I’m at such an intersection of privilege that I don’t think I considered politics in any meaningful way until my early 20s when I got hit with the libertarian propaganda and realized that maybe the police and army are political actually.
I always hear of people doing such great work and being so political in their teenage years ago I wonder if it’s more common for someone to not engage in politics until adulthood line myself or if it’s truly just my position in life that allowed me to be ignorant for so long.
I remember buying a shirt with “fuck politics I just want to burn shit down” when I was around 17 and honestly edginess was I think my entire ideology at the time
Bad politics is still politics so long as you were aware of them. I’m talking not knowing any ideologies beyond pop culture references, not knowing any of my local or higher representatives in Parliament etc
Then I guess we’ll say my preteen political chunibyo phase counts, because I knew my own eclectic, esoteric weirdo ideology pretty well, and I had a vague impression of who my mayor was.
What made you want to be political in your preteens in the first place, if you can remember without doxxing yourself
My dad died suddenly before my eyes when I was a preteen, and I partly blamed both myself and the paramedics for his death — and his death also completely changed the internal dynamics of my family for the worse. That was I think the main thing that pushed me towards politics at a young age, whether it be dedicating myself to helping others to make up for my “failure” to save my dad’s life, or being distrustful of the government because I’d convinced myself the paramedics could’ve saved him if they’d received “better training”, or simply believing that I had to “act like a grown-up” to compensate for my dad’s absence, et cetera.
Then at the same time, I was also an autistic second-generation immigrant; I was starting at a new school with a new schedule, and losing touch of my handful of old friends; I was reaching an age where my gender and sexuality troubles were first starting to manifest; and I had unfettered Internet access. This meant that I just generally had a lot on my plate and a lot of opportunities to become a political chunibyo: making believe as a reaction to a situation I’d been thrown into with neither theory nor agency.
Probably should have asked this immediately but what does chunibyo mean?
—Opening narration of Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions (English dub)
If you’d like to know more, TV Tropes’ page is a pretty good basic overview of what chunibyo is. But yeah, in short, I’m basically saying that I was literally acting like a cartoon archetype of a preteen or teenager who can’t tell their elaborate fantasy world from reality: Sometimes a chunibyo wears an eyepatch and color contacts, and talks with full sincerity of possessing the secret magic powers of the Eye of the Wicked Lord… And sometimes a chunibyo proclaims herself the leader of a New Revolutionary Movement which will overthrow the shackles of the current order, and decorates her room (sorry, “base of operations”) with flags made of colored pencil on A4 paper.
JP: 中二病 chūnibyō, lit. “middle school second-year syndrome”; also localized as “eighth-grader syndrome”. Coined by comedian Hikaru Ijūin in 1999; since then sincerely studied by psychologists. ↩︎