Original Content

He had forgotten, in the depths of his gaming haze, that he should be looking out for Sawyer. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and nearly jumped out of his skin, throwing the gamepad at the monitor. It pinged off it, careening off into the air before being stopped by its cord, yanking the computer nearly off the shitty folding table the whole arrangement sat on.

“Alan?” Henry said, concern in his voice.

Alan jerked upright, turning towards the voice more with his shoulders than his neck – in a brief flash of his addy'd mind, he thought of Michael Keaton's Batman suit – and saw the friendly, though frowning, face of Henry Truffaut, ur-President of the Pioneer College Anime Club. He tried to respond, but his words and thoughts crashed into each other, and he just ended up making a noise like a wounded dromedary.

He tried again.

“Henry? I, uh…” Alan rubbed his forehead with one hand, and reached for the controller with the other. He failed to find it, and gave it another shot. This time, he couldn't find his forehead, either.

Henry picked up the controller, and handed it to Alan. “I was going to ask how you're doing, but…”

Alan made a noise that was, at least, a solid attempt at a word.

“Exactly,” Henry said. “Stay here, I'll be right back.”

Henry was a nice man, Alan thought. Those gaunt cheeks and sharp nose made him look malnourished, and he probably was. Henry always spent more on collecting and archiving anime than his own upkeep, and after that, on his friends before himself. He was-

Alan couldn't finish the thought, and redoubled his efforts to defeat Suwako Moriya. As an extra boss, she was putting up a hell of a fight, but Alan liked his chances. He was making progress, and while the addy was wearing thin, he could-

His character exploded for the nth time, and he started again.

He knuckled down, died again and again, until he was tapped on the shoulder again. This time, he managed to keep himself from jolting. Henry pulled up a folding metal chair beside him, and plopped down a cardboard case of donuts and two large iced coffees from Dunks on the table.

“I figured you could use this,” he said.

“Thanks,” Alan replied, taking a sip of the coffee. The bitterness of the coffee made him wince, and he tried to brush it away with a glazed chocolate donut from the dozen-box.

The flavor exploded in his mouth, a sudden awakening to just how hungry he had become. He wolfed it down, before grabbing a Boston Creme and making short work of that, too.

“Hungry?” Henry asked, sipping his own coffee slowly.

Alan didn't even look up at him, eyeing another donut. “Yeah. I haven't eaten in like… What time is it?”

Henry checked his watch. “Eight thirty,” he said, before assessing the situation and adding, “in the morning.”

“Twelve hours? Ish?” Alan said.

“That's not that bad,” Henry said. Again, his read of the situation tempered his words. “Unless you haven't slept…”

“Nope,” Alan replied, before stuffing his face with a butternut donut. He didn't think that any nuts were involved in a butternut, but its particular brand of crunch and flavor complimented the plain cake body of the Dunkin' Donut – Dunkins had two body formats, you see, cake and a softer, more compressible kind that-

Henry put his arm around Alan's shoulder. “Breath, Alan.”

And for a few minutes, Alan allowed himself to stop thinking.

Henry made small talk with him, commenting on various donuts, on the progression of the Touhou series, deftly avoiding any subject that Alan stuttered on, like how the past day and a half had gone, figuring out as much as he could through avoidance, a picture in relief. Alan did his best to keep up.

Eventually, Alan started speaking in mostly complete sentences, and Henry smiled.

“Hey, let's say we catch some AMVs, okay? Get you on your feet for a bit and watch something fresh?”

Henry's proposition did sound inviting, and Alan found himself standing, though not without aid. He'd been in that chair for far too many hours, looking out for… something? And now his legs were full of pins and needles. He steadied himself against Henry, who despite weighing maybe two thirds of Alan, had enough of an understanding of the principles of balance and civil engineering to support and transport him out of the game room.

