As an initial disclaimer, this blog has some mentions of sexual harassment, so if this makes you uncomfortable, then be wary. 

 

This story starts in 2020, just a few months after the pandemic started. Being as bored as I was, I started to do what I normally do when I’m incredibly bored – doom scrolling through a list of manga to read. Eventually, I landed on a manga with a shiny cover by the name of Act-Age, and with minimal expectations and lots of time to kill, I opened the first chapter. 

 

4 hours later, I closed my computer and reflected upon the life changing story that I had read. 

 

Act-Age, a story of a girl trying to get into professional acting, was an incredible tale exploring the nature of human emotion and how to express it through action. The story, while pretty rough in its inception, lulled me into its pace and cadence. The artstyle, initially jarring, developed with time and became something hauntingly beautiful. The world of theater and the methods of acting was expressed in such a raw human way. The main character, Kei, used her especially honed method acting to be the perfect mirror to whatever expressions and emotions the author wanted to portray through the page (not to mention the art was absolutely insane). TL;DR, I was very very high on this manga, and I was backing it to be the next big thing in a few years.

Call me down bad but I screamed a little when I saw this for the first time.

 

Now before I continue my story, I want to take a detour that is needed to set up the next bit. While running, Act-Age was published in Weekly Shonen Jump, and as the name suggests, was published virtually every week. However, trying to develop a story in weekly increments with both text and art is very difficult and often times doesn’t turn out too well, which is why weekly magazines tend to end manga very quickly if they start falling off in popularity. So as one can imagine, it sucks to see something end when it still has a lot more to tell.

 

The next part of this detour takes place in the world of video games. During 2019-2020, I was a humongous Smash Bros fan. Every weekend, I would watch tournaments of this children’s party game, my YouTube feed was filled with Smash Bros, I followed an ungodly amount of professional players on twitter, etc. I was a superfan in every sense of the word. That was all until the summer of 2020, when everything came crashing down. One very brave member of the smash bros community posted a twitlonger explaining that a very famous established member of the smash bros community had been sexually harassing them, and the famous person in question was quickly banned (wiki page on the issue). This then led to more twitlongers exposing sexual abuse and harassment, and not a few days later, people I had been fans of and watched behind a screen for hours upon hours, had been outed as predators and just really awful people. Even worse was that not every story was black and white, people lied for attention, stories were made up, lawsuits went into play, twitter became the most toxic I’ve ever seen it been, and it was just a big mess that little freshmen year me was not mentally equipped to handle. Thus I just unfollowed everything related to smash and went back to my origins of being a manga enthusiast with Act-Age being the forefront of my attention.

Me after reading all the twitlongers

However, the worst part was yet to come. Not even a month after everything went down with the smash bros community, I was sitting on the floor and I had the idea to open up Twitter (I have a bit of an addiction btw). Strangely, on the trending tab, I saw the name Act-Age. Initially, I was excited. The small time manga that I was rooting for was on the trending page of twitter, and so I thought something incredibly good must have happened to land it there. 

 

It was not good. At all.

 

Because what I saw was that Act-Age had just been axed and not because it was underperforming in the rankings. No. It was because the author had been arrested for molesting teenagers (he didn’t even go straight to prison which is really concerning but I digress). 

 

I didn’t even process what I was reading for a solid 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe that two communities that I had followed so intently had both been hiding the same ugly reality. I scrolled through as many news articles and comments to see what had happened – to really and truly check if what I was reading wasn’t just some sick joke. But no. It was reality. Now looking back, maybe I overreacted, and for this to be the lowest moment for me during the pandemic is honestly quite fortunate as it didn’t involve any actual death of a family member, but I felt a bit of my soul fade away in that moment. 

 

Now, with my two main sources of joy during the pandemic ruined, I did some serious self reflection. And the conclusion that I came to was this: there are no angels on this earth. 

 

Pretty edgy I know, but I learned this lesson the hard way. I spent so much of my time praising and looking up to these people and stories that weren’t even real. I failed to recognize that what I was seeing through the screen was only a the work of someone and not their actual character. I realized that I, some 14 year old from Illinois, didn’t know these people, and that by putting them on a pedestal, I had only set myself up for suffering. 

 

Now, when I look back at Act-Age, I still see an absolute diamond in the rough of a story, but I also see a stark reminder that images that I have in my head of something could very well not allude to reality, and to be able to separate myself from things that I have not ascertained for myself with my own eyes is a very important skill. 

 

I also still want to deck the author with a chair.