I was twelve the first time anime infected my brain—a single accidental click while trying to escape the sound of my parents eviscerating each other in the next room over, their shrieks ricocheting down the endless corridors of our suburban mausoleum. Every day the same: sun-bleached vinyl siding, chemically green lawns, my mother and father locked in eternal, pointless war over who failed harder at life, at marriage, at raising the mistake in the bedroom down the hall. That mistake was me.

Anime was never a choice. It was an inevitability. One minute I was a bored, lonely kid. The next, I was mainlining garish cartoons with eyes bigger than my future and voices higher than my hopes. Teto Kasane was the final nail. It wasn’t just escapism—it was lobotomy. It didn’t save me from my parents; it just anesthetized me while they finished killing anything worth saving. They screamed about bills, about cheating, about who ruined me. They never screamed about me. I was just furniture, another asset to fight over, to neglect, to blame for the smell.

shut the fuck up faggot

By fifteen I was already ruined. Real women? Just meat puppets with none of the engineered perfection of the 2D trash flooding my synapses. I stopped even pretending to care about school, life, hygiene, the future. Instead I marinated in porn, fanfiction, endless re-edits of the same two dozen tropes, because why not? Reality is a trash fire. My parents made sure I saw every minute of their decline, two failures orbiting a black hole, tearing each other apart and somehow always remembering to blame me for the gravity.

I tried to escape—Discord servers, forums, fan art, self-insert fanfics where at least Teto pretended to care about me, or at least didn’t scream at me about the electric bill. My father raged about my “uselessness” while microwaving his dinner at 2am. My mother blamed the internet, the school, the universe—anyone but herself. They blamed each other, always, for everything. Why am I like this? Look in the mirror. Look at each other.

Now I’m 24, skillless, joyless, unemployable. I can’t talk to women unless they have cel-shaded hair and a tragic backstory. The only marketable skill I have is identifying Vocaloid songs before the first verse hits. My parents are still fighting. Still at war. I’m just the collateral damage, the smoking crater they point to when they want to prove how thoroughly the other failed. Every time I hear them screaming, I put my headphones on and drown myself in another episode, another remix, another porn comic, anything to keep reality out. Anime didn’t ruin me—my parents did. Teto just made the decline less boring.

If there’s a lesson, it’s this: nothing matters, no one gets out, and anime is just the morphine drip while your family tears itself apart in the next room. If you’re reading this, log off. Or don’t. There’s nothing on the other side worth coming back for.