The hallways of the Sheraton hotel, and their portion of the convention, were full of the particular swath of conventioneers unique to that time before eleven AM. Some shuffled around like zombies in search of coffee, others shuffled around like zombies that had just gotten their hands on coffee. Yet more were working off hangovers, doing their best to hide the fact that they even had hangovers, and failing miserably. And of course, there were the perky, peppy “morning people”, often in cosplay, excitedly looking to go to the next panel, the next event, the next photoshoot, dragging along their friends who, to be fair, they didn't notice were barely keeping up.

You could even delineate these groups by their orders at Dunkin Donuts – after all, this was Massachusetts, no one didn't get breakfast at Dunks. The more hungover someone was, the more likely they were to take a fatty, hearty sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich, up to and including one on heavily buttered croissants, though after crossing a certain line of hungoverness, they spent more time staring at their meal than eating it. The coffee zombies, meanwhile, tended to have the standard large coffee – being more health-conscious didn't mean taking a smaller coffee, it meant taking it black and without sugar – and one-to-two donuts, depending on a complex matrix formed by their t-shirt size and general excitability.

And the “morning people”? Despite generally being fit, slim cosplayers, they almost universally had some kind of Coolata, Dunkin Donuts's high sugar, high caffeine, high fat smoothie equivalent, and nothing else. While unhealthy as huffing asbestos, Coolatas would give you the energy needed to rebound off the walls of the convention center while dressed as a Final Fantasy boss.

Along with all of these was a rarer species, eyes flitting frightfully at the high strangeness surrounding them – normal vacationers who had just happened to book a room at the main hotel of an anime convention. There were a few bewilderedly wandering the halls, and Alan spied a family being extremely alarmed as they passed by a man in full military body armor, with a small arsenal of weapons strapped to him. All were peacebound, orange-tipped costume pieces, and he was in character as an agent of the Umbrella Corporation, but they couldn't possibly know, and he couldn't possibly explain it to them without breaking character.

Henry kept his hand on Alan's shoulder as they meandered out of the hotel, through the mall, and into the convention center. Alan let himself lean into Henry a bit – he was tired, and Henry was there, he reasoned – and Henry gripped his shoulder a bit tighter. When they reached the escalators, Alan had a brief moment of terror, imagining himself teetering over the edge into the central abyss of the convention center, but Henry steadied him, and they successfully made it to the Main Events auditorium. Henry found them a nice, quiet spot in the back, next to a support pillar that held up a balcony above. At this hour, there weren't many people there yet, and even fewer wanted a back seat. Henry reasoned that this was what Alan needed right now, and he was right.

Alan just sat back, and watched.

Right now, before the convention had fully woken up, the Main Showings auditorium was devoted to anime music videos, otherwise known as AMVs. Alan's first experience with AMVs had been through file-sharing software – Morpheus, the predecessor to Kazaa and inheritor of the piracy crown once held by Napster, had given Alan access to a wealth of anime content beyond his wildest dreams when it'd debuted back in his high school days, and one of the many things on there were anime music videos. Take a song you loved, an anime you loved, and work some editing magic to make the visuals match the audio, and you've created an anime music video.

Alan had complicated opinions about this. As a concept, it was awesome, and when executed “properly” (according to him), it set off more emotions in him than he dared display in public. The combination of a narrative that you knew and music allowed for a layering of meaning and implication that was like downloading feelings directly into your brain, far faster and denser than regular narrative experience could keep up with. And at the same time, watching AMVs for a show that you didn't know gave an entirely different experience – In the first case, you read the narrative queues, and mirrored them, quickly, to the music, in a call-and-response sort of way, and had the feelings that you experienced through the narrative amplified by the new context. But in the second case? Since you didn't know the narrative, the pattern-recognition engine of the mind, the same thing that saw faces in rocks on Mars and heard voices out of random static, kicked into overdrive, and you tried to establish a narrative that fit with the visuals and music that you were hearing. This rarely, if ever, matched with the story told by the anime sourced by the AMV… but it was almost universally interesting. It made Alan want to write, though the idea of writing fanfiction made him cringe uncontrollably, and his experiences with Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind led him to believe that contemporary fantasy writing relied on an understanding of one's own fetishes (dominatrixes and top verses top battles for Goodkind, and traditional gender roles and calves for Jordan) and the ability to integrate them into a larger narrative, and the idea of showing off just what turned him on to the world terrified Alan.

