So... I guess this is the story about how anime changed my life?
And this won't be clickbait, I promise.
Don't worry. You won't have to look at my face for all of this.
I won't burden you with that. Just parts of it. Um
But I wanted to tell you guys my journey, and how anime has brought me to where I am today.
So a little bit about me:
Tell me if any of this sounds familiar to any of you. I grew up in a small town in Wales. Somewhere.
I worked somewhat hard, but I always felt out of place when I was growing up.
I worked hard. I got good grades. I had plenty of friends.
But...
I never truly felt happy.
I never felt like anyone really understood what I was passionate about,
Or thought I was weird if I told them.
I never felt like I was achieving anything meaningful to me, and
I always felt like my passions were weird to everyone around me. My life in high school, for the most part
Consisted of me playing video games at every free moment. After being a good student, of course
But that still didn't stop my parents from being really angry at me for being on Pokemon 24/7.
So one summer I decided I was gonna watch all of the highest-rated TV shows on IMDB.
I wanted to be a bit of a TV buff and flex a little in conversations about how much I knew about TV. Yeah,
It's a dumb idea. I know, just forget about it. One day I remember seeing this show called Death Note.
And it was hovering around the Top 10 spot and I was really confused
How was a cartoon so highly rated? Initially I went in order.
I'd watched the whole list starting from one going downwards
But for some reason the first time I saw this, I just kind of brushed it off.
Remembering what my parents and my peers had told me.
That cartoons are for kids, and I shouldn't be watching them anymore.
I'm too old for that now. That's what I thought.
However, a few months later I just finished watching a TV show and I needed the next TV show to watch.
And there it was.
Staring at me still.
MENICINGLY!
The number 10 spot. I hadn't watched it. It was just staring at me
Being a bit of a perfectionist, I didn't want to leave this list undone.
I wanted to watch everything on this list.
I decided to open the synopsis of the show to see what all the hype was about.
Needless to say after seeing it was about death and mind games,
I was pretty sold that it wasn't some kind of Kids Entertainment
Now a quick disclaimer about me personally, I've always been one to gravitate towards entertainment from Japan.
Some reason I was always obsessed with stuff that came from there.
Pokemon, Nintendo, the original Ninja Warrior, Takeshi's Castle,
Battle Royale, you get the point. I was a big Japanese media fan without even realizing it.
So there I was eight p.m on a Thursday night with school the following day.
I put on the first episode of Death Note that I could find on YouTube - that's how long ago this was
And something magical happened.
I remember from the moment the first episode ended, I had found something special. I got addicted.
I got entranced, I got sucked into this world, this style. It felt like everything was appealing to me specifically to my very core
I ended up staying up all night watching this show
I had five episodes left before I had to go to school.
I had just spent 10 hours straight watching this TV show, and I'd never been more excited in my entire life.
I finished the show and immediately, I needed something to fill that void. That craving for more of this style
Obviously, I went to Google. I Googled what other anime appealed to people who like Death Note.
And then I found Code Geass.
I specifically remember having to go and do a shift at McDonald's right after I had started watching this show,
and the whole eight hours I spend making Big Macs, all I could think about was going home and
Binging this show and that damn opening was in my head the whole shift!
And so at this point,
I'm probably sure that some of you are thinking that you know where this story is going.
That I love anime so much and thus I wanted to make a YouTube channel talking about my favorite anime shows
And nope, sadly. It's not that straightforward.
Remember how I mentioned that people didn't really understand what I was passionate about in the start of the video?
Well, that was me being obsessed with VIDEO GAMES from an early age.
I was given a lot of shit for spending all my time playing video games.
So imagine if VIDEO GAMES were weird where I was growing up at the time,
Imagine what would happen if I rocked up one day and started playing an episode of High School of the Dead,
and said, "Yeah this? This is my new passion guys." I'm not exactly gonna be the most popular kid in school
So for the last year of high school, anime was my secret.
I watched it and I told no one. For fear of becoming more of a social outcast than I already was.
Now, no doubt some of you watching this will probably feel the same.
That no one can understand you and appreciate you for your hobbies and what you love.
And that is okay. And I was the same and
Naturally being someone who used the internet an awful lot at that time,
I thought --
I thought it was best to go to the internet and try and make friends there.
I'm really smooth by the way.
I went to MyAnimeList to try and make friends, but I never could.
I even vividly remember downloading and playing OSU just because it was the only game I knew weebs played.
And I tried to make friends through that. It was a terrible idea, and in hindsight
I honestly had no idea what I was thinking.
I distinctly remember this one German girl who I met on MyAnimeList who I ended up playing a bit of OSU with
And I was so excited to have a friend that I think I scared her off with how often I tried to talk to her.
But I was just so overjoyed that someone, somewhere out there loved the same thing as me. I didn't have to lie,
I didn't have to hide, I didn't have to pretend to like the same things as everyone else did around me.
I could -- for once, unapologetically be myself.
Sadly, I didn't really have much luck in making friends who liked anime
But summer vacation was coming up and I just finished my A levels
so I had six weeks of summer to binge as much anime as I wanted.
And....well....
That's exactly what I did. Every day I would watch at least 12 episodes of anime and never leave my room.
I was consuming content at a rate that I think I will never reach again in my life, but then
with all good things, it comes to an end.
After watching so much anime something felt off
Just watching anime wasn't really enough anymore.
It didn't scratch that itch that I need it to. But as I was watching all these anime,
I started to find myself more and more invested in these characters.
So much so that I wanted to BE the characters and experience their emotions
But obviously I can't BE the characters.
Can I?
So I said fuck it. I'm gonna see if people want a voice act anime with me online
I grabbed my turtlebeach x1 headset that I used for screaming profanities at people on xbox360
Downloaded audacity and hit record.
