05.26.26
In the time between finishing My Childhood Friend Is in Love with My Mecha! and Despite My Fear of Heights, the Space Princess Still Loves Me!, I’ve been doing some thinking about the nature of inspiration and influence for artists. Or, perhaps I should say, “for me,” as I ought not to speak for others. Maybe the mechanics of how those things we love shape the things we make are different for every artist. I probably don’t even need to say “maybe,“ but this point is that I don’t know.
After I submitted My Childhood Friend Is in Love with My Mecha! and was telling people about it, I had some not-all-that-serious conversations online about what is means to call a work “anime-inspired.” I don’t necessarily share this view (although I do prefer to categorize myself as “anime-aligned”), but one person told me that they thought calling something anime-inspired was essentially a cop-out, a meaningless possibly even cynical descriptor. The point was that anime encompasses far too many drastically varying works to be useful in actually saying anything of substance about an “anime-inspired” work.
I think this is somewhat fair.
I also, at the time, didn’t really concern myself with it too much. Even if, as a description for ChiMech, it was ineffective, I at least knew exactly what I meant when I used the term to describe my book. I know my own history, as it were, of which all the anime I’ve ever watched, all the manga I’ve ever read are some part. Of course, this doesn’t make “anime-inspired” useful in communicating to others, or at least not useful in specifying the particular qualities of a book like ChiMech or a web novel like Space Princess. At the same time, though, I don’t think it’s entirely useless. Assuming (and perhaps this is too generous an assumption to make generally) that the term is not being used in a cynical manner meant to capitalize on anime’s global popularity, it does at least cast a work within a particular context—even if that context is a broad one.
For example, even if you didn’t exactly know what the either term meant, I don’t think you would expect a work that was “anime-inspired” to necessarily look like something “American scifi-inspired.” I acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily parallel in specificity (the former is broader than the latter), but hopefully you understand my point. Now, you might not know what to expect from either, but at the very least you’d get the point that both are either coming out of or paying homage to a particular tradition.
The not knowing what to expect, I think, was what my friend was highlighting. Depending on what “anime” are included in “anime-inspired,” you end up with very different things; classic mecha anime-inspired is not the same as contemporary isekai anime-inspired, it’s true. I suppose I’m arguing out of both sides of my mouth here; perhaps the real conclusion is simply that if you want to say “anime-inspired,” you can say it to yourself, but you can’t expect it to transmit anything of value to anyone else—and that this is okay.
As a side note, I do think there’s something interesting about indebting written-only works to anime (as opposed to light novels). Writing is some component of anime, yes, but anime is also sound and sight, cinematography and music and voice acting and so on, each of these with their own distinct traditions, patterns, tropes, and cliches. Yet, I would definitely not consider my works light novel-inspired, as it were. The thing that drew me to anime in the first place was the multimedia nature of it, and I do find myself trying to capture some sense of that when I’m writing my anime-aligned works.
Anyways.
All of this is basically to say that when I sat down (actually, I was at my standing desk) to write up a self-indulgent little Author’s Comments section to tack on to the end of Despite My Fear of Heights, the Space Princess Still Loves Me!, I knew I wanted to include some kind of list of specific refences to anime that I felt had inspired or influenced it.
This was an enjoyable activity, and it was also much, much more reflective than I had anticipated.
I started with the most basic influence, Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie, which has been on my mind since I watched it—not least of all because of the little compilation artbook for the manga that I bought in the Ikebukuro Animate during my first trip to Japan, which still is in visible sight on my writing desk. There wasn’t too much to say about this, nor to discover. Once upon a time, I’d had an idea for a blog post about Shikimori-san and the way the anime framed shots of the titular heroine, but I’d never got the energy to put it together. Still, it had sat with me—as I said on Bluesky once with equal parts snark and sincerity, Keigo Maki really was on to something when creating a girlfriend who was both cute AND cool—and may for a while until I write it out of my system.
After this, I did something that I wondered if some might see as inauthentic: I went to my MyAnimeList account and starting scrolling through my completed shows.
