So ever since I wrote that article about playing Catherine with my girlfriend Lindsey, there seems to be a misconception that my girlfriend is a terribly controlling woman and that I don't deserve to be in a relationship with her because I am a man-child who is afraid of commitment. So, I wanted to write something up about how I met my girlfriend and how I became her gateway into a world full of anime and video games.
When I first met my girlfriend, we were at a Halloween party full of drunkards (as most Halloween parties are). We talked a while about how she was a dancer who used to teach ballet in Marin county and got along nicely, and things were going great until someone who no one recalled inviting to the party decided to take a piss off of the roof and onto a neighbor's house. The cops came and the party was broken up. I wasn't about to let this poor girl take San Francisco public transportation home at 1 in the morning on Halloween, so I offered her a ride home. It turned out that she lived a few blocks away from me and worked at the Irish bakery near my house, so when I dropped her off she gave me her phone number and told me to come by her shop to get a free pastry before I drove back to college the next day.
Lindsey and I talked online for about a week, and found that we had a lot of things in common. She and I both liked to dance (although I'm a bboy/locker and she can do ballroom, tap, jazz, ballet, contemporary, and hip hop), we both loved cats, she played video games (The Sims, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame), and she was smart. I ended up making her go over her text message limit that month, and I felt terrible about it, so I invited to take her to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, to make it up for it.
Long story short, that movie was a fucking terrible mess, and I felt even worse for inviting her to a terrible movie, so I asked her if she had ever watched anime or a Japanese drama before. She said the only anime she had ever seen was Cowboy Bebop, and that she had never seen a live action drama before, so I invited her to my place to visit my 3 cats and watch an amazingly epic Japanese medical drama called Iryu: Team Medical Dragon. I'm not going to get into the show here, but suffice it to say after the first episode, Lindsey was hooked. Our first date lasted from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon as we watched the entire first season at my house.
Iryu: Team Medical Dragon. I hate throwing the word epic around, but in this case, use of the word is justified.
Our relationship progressed smoothly as I introduced her to being Asian, aka living in San Francisco. Lindsey grew up in Novato, a city not far from Petaluma (where Ryan and Jeff live), which is just about the whitest part of the Bay Area. That being the case, she had never had a significant exposure to anime, bubble tea, real Chinese food, or Asian people in general. We went to parties that my friends who were transfer students from Japan hosted, and Lindsey socialized, got to know more Asians in a month than she had met in her entire life to that point, and generally had a good time.
One day, Lindsey was talking to an attractive male friend of mine, Ryosuke, who was basically your average Japanese pretty boy, who looked like he came straight out of a J-Pop album cover. They were talking about Japanese dramas and Lindsey said something to the effect of "but I mean at least you're not an 'otaku,' right?" To Lindsey, people who were "otaku" were overweight, smelly, creepy men who lived in their parents' house at age 30 and masturbated on their anime figures and art books. To her surprise, Ryosuke said "No no no no no...I am an otaku. If I am not an otaku, I am nobody. Your boyfriend is an otaku. Everyone in this party is an otaku." It was truly a revelation for Lindsey to realize that attractive, socially adept men could be otaku too.
Somewhere around this time, I gave Lindsey my old DS Lite, cause I didn't have time to play it now that I was out of college and working a full time job. I told her that she really needed to play Phoenix Wright, so she did...and it was the only thing she did for weeks. She loved it, and the third game in the series replaced Silent Hill 3 as her favorite game of all time. We sat next to each other on my couch and I watched her struggle in the courtroom and become completely engrossed in the story and characters.
A few months later, I invited Lindsey to come with me to FanimeCon in San Jose, because I wanted her to meet all my friends that I'd met over the years playing DDR and attending conventions. She agreed, but a few days later told me she had had a discussion with her best friend who told her "yeah, you'll probably be the best looking person there, and best smelling too." I assured her that no, she wouldn't be...a horrible decision on my part, but I mean...I know a LOT of attractive otaku, male and female, and as beautiful as I think my girlfriend is and as much as I love her, I'm an honest person. She got really upset, but we made up and she agreed to go to the convention.
Long story short, Lindsey had an amazing blast at the convention. My friend lent her a strawberry pink frilly lolita dress to wear and they walked around the convention, having their pictures taken. Lindsey was amazed at how much work people put into their cosplays, took hundreds of pictures, and when we finally got home that Memorial Day afternoon, Lindsey was beyond excited to begin a trek down the rabbit hole. She wanted to watch every anime, she wanted to cosplay cute characters, she wanted to play more video games, and she wanted me to be there every step of the way. Lindsey has now made 3 costumes by hand, and we've cosplayed characters from Phoenix Wright, Persona 4, and 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors. We now have a bookshelf in our room (we live together now) dedicated to anime figures we've collected at conventions, and most of the figures are ones we've picked out together. We've gone to FanimeCon three years in a row now, and each time I go and we dress up and she puts on her make up to get ready to be a video game character for a day, I marvel at how lucky I am to have a girlfriend like her.
So I know this wasn't really video game related, and it's excessively long, but I hope you found it entertaining (in fact, I'd be surprised if anyone read all the way down here). I just felt like writing this after all the discussion that happened on my Catherine blog post, and show everyone who told me I am in a terrible relationship exactly why I love my girlfriend. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all in the comments thread!
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