Five Night’s at Freddy’s and My Overactive Imagination

The recent installment in a series of horror games called “Five Night’s at Freddy’s” (Specifically FNAF 4.) got me thinking back to a time in which my overactive imagination was extremely significant to me. Apparently I am an amazing actor, as even my parents were oblivious to this fact until now. Story time!

When I was seven, I was trying to work on a math worksheet without the assistance of my dad when I heard my mom screaming. This was nothing new, she was probably watching a movie thought seven-year-old me. So I kept working. Another scream. I was starting to lose focus and started getting irritated that I couldn’t work properly. Another scream. That was the last straw, and I stomped outside to find that my mom was actually watching a movie, but it wasn’t anything I ever saw before. My mom invited me to sit on the couch, and as I could never resist my curiosity, I sat down. I wasn’t really paying attention to it until the people in the film were standing in front of a barricade that got kicked down and people walked in. Except they weren’t actually people. It was a zombie movie that I found myself watching, and I was absolutely terrified as well as interested in a strange, macabre way. We finished the movie when my mom told me that we had to return the movie to the rental shop. I was ready to leave the house and not think about the horrors I just saw or my math homework. So I rushed to the front door and threw it open (as well as a thin, feather-light seven year old could do), and saw what time of day it was. It was night.

I survived the rest of the night (albeit, with my mom almost successfully scaring me sometimes, but I was a hard-headed, stubborn little girl) but when I lay in my bed that night, I put my head under the covers for the first time in my life. I tried sleeping but I found that it was hard to breathe so I created a little hole using the edge of the blanket to breathe through. My legs were slipping out of the bottom so I tucked them up to my chest and slept like that until morning. This was the beginning of me formulating tactics and various plans to avoid the zombies from getting me. (Note: I was old enough to know that they were fictional, but they were science fiction. According to me, that meant that it could happen.)

The first of the tactics and plans was to protect my bedroom at all costs. I would now no longer keep my door shut and if I noticed anything bad, I would sprint towards my parent’s bedroom (which happened to be exactly on the opposite end of the hallway from my room). This way I could protect myself by alerting my parents. I then made a habit of keeping the closet open so that I could see anything that would crawl out. Next, I had to tuck all limbs to my chest and I had to be underneath the blanket. The only time I was allowed to change positions was when the zombies got in the room and I would have to lay spread eagled out under the blanket to trick the zombies into going into other rooms because they wouldn’t notice me. Oddly enough, my next tactic was to always turn away from the door (Which would make the first two tactics completely moot, but oh well.) but I was seven, don’t ask.

From this, I started my next tactic which I called the “Light Sprint”. I had received permission to start going home by myself (and or accompanied with my mom) and once the door was open I would rush through slapping all of the light switches and throwing my bag across the carpet to finally settle against the corner of the couch that was against a wall. There are many variations of this, such as when I was finally desensitized to the visually related fears I had and my auditory fears began to become more pronounced. I started to either hum or sing to myself a happy song before I opened the door, and when I would get in, I would keep my hands on the locks while scanning for anything that might pop out. This way I could run out while slamming the ghost in the face.

This was worsened when I stayed over at my flat in San Francisco and because my parents took the bedroom, and eight year old me had to sleep on the couch. In the living room. Which had the front door in it. And the heater. Which meant noises that would freak me out. I managed to try get my dad to make me a midnight snack just to have some company at 12 in the morning. But the inevitable happened and I was re-tucked into the makeshift bed. The light switch was flipped and I was terrified. I tried to cover myself with the blanket using sleep protection tactic #1 (tuck all limbs to chest) but the heater made a sound that freaked me out and I never slept there again. On reflection it might have been better if I stayed there because I could be like a lookout, but hey, eight-year-old Aya logic.

That’s only a taste of what I used to do as a paranoid little kid. The list goes on from creating my own zombie survival kit, stealing the flashlights, always keeping my BB gun with me to making barricades using my never ending supply of stuffed toys. I also came out with a bunch of habits such as never being able to sleep without the orange nightlight (which I’ve finally started NOT using), always flipping on every single light when I enter a room and putting the blanket over my head. Not that these aren’t good, it’s just that some annoy people. 😛

One good thing that came out of my period of extreme paranoia is the fact that I am now completely desensitized to the horror genre. Seriously, the closest to screaming or covering my eyes is me slightly jerking my head back. (Which is instinctive.) Apparently during the last months of my paranoia, I started getting into creepypasta, horror movies, NoSleeps and RPG horror games. Weird how that happens.

Signing off,

Aya

Hiatus Update, Cartoon Shows and all of That Jazz

Yo! I’m back after a ridiculously long hiatus, (almost as long as the BBC Sherlock ones to be honest) and I’m ready to actually… BLOG! (Terrible use of ellipse but eh, my blog, my words.) I haven’t been writing a lot recently because of another terrible event that happens annually called “school”. Otherwise known as either: 1, your safe haven for learning and fun times with friends or 2, absolute hell on earth. How is it for me? Both. As much as I love/hate school sometimes, I get up to other things that are not school related, but those hobbies get burnt out. So what did I decide to do? Revive my old blog and start writing again. (The real story is that my dad said “Hey, update your blog.”, and I said “FINE.”)