You can probably immediately understand while I wondered about the “authenticity” of this activity. After all, can you really say something was an influence on your art if it was so far out of your mind during the creation process that you had to look it up?
Obviously, the answer is yes, but I worried nonetheless at the outset.
I needn’t had, though.
What I discovered on the other side of this process was two different levels of artistic referencing, which I’m going to categorize as inspiration and influence without nearly as much thought as I probably should. So, if my use of them seems off, just give me a break.
The first was the level of inspiration: anime from which I had draw relatively specific elements. For example, one romcom anime that jumped out at me was This Art Club Has a Problem! (aka Konobi). When I first saw the title, I remembered immediately specific feelings I had when watching the show, and felt once again the deep fondness I still have for it. In this brief spell of recollection, I suddenly remembered that one of the things I most liked about Konobi was that it featured two characters in an existing friendship, in which one was trying to move the relationship needle into romance. This is a set-up I’ve always liked (it’s fundamental to the childhood friend trope, which those who know me know I adore), and I immediately noticed that aspect of Konobi’s heroine, Usami, were present in my two leads for Space Princess.
A few other shows fell into this category, although not all of them were such revelations. I’d been very conscious of writing something that I intended to feel a bit Liz and the Blue Bird-like in one chapter, as well as the effect certain anime that have used blue-haired childhood friends as romantic punching bags has had on me over the years.
Then, there was the second level: influence. This level, I think, is deeper. In my Author’s Comments, I called it foundational. But until I was reflecting on particular anime, I hadn’t even thought of them. The three shows I identified in this level were Nisekoi, Chihayafuru, and Akagami no Shirayuki-hime.
Now, coming upon these three shows was no surprise to me. All of these were anime I watched much longer ago than I did most of those in the inspirations level, and they are ones that have stuck with me. Nisekoi, particularly the very first episode, feels like to me like an archetypal execution of the genre tropes on which it draws. Combined with its unpretentious SHAFTisms for constant eye candy, I’ve thought about and referenced it constantly over the years. Chihayafuru, and the Taichi side of the love triangle in particular, I think shaped feelings I have about unrequited love in real-world settings, and Shirayuki-hime has long been the show I reference as having my favorite romantic pairing in anime.
What was a surprise, though, was the realization that elements from each of these shows seem to, at some very basic level, have shaped how I like to write romance in anime-style books. This is a bit harder to articulate that the specifics of the shows in the inspiration section, but it feels true to say. Maybe one way of expressing it would be to say that, consciously or not, I’m always trying to emulate—through the interpretive lens of myself—say, the color and dynamism I felt Nisekoi’s visual presentation added to the experience of watching it, the complexities of Taichi’s insecurities, the openness of communication that I found so compelling between Zen and Shirayuki (although, if I’m keeping to my definitions, you could also say I took inspiration from Shirayuki-hime when I, ahem, borrowed the neck kiss scene concept for the finale of Space Princess).
I don’t know if any of that makes any sense to the external reader. It may not. It may be that, absent specifics, the way those three anime feel like they underpin the essence of Despite My Fear of Heights, the Space Princess Still Loves Me! (and probably other things I written, too!) remains visible only to me—and to me, as is probably evident, not through a particularly clear glass. It might be something that can be felt and understood to be true, but can’t be explained, at least not at my current capacity for self-analysis.
I think that’s okay. It probably only makes a difference to me, and potentially some hypothetical interviewer in the future who wants to know how Despite My Fear of Heights, the Space Princess Still Loves Me!, the novel that launched the career of the writer who goes by the pen name of marble, came to be. In that hypothetical interview, probably conducted over email or Discord or maybe IRC after the corporate instant messengers dry up in the desert of user-exploitation-turned-inability-to-turn-a-profit, I’ll smile to myself and type, “You know, I can give you the names, but I can’t explain exactly how. Is that okay to say?” and the interviewer will type back, “LOL – in an interview like this, you can say whatever is true.”
To return to the top, I guess the mechanics of how the things I love shape the things I create remain a bit mysterious, even to myself. Which, you know, I kind of like. In a self-interview like this, doesn’t leaving the interviewer a bit mystified seem better?