It turned out I was pretty fucking terrible at voice acting
I didn't really know how to act. Which seemed to be quite important for
Voice...acting...
The point is, I was voice acting. Not good, but still. I was doing it. And it kind of became my new obsession.
I made amazing friends that I still have to this day, and funny enough. Everyone liked anime. It was perfect.
I spent all day talking to my new friends who loved everything that I loved.
I was really happy. That was until my whole life got tipped on it's head
because I had to move to the other side of the country to go and study engineering.
Fun.
So, yeah
I kind of put everything that I loved on the back burner whilst
I jumped headfirst into my studies because that's what being an adult is right?
Forgetting everything you're passionate about to pay the bills.
Oh boy
So about halfway through my first term in university, I wanted to get back into voice acting.
I had a lot of free time, so I wanted to give it a shot again.
I bit the bullet, upgraded, and ordered a new setup a £200 XLR setup
This was this was crazy money at the time for me. And was this very much an overkill setup for what I was using it for?
100% yes
But it made me really take it seriously this time around.
I think also having time away from my passion and having time to mature
Made me a much better performer.
I distinctly remember the first audition I did after not doing voice acting for ages
It just felt right. I -- I swear I nailed it.
I probably didn't. But at the time - at the time I felt like I nailed it, so that's what's important, right?
Right?
Something just clicked when I returned to it.
And the best analogy I can think about to describe how it felt was: when I was about 8,
I think my parents bought me Donkey Kong Country on the Gameboy advanced. And I was stuck on the stage
Forever. So I left the game and then I came back about 2 years later to play that stage again
And I just nailed it the first time and that's what it felt like when I returned to voice acting.
I understood what I needed to improve and how to do it. I was on a roll.
I enjoyed voice acting again, and actively made time for it.
Even if my roommates thought it was really weird and laughed at me a lot. I didn't care!
I had a passion and I was killing it.
I remember a competition where you and a friend had to create an audio skit every two weeks and you'd compete against other voice actors
You'd be judged by the two people who ran the channel and a guest voice actor
So I asked my friend at the time Gray fox
He's the one who edited the first yaoi videos by the way
If he wanted to enter with me and he did. Now not to toot our own horn too much
But we pretty much destroyed the competition.
And being validated by people like Xander Mobus and Kyle Hebert was crazy to me as an 18 year old kid
Who came from a tiny town in Wales. And a few months had passed
And it was at this point in time where I've been watching anime YouTube for a while. People like Gigguk, Demolition D,
Glass Reflection, I watched all of them. And obviously, being a voice actor I loved Abridging.
Oh. My. Money.
Don't you mean God? You worship your thing, I'll worship mine.
I thought it was a really creative way to show love to a show while still retaining a lot of creative freedom.
Sadly, this was not really feasible on YouTube as you'd struggle to get an episode out at least once a month.
However, there was nothing really in between the reviews and the abridging at the time.
There was no one using the characters that I loved in an interesting way and
Voice-acting became a little too slow for me. Doing auditions,
Getting roles, the whole process felt slow. And I didn't feel like I had any control over it.
So I'm sure you can see where this is headed. I made my YouTube channel
Yes, it had been around for a while, but just ignore that, okay?
I used my YouTube as a way to creatively satisfy myself while still doing voice acting.
In between doing auditions and getting roles, I would make YouTube content.
Whilst of course balancing my whole university degree. Which I would totally not recommend anyone do.
Little did I know, the content I wish that had existed
Others also apparently really enjoyed.
I remember being so excited that people enjoyed my videos and were so enthusiastic in the comments that I was so excited
I just -- I had to make another video straight away. So the week after I posted another video and people liked that.
So I posted another video a week later and
and another video
And another video.
Until I just kind of became someone who uploaded anime content weekly?
I didn't plan on it, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just hit record and did what I loved.
Now I can make a whole separate video on my YouTube journey, so I won't talk too much about that now.
But essentially by the time my degree was over I grown the channel an awful lot.
And I was faced with two choices.
Do I keep uploading occasionally for my 150,000 or so subscribers and get a full-time job using my degree?
or do I say fuck it. Try to do YouTube full-time, even though I wasn't earning that much, and just see how that goes?
And ever since then I haven't looked back and I'm sure you can guess which one I picked
I've never been happier than I am right now.
I've never once doubted my decisions and I'm surrounded by amazing people who create amazing things.
I've changed and I've grown a lot with my YouTube. And I feel like a really well-rounded person.
I take my own mental well-being and my own happiness very seriously now.
Something I didn't really do before.
Oh and I made a yaoi audiobook, don't forget that part. That's that's the highlight reel, baby
And none of that would have happened,
if I listened to the people around me who said cartoons were for kids
Who wanted me to be the exact same thing as everyone else around me.
Who told me to pick the safe and easy option in life, but
Little did I know
Me clicking on that one webpage,
Years ago,
Changed my entire life trajectory and it scares me.
Knowing there's a world out there, where I'm not doing what I am right now. And it feels weird being
Honest and serious with you guys, cause all I ever want to do is be funny and make memes
because that's just my mood 24/7
But if you've made it this far into the video.
Let me tell you this:
You may not know where you are in your life,
And you may have no idea what it is that you want to do in your life.
You may not be happy with the people who surround you.
But you'll never truly know how far you've come or how long is left down a path.
All you do know is in this moment, what is you love to spend your time doing.
And you should never be ashamed to pursue that.
You never know what little thing might change your life forever.
So, I guess that's part of my journey. That's how anime made me realize
Made me realize I shouldn't be ashamed of what I love.
Instead I should embrace it and see where that passion takes me.
And I guess that's how -- that's how anime changed my life.
See ya.