March 2020

I was fifteen when the schools closed. My city went quiet in a way I had never experienced, and the usual scaffolding of my life — the commute, the hallways, the rhythm of class periods and lunch tables and after-school everything — disappeared in about a week. My family is not an anime family. My parents watched news and nature documentaries. My older brother played video games. I had never really given anime much thought beyond a few things I had glimpsed at friends' houses. But I had a lot of hours and a streaming service, and one night I started something on a recommendation and could not stop. What I found was not what I expected to find, which I realize is a strange thing to say about animated television. I expected it to be a diversion. What it became was something closer to a curriculum.

What I Mean by Education

I do not mean that I learned academic content from anime, although some of it incidentally covers historical periods, scientific concepts, and philosophical questions with more depth than I was getting in school at the time. I mean that I was getting an education in emotional range, in moral complexity, in how to think about the kinds of questions that do not appear on standardized tests. A lot of what I watched centered on characters navigating belonging, failure, identity, and the specific difficulty of figuring out who you want to be when the people around you have their own strong opinions about it. These were not abstract themes for me in 2020. They were the exact questions I was sitting with, alone in my room, with no social context to test my answers against.

The Emotional Vocabulary It Gave Me

There is research from the University of Toronto's psychology department on the relationship between fiction consumption and what researchers call theory of mind — the capacity to model the internal states of other people. Their work found that literary and narrative fiction, more than other forms of media, develops this capacity through its sustained attention to character interiority. The mechanism is practice: you spend time inhabiting someone else's perspective, and that practice transfers. Anime gave me access to emotional states and relationship dynamics that I had limited exposure to in my own life. Not because my life was sheltered — it was not especially — but because adolescent social environments do not produce much range. The specific alchemy of grief and loyalty I watched characters navigate, the way a series could hold competing moral claims without resolving them too cleanly, expanded what I understood emotions to be capable of.

The Tangent About Subtitles

I should mention: I watched almost entirely in Japanese with subtitles, which means I spent lockdown also inadvertently learning the rhythms of a language I had no previous exposure to. I cannot speak Japanese. But I understand tone, register, and emotional subtext in ways that feel different from just reading words. Something in the patterning got in. I have since talked to other people my age who did the same thing, and many of them report a similar experience — a literacy in the original performances that does not translate into language competency but does transfer into a different kind of listening.

Community as a Secondary Classroom

The fandom was not where I expected to go next, but it was the natural extension. Once I was deep enough into specific series to have opinions, I found online spaces where people were discussing them seriously — not just reacting but analyzing, connecting themes across episodes, writing long essays about character arcs and the ways specific scenes resonated with their own experiences. These spaces were the closest thing I had to intellectual community during lockdown. A study from the University of Leicester on fan communities and adolescent development found that participation in organized fan discussion groups was associated with improved critical reading skills, stronger written communication, and more sophisticated engagement with moral and ethical questions than non-fan peer groups. The depth of engagement that fandom rewards is not trivial.

What I Carried Forward

I am in university now, studying literature. My professors sometimes ask where students developed a tolerance for ambiguity in narrative — the ability to sit with stories that do not resolve neatly, that leave characters morally complicated, that respect the audience's capacity to hold contradiction. I always think of 2020. What anime gave me during lockdown was not a substitute for school. It was something different — a form of sustained engagement with human complexity that the school I had been going to was not really offering, even before it closed. I think I would have found it eventually. The pandemic just moved up the timeline.