Written by: Sofia Tas-Castro
Around the time I started watching anime and reading manga, I was in middle school and if you were a kid growing up in the early 2000s/2010s, then you know admitting you liked anime or manga was like a death sentence for your social life.
Why had I seemingly stopped reading novels and switched to these different literary medias? Because as much as I loved reading, I developed what’s called Reading Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Reading OCD. It’s a variation of OCD that forces a person to engage in rituals based on compulsions to make sure that they read everything “perfectly.” For example, a person might feel the urge or compulsion to re-read paragraphs several times before they can move on to the next section of a page. Or maybe they need to have absolute silence when reading because if they don’t they can’t focus.
Although I’ve spent hours in therapy doing exposure therapy work to combat this, the biggest compulsion I have that still plagues me to this day is creating mental images while reading. You’ve heard about the “mental picture” reading creates in the reader’s mind, except my Reading OCD took this to such an extreme where if I couldn’t see a “perfectly” vivid image, then I would stop reading altogether because it was a waste of time if I couldn’t read “correctly.”
So, reading became a chore and borderline inaccessible to me. But I still had this passion for creating stories and characters in my head so where was I going to get the ideas from now?
Well, anime and manga came to the rescue.
There was no need for me to worry about creating perfect pictures in my head when the mangaka and animators were giving the pictures directly to me. I didn’t have time to re-read paragraphs and sentences because the subtitles moved too fast for me to do that.
Not to mention, the stories and plots that I saw in anime and manga were so much different from what I had seen in western media. A boy fighting titans to save his friends and his world from disaster in Attack on Titan terrified me so badly I had nightmares yet I became addicted to imagining the characters in different scenarios in my head. A girl who started off as bratty and weak who became a warrior after having to leave her palace in Yona of the Dawn or a girl who learnt how to tame shrine spirits after leaving her destitute family in Kamisama Kiss let me see powerful female protagonists take a front seat in adventure-packed storylines.
The more I engaged with these stories, the more I learned about pacing, character development, romance, worldbuilding, and how to write dialogue. Combined with my constantly growing imagination, this excitement from engaging with these stories made it easier for me to fall back in love with reading years later and manage my reading OCD.
It took years for me to learn, but every form of media, whether it’s a movie or TV show, comic book or Manga/Manhwa, or simply a novel, has invaluable teachings you can use to enhance your writing. Whether they inspire your own work or show you ideas you may have never thought possible, they don’t deserve to be overlooked or looked down upon.