew people I know (although i'm alot lousier than they are). I also like gaming alot, to the extent that some people at school call me gamerbean. But the thing about all these activities is not so much the activities themselves but the degree to which people get enamoured of and immersed in them. I enjoy a good game of DOTA and a good anime like Cowboy Bebop, but I don't live for them. They're really fun and all, but there are much more important things to do aside from them, like actually living.

Anyway i've wasted tons of time writing this already, time to do homework.

So said Aerasio at 04:14