michifugu

Alright, we’re on the 3rd week of Fannish/Fandom 50, and this time I’ll talk about my first exposure to that ~gay~ stuff in animanga.

( Warning: there's homophobia subject )

I wanted to do Fannish 50 weeks because I happened to see a mutual I follow doing this, so it interested me! This is my first time doing something like this, so please go easy on me, LOL!
I don’t have any set themes and will just roll with it, depending on my mood. But I will try!

For the first post, I wanted to talk about my first fandom, Shugo Chara. You guys probably already know this series from my FAQ, but this series is very important for my childhood because it’s probably the series where I first interacted with “fandom” stuff and made transformative works.

I’ve been an anime and manga fan since I was a child, at the tender age of 5, when I watched Minky Momo and Hachi the Bee on local TV channels. The first manga I read was Doraemon. Since then, I continued to follow a lot of anime and manga like Sailor Moon, Detective Conan, Tokyo Mew Mew, One Piece, buying Nakayoshi magazine, Cardcaptor Sakura, etc. But because I was young at that time and didn’t have friends to share interests with, I had no idea what a fandom was. Not to mention, I hadn’t been exposed to the internet at that time because I believe back then you had to buy a modem, and my family wasn’t familiar with it. That was until my late father bought us a modem because I think my older sister and brother asked him to. My brother and sister had to go to net cafes to use computers and the internet (good times—I wasn’t allowed though, because I was too young, lol).

So, this marked my first exposure to the internet, I believe at age 8-9. My first social media platforms were Friendster and Myspace because that’s what was the rage back then, until Facebook took off in my country and everyone went crazy making Facebook accounts. So naturally, I did too.
On Facebook, I joined otaku and animanga groups where a lot of Indonesian anime fans gathered. I befriended a lot of people there, and then I found that my FB home had this cute pink anime girl character, and a lot of young otaku girls talked about it. I asked what the title was, and apparently, it’s Shugo Chara.

I found out that the series was serialized in Nakayoshi magazine, but because Nakayoshi was so expensive, lol, there was no way I could ask my dad to buy it. However, I was lucky to find that my local bookstore sold the manga! I bought it, I believe two volumes, and I was immediately super into it.
Amu was very cool, and her fashion just hit hard for a lot of young girls back then. We all wanted to wear similar clothes like her!

And then I joined Shugo Chara groups on Facebook, where I met a lot of new people. This is where I was first exposed to fannish activities. We all gushed about the characters (Ikuto was so popular back then) and even drew fanart of it. Honestly, my younger self was overwhelmed and felt the need to contribute! So I started posting art, even though it was bad, haha. And then there was an Indonesian Shugo Chara-only forum, so I joined and found out there was a girl my age from the same school who also joined! From there, we became friends, even though there were problems and fights because we were idiot children back then. But I’m still grateful to her because she taught me how to draw, and I learned a lot about other anime and manga series beyond what I knew from TV and bookstores. I also found out about hentai from her, btw, lol. And through Shugo Chara, I also learned about Hetalia’s existence, but I had no idea what it was because I was dumb. Still, it’s also one of the important series that shaped my fandom activity and experiences. But that’s another story, and someday I’ll post about it.

Anyway, I’m thankful for Shugo Chara for introducing me to fandom, and I’m so glad I did because it was my first fandom experience where most of the community was young girls. I’m so glad my first fandom was surrounded by people my age back then. It was also a gateway for the path of my otakudom—thanks to it, I know what Hetalia and Vocaloid are, hahaha.