Seeing as I have been absent here since… um… some time ago, let me do a quick recap of what happened so far since then. (I used since twice in one sentence and keep using these wonderful things called parentheses. That’s bad.)

Aya, hiatus year 1 – “Oh, it’s nothing. JUST THAT I’M PAST TEN YEARS OLD AND NOW I’M SO MUCH BETTER THAN ALL OF YOU, HAHA!” Obsession(s): The Warrior Cat’s series

Aya, hiatus year 2 – “Did I mention that I’m almost a teenager?” Obsession(s): Ace Attorney, 999, and anime.

Aya, hiatus year 3 – “I’m a teenager. EW, WHAT!? I’M SO OLD NOW.” Obsession(s): Sherlock (which is ongoing :D), anything horror related, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and various actors.

And so it goes… Meaning that I’m almost exactly the same “me” as me from hiatus year 3. Insert P.T. joke here. Okay there are some years I didn’t cover but, eh. Enough updating from me though, let’s get on to something from the current me shall we?

Story time! When I was a kid, I loved cartoons. And not as in: “Oh, I liked this one show…”. No. I would watch ANYTHING on Cartoon Network or Disney. Anything being, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Power Puff Girls, Mickey Mouse Club House, Miu and Mao, Pingu… JUST ANYTHING really. (Believe it or not, this meant that I absolutely despised live-action or anime. You can gasp now.) I got up every morning and as soon as I could leave the shower I would jump on the sofa, and turn on the TV. It was a miraculous experience. (Except for when my mom would drag me off to dry my hair and go to school.) I always had this feeling of complete and utter satisfaction when I would finish. When I was dragged off to live in England, the initial absence of a TV got to me. I would lie around the flat, doing absolutely nothing. Once we had one, I wouldn’t watch. Cartoon Network wasn’t on air so why should I care? Thus, I got acclimatized to reality television and game shows. I started getting into reading more. I started to leave the TV off more often than on, and migrated my sitting spot to somewhere in my room or the swivel chair of the computer. Instead of my eyes glued to the TV, my nose would be buried inside a book or I would be leaning into the computer as if I wanted to jump inside.

This carried on until we moved back to our old house in Japan, and I found myself face to face with a familiar screen. There was a feeling in my gut that said “Cartoons, Aya! What are you doing, go on! It’s right there in front of you.” I was once again deprived of the TV as we were not paying for the broadcast of Cartoon Network and Disney at the time, and the feeling nagged at me to ask my mom to start paying for the broadcast again. This took about a week before she finally remembered to start doing so, but by then the feeling dissolved and I went back to my Rainbow Magic and Club Penguin. She reminded me one day that it was there, and I immediately rushed in front of the TV and turned it on. (After looking at the page number and trying to remember it. Totally forgot it and had to flip through each chapter until I found it. :P) The feeling was back. I found myself back in time as I flipped to the channel that I was longing to see so badly when I saw a cartoon I had never seen before. I was disoriented. I knew all of the cartoons. How could I not recognize this one? I finished watching it, but I never got the satisfaction of finishing the episode of what’s-it’s-name cartoon like I always had.

Because of this one encounter with an unfamiliar cartoon, I started to migrate towards channels like Discovery, History, National Geographic and Animal Planet. I had started to become glued to the screen again, absolutely fascinated by all of the things I didn’t know about. But despite my return to the front of the TV, it wasn’t the same. I started to drift off again, into the recesses of the internet and anime.

So that’s my relationship with cartoons. No, scratch that. WAS my relationship with cartoons. I was on and off with it, as I became slightly obsessed with Avatar: The Last Airbender and Korra, and gave Adventure Time a shot. But even as I finished each episode and series, I (again) didn’t get the same feeling of satisfaction. Until recently.

I was scrolling through and squealing at various things on Tumblr, when I saw that many of the people that I followed were writing and drawing about this show called Steven Universe. I had seen it in some advertisements on TV but because of my lack of interest in cartoons, I ignored it. The fact that I had a lack of interest in cartoons popped into my mind, and I continued scrolling past the masses of posts. After a couple weeks I was browsing my favorite artist’s blog when I found once again, masses of posts about Steven Universe. I had just about enough with being completely oblivious to what everybody was talking about, and I watched it purely out of annoyance at the people who knew something more about cartoons than I did.

When I finished the first episode, my mouse immediately moved towards the “next episode” button and a familiar euphoria bloomed inside of me. I kept watching every single episode and devoured the whole of the existing episodes in one day. I rewatched my favorites and hungered for more. So where did I look? Tumblr. I found mountains of content, gold mines of beautiful works created by the fandom. There I came across some crossover posts between Steven Universe and Gravity Falls. Gravity Falls was another cartoon which I completely ignored just because it was a cartoon. I resolved to try it as well. I sent a text to my friend who was telling me that I should watch it, and pressed play to the first episode. And well what do you know, I fell in love with it as well. It took me a slightly longer time to finish it, but I would not stop for breaks and watched everything in two days. My faith in cartoons was restored.

So what are you supposed to take from all this? I say: 1, watch Steven Universe and Gravity Falls, even if they aren’t your cup of tea (Just give it a try, this is coming from a person who hasn’t as much as looked at cartoons for years now.) and 2, cartoons are amazing.

Signing out,

Aya.