That was the peak of AMVs, according to Alan, but “according to Alan” didn't make for the majority opinion of the anime fandom, and a distressing trend had taken hold. Rather than matching emotively, a lot of new AMV production focused on literal matching – either taking lyrics literally and finding clips that directly mirrored the lyrics, or, ever so slightly better, finding / editing lip-flaps so that it looked like characters were singing the lyrics mid-scene. Sure, it was an admirable feat of editing, but it was a kind of artifice that Alan couldn't grok. Instead of creating an elevated state, it was a piece of art leaning on the frame, acknowledging and manipulating the limits of its medium, playing with them to the degree that all you could see was the medium, rather than the art. Video editing, with high-caliber masking used to insert characters into series other than their own, accomplished the same thing – they got plenty of votes in any AMV contest, as how could you not vote in favor of such obvious technical mastery, but they just didn't hit in the same way.

Sometimes this worked for Alan. Sometimes an AMV was less about the emotive aspect of the series itself, but instead was a narrative about the fandom. A strange thing had happened around a Swedish song, Caramelldansen, in that it somehow had become the overarching theme of the anime fandom at large, and so, one of the AMVs being a high-octane fast-cut of a dozen dozen different shows, all the most popular franchises of the past five years, with plenty of layering and crossovers, felt emotionally resonant in that it was an AMV not of anime, but of the experience of being into anime.

Henry smiled. “Feeling better?”

Alan wanted to say, “Than what?”, but instead, just nodded. “Yeah.”

“I thought this might help,” Henry said. Back where they sat, behind even the front-facing rear speakers of the auditorium, they could hold a conversation without straining their voices too much. They only had to lean in close, and Alan had always felt comfortable with Henry, against every bit of societal training. It wasn't like getting all close and personal with just any guy, where you'd be on high alert for slurs for being within six inches of each other without a clenched fist. It was more like… hugging your dad. It was fine.

Alan wanted to say, “Help what?”, but instead, he just nodded.

“You know, Alan, this is one of the few times I feel like I can connect with you.”

Alan, against his masculine training, put his hand on Henry's knee.
“What do you mean?” he said, concerned.

Henry laughed a little, like he'd made a joke purely for himself. “Not just you, Alan, everybody. Things are so different now.”

Alan nodded hesitantly, and Henry picked up on it.

“Let me think of an example, okay?” he said, and leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head. His chest and elbows stretched wide, and Alan looked away from the projector screen to watch his expression. It was a smile. A complicated one that Alan couldn't quite understand, but a smile.

“So,” he began, “You remember the VHSes in the club room?”

Alan did. For his entire tenure as vice president of the Pioneer College Anime Club, their library of manga and anime had been divided into three portions – Manga, of course, anime, of course, and “other”, into which fell everything from donated doujinshi to figurines to a legally horrific amount of bootleg videos and merchandise. The cleaning up of which Alan had delegated to Steve, and thankfully, by the end of their third year in charge, the collection of movies with monochrome photocopied art in generic slipcases had been reduced to almost nil, replaced with official releases. So, he nodded.

“I know you told Steve to get rid of those,” Henry said, clearly planning to continue, but Alan had to interrupt him.

“Steve did that on his own, I just told him to clean things up,” Alan said.

Henry snorted. “You don't have to find an out, I know holding on to those things was silly. But I did anyway. You remember how Steve wanted to throw them into a lake?”

