Alrighty-dighty. I’m going to pour into you what my latest obsession is. It’s been eating me alive, ya hear me, and I am at a loss of what to do without seeming like an overzealous freak.

I’m talkin’ about manga. This year, 2014, is the year when I have become obsessed with manga.
Not just any manga, no. Attack on Titan.
Yes, yes, yes! I heard a lot of people talking about it and have watched a few episodes (which isn’t all that good for the spoilers, but you can’t beat a dead horse) and when I went to Barnes and Noble, I saw volumes one through thirteen on the shelf and thought, hey, why not? The novels I’m reading aren’t that captivating anyway.
So I had to keep going back and buying new volumes because my craving for creepy things was eating me alive. However, my family just didn’t and doesn’t get it and I have no friends who like this stuff, hence my rant to you all. And the price of the books is freaking ridiculous. It’s like eleven dollars, which is really expensive for a little thing of manga. It’s not even a book, it’s like half a little piece of book. At most, the pages run up to a hundred, even though it feels less than that.

Yes, Attack on Titan is also an anime, but BEFORE YOU STOP READING HEAR ME OUT. Because I know a lot of people who hear the word ANIME and get totally turned off.
Oh, they say with their snotty old snot-nose voices, anime is so stupid. I hate anime. And then they’ll go see Frozen twelve times (no hate, love Disney) and The Lego Movie ten times and Despicable Me a hundred times. So you can freaking watch anime, people. Besides, it’s not like there is an influx-tation of good animated shows right now that aren’t on baby-kid-show networks.
No? You don’t agree?
You telling me you can’t sit on your butt for, like, twenty minutes and watch an anime pilot? Seriously now. First of all, lemme get something through your skulls. Anime is not a cartoon. It’s not, it’s an animated piece of art. What I consider cartoons are Tom and Jerry, Spongebob Squarepants, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life and so on and so forth. Animations are completely different. As sugar-coated as some can be, they deal with real world issues. You can consider anything Disney to be an animation—unless it specifically says “A Mickey Mouse cartoon”—and a lot of Dreamworks stuff too. And of course, anime is included in the mix.

Basically, it’s a biconditional statement. All cartoons are animations, but not all animations are cartoons.
In your defense, it’s hard to give anime a chance when there are so many geek conventions and bare-chested freaks running around, acting like ward patients. Let me tell you that I am not one of them. I have the upmost respect for Hayao Miyazaki and other anime creators, and if he saw anime geeks’ behavior, he’d move back to Japan in a heartbeat.

Now. Getting right along.
I haven’t been able to read the manga in weeks because of a few reasons. (My fingers are gonna hurt after this…)

1.) My parents won’t take me to Barnes and Noble. First of all, I can’t drive (tear), so I have to get permission from my parents to go anywhere. And as I said before, manga is, like really expensive and my dad doesn’t want me reading that stuff anyway. I’m dead serious. I bounced up to him to show him what I was buying and when he saw the cover, he just frowned. Oh, Daddy, dear you know you’re still number one, but girls they wanna read manga.

2.) Because of number one, number two is the fact that I only have up to volume seven in my room. They never leave my room without getting put back neatly at the end of the day, so I don’t forget where they are. I’m trying to read the last six volumes online, which is harder than it sounds. I can’t even get through one box without an ad popping up. I don’t even know which volume I’m on because the website MangaBee goes by chapters, not volumes.

3.) I am very impatient. As much as I love the book, I want to hurry up and get it done so I can watch the anime. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it and I want to know what the hubbub is about.

4.) I don’t have any time in the day. As soon as I get home, once I finish all my homework, I’m beat as a dead horse, so all I can do is lug myself into the shower—MAYBE eat some dinner—and collapse in bed with the same new age song on loop.

Okay, enough. You all get it, I’m deprived here.

And to make matters worse, anytime I try to look up Attack on Titan, I have to bob and weave and cut and run to avoid spoilers. I think I already have one before I even got that far. And that really makes me angry because I wouldn’t do that to anyone else. That’s why I don’t let people see my stuff before it is finished, because of the spoilers. I don’t even know why I look in the comments section. Just a bunch of bozos trying to get attention. But to those websites who warn there’s a spoiler posted, thank you.

I hear that Japan has anime on all their major TV networks. I’m not some kind of crazy lunatic-fanatic human person, but I’m tired of going behind my family’s backs to watch this beautiful magic on my little Phone screen or on Adult Swim. I’m not going to put up with that any longer, so I’m going to have to think about moving pretty soon.