“Yeah,” Alan said. There had been a microwave oven, of all things, donated to the anime club, which could have been used for all sorts of things – cup ramen, mainly, but presumably other things – but the club office was shared with the Gaming Club and the International Socialist Union, and running a microwave at the same time as the Gaming Club's bevvy of consoles and CRTs alongside the ISU's mesh network server that turned the university's internet connection into OUR internet connection for anyone in a several mile radius tripped the breakers, reliably. So, Steve had decided to take his newfound authority and kill two birds with one stone – throw the bootleg content and hentai into the microwave, and throw the microwave into a lake. Conveniently, there was a pond that could be described as a lake in the middle of campus, and so Steve's plan would only take a five minute walk. “That never happened, right? Otherwise Steve would be telling stories about it to this very day.”

“Exactly!” Henry said, grinning. “I took it all.”

“All?” Alan asked, incredulously. He knew that Steve's plan was bullshit, not by it being conveniently funny, but by being physically impossible to fit that much porn and VHS tapes into a thousand watt microwave.

“Of course,” Henry replied. Alan wanted to ask him what kind of library he had at home, and recalled that he never actually saw what Henry's living situation was, and had been discouraged to ask, beyond hearing that Henry was the reason that the Sci-Fi club had been able to keep the size of their library under control despite the massive pile of donations when Anne Rice (horror and fantasy, after all, had just become additions to the purview of sci-fi) declared that all fan-fiction was an act of war against her authorial authority.

“I had the room,” Henry said, reinforcing the mental image Alan had of his bookshelves, “but it wasn't just that. It was personal attachment.”

“Yeah?” Alan said.

“Things were a lot different back in the day. Say, 1996. ten years before you graduated, right?”

Alan nodded.

“Sure, Netscape Navigator was out, and there was some anime available through Suncoast and other video retailers, but where do you think we got our shows?”

Alan thought for a moment. “Mail order lists?”

Henry began to roll his eyes, but gave his charge the benefit of the doubt, given that it was both before 9AM and well after Alan should have fallen asleep at the same time. “Here,” he said.

Alan looked around the room, before realizing that that was a supremely dumb way of interpreting Henry's words. “At conventions?”

“That's what they were for, Alan,” Henry said. “I mean… You at least care about subtitle groups, right?” In the reflected light of the music videos, Alan could see a sort of pleading expression in his eyes.

“Yeah, of course,” Alan said. He felt the need to elaborate. “Like, I appreciate the speedsubs, like Commie, for their service to the community, but the artistic touches of the older groups…. Man, they add something,” he said, not quite finding the words.

“Like karaoke subs?” Henry said.

The practice of taking opening and ending themes, and not just subtitling a translation of the lyrics, but a romanized transliteration of the Japanese lyrics, with each syllable highlighted as it was sung, so that you could sing along- “YES!” Alan exclaimed. “I love that shit.”

Henry clapped him on the back. “Do you have any idea how hyped I was when that started being a thing? I honestly don't know if it was even possible back in my day, but the VHS subbers like VKLL either didn't have the tech or didn't have the time to do it while still putting out as much content as they did.”

Alan nodded, while not quite getting what Henry was on about.

“My time was defined by the Amiga Video Toaster – basically Windows movie editor for the 90s – VHS copiers, and the necessities of data transfer.” Henry looked down at his feet, and then back at Alan. “I'm sorry, I'm going off about stuff, and you're worn out, tired, and probably need a nap.”

Alan shook his head. It was rare to see Henry open up about this. He was usually more concerned with how other people were doing, and Alan treasured the opportunity to understand him more.

“Okay,” Henry continued. “Have you ever heard of sneakernet?”

“What?”

Henry sighed. “I'll keep it short. What's the fastest way of transferring data?”

Alan didn't even have to think about it. “Maybe ten megabytes a second over campus internet?”

“Not even close,” Henry said. “Imagine a steamer trunk full of hard drives in the back of a station wagon, moving down the highway at 70 miles an hour. It might take a day to get from Jersey to Hartford, but that's a hundred terabytes of data at today's rates. That's over a gigabyte a second.”

“Shit,” Alan said.

“Exactly. Whatever numbers you want to plug into the system, between data compression and internet speeds, a guy with a station wagon will always been the fastest method of data transfer, at least as far as I can see. And that's how we got our anime. We couldn't download much off of IRC, or BBSes. We could discuss anime there, sure, but we couldn't use it to share it. We used the mail to trade tapes, and make copies of those tapes, mailing the originals back. The quality was terrible – you'd often be on a tenth-generation copy, just happy to have legible subtitles that had been pressed onto the video two generations away from the original Japanese VHS. But at conventions, like this?”

Henry let out a happy, nostalgic sigh. “You could get first-generation subs. Made fresh from Japanese originals. And the rarest shit you had? You copied that for people in hotel rooms all weekend long. Without that kind of people, I'd never have seen Minky Momo, or Space Family Carlvinson, or-”

“What?” Alan said.

“Exactly. We were driven by an almost archival sense of purpose. It was our responsibility, not just to ourselves, but to the English-speaking anime fans of the future, to acquire and preserve everything we could. So when you kids wanted to cull the archives of the Anime Club?” He shrugged. “I understood, but I couldn't let it happen.”

He looked into Alan's eyes. “I know I rambled, but do you understand? That's what this fandom means to me. It's a conservation and a conversation. We preserve and we analyze and make our own things from that which we experience.” He gestured towards the projector, which now was showing a Bleach AMV to the tune of a Within Temptation song – both series and band of which Alan only had a passing knowledge of, but it was nonetheless evocative. “Anime music videos date back to the beginning. Gainax began with a fan-animation of series they didn't own to music they didn't own. One of the earlier official VHS releases of anime was a compilation tape of Bubblegum Crisis AMVs. Theft, sharing, analysis, respect, and community all feed into the matrix that makes what our fandom is, and should always be. The methods might differ from what we had back then, but the spirit is the same.”

Alan wanted to say “yes”, but instead, held back, and just sat there, watching. Something magical really was happening in the dialogue of media and fans, something that wouldn't be legally possible, that relied on this, whatever this was. It was beautiful… and listening to Henry, maybe it always had been. Watching, he felt tears well in his eyes.

“Yeah,” he managed, as the video drew to a close.

“I'm sorry for rambling,” Henry said.

“It's fine,” Alan rushed out. He couldn't bear the thought of disappointing Henry. “It's…” He tried to make sure he was differentiating what he felt he had to do with what he truly felt. He didn't want to lie to Henry. “I think its what I needed to hear right now.”

Henry smiled, and gave Alan a tight, one-armed hug. “I hoped so. I know big conventions like this can be wild, I've been to enough of them to know. And…”

He looked into Alan's eyes, and it felt like Alan was a book being flipped through. “I don't know your life situation anymore, Alan, but you need to take care of yourself. We'll talk after the convention, okay?”

“Yeah?” Alan said. He was used to statements like that. Friends who came back out of nowhere, promised to keep in touch, and then never did. That was fine. As long as they kept appearing every now and then, it staved off the loneliness, at least a little.

Henry had known the same. “Seriously. I'll message you on instant messenger when the convention's over and I have a steady internet connection.”

Alan felt warmth rush to his cheeks. “Hah,” he said, failing at faking a laugh.

“On one condition, though,” Henry said, and Alan's heart dropped out of his throat and several feet into his torso.

“Yeah?” he said, worried.

“Go back to your hotel room and get some sleep, okay? I'll tell you about anything you miss, just take care of yourself,” Henry said, and held out his hand.

Anything but that, Alan thought, and against any conscious objection he had, he took Henry's hand in his, and shook it. He hated lying to Henry like this.

Henry smiled. “Good. I'll see you later today, okay? The boys are putting together a show at the Masquerade, I'll need people to help cheer them on,” he said, standing up. And before Alan knew it, Henry was gone.

In any other situation, on any other day, Alan would have done exactly what Henry said. But he had to stay alert, and he had to stay away. If he went back to his room, he probably wouldn't be coming back, and if he fell asleep, he probably wasn't waking up.