this is not a review of Godzilla Minus One

on root canals, enjoying anime, and being autistic

I'm writing about this a bit after the initial rush has passed, but I do want everyone to know that not only did I see Godzilla Minus One in theaters at the first opportunity, I saw the very first fans-only preview screening in my city on November 29th. I am an enormous Godzilla fan, which I've written about at length before. I'm sure if you wanted to psychoanalyze the roots of my fascination with the G-Man, it probably doesn't go much deeper than the primal pleasure of watching Big Lizard Go Smash, but the older I got and the more I was able to intellectualize Godzilla and what he represented (national fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, and so forth--Matt Zoller Seitz has a fascinating piece about Legendary's Godzilla, King of the Monsters where he analyzes it in terms of religious allegory), the more that I was also able to take a step back and appreciate him as an actual Character, with a Personality all his own.

I've been told by my therapist that I am autistic. (I promise this has to do with the new Godzilla movie, just let me get there.) I am loathe to self-diagnose something like that but I take licensed professionals seriously and my parents have also told me that they were told something similar by a child psychologist when I was six years old and simply chose to do nothing about it. (In retrospect, I actually really appreciate this.) So I've accepted this label, along with ADHD and OCD, as information to help me understand why I am the way that I am and to help me mitigate some of the psychic damage that life inflicts upon me. I am near-1-million-percent positive that anyone who has been following my work for any significant length of time already came to the conclusion that I am autistic long ago.

I like anime and manga/general weeb shit, which is a pretty stereotypical niche interest for autistic people. For a long time my public opinion--kind of as a bit, kind of not--was that anime had no redeeming factors whatsoever. (Hating ska was also a part of this bit, which I'm surprised no one saw through, given how often and I talked about, and continue to talk about, ska bands.) In retrospect, similar to my longtime misguided and very public hatred of metal, this was really just my attempt to distance myself from the "gross" nerd shit (as opposed to, obviously, the extremely cool hyperfixation I had on DIY hardcore and emo). I wasn't like those people! I was Normal and Sociable and Well-Liked By My Peers!

I don't think I was consciously making the connection that I was being self-loathing. There is a LOT of bad shit in the weeb and metal communities: both fan bases historically contain worrisome, well-documented fascist contingencies; anime fandom, far too often, makes space for and/or turns a blind eye towards obvious pedophilia; even when not fascist, metalheads constantly make excuses for racism and general social conservatism under the guise of shitheaded libertarianism. (I was trying to figure out how to write a libertarian=pedophile joke in there somewhere, but no iteration I tried flowed correctly.) I also came of age during a time when TV Tropes, Reddit, and Tumblr were teaching its users about fedora-wearing Nice Guys, many of whom fell into that anime and/or metal nerd bucket, and as a person with a burgeoning leftist sensibility who felt a lot of gender confusion and was sexually inexperienced, I wanted (and continue to want) as little to do as possible with bearded veiled-misogynist virgin losers making attack helicopter jokes. (Goddamn, writing that out felt early-2010s as hell.)

Add to this the fact that the big anime fans in middle school and high school were also the kids who did the Naruto run between classes, sexually harassed me and my friends, and generally were insufferable to be around, and it's really no surprise I hid the interest, mostly didn't keep up with it for years, and loudly denied any and all association with it in public. Who wants to be lumped in with any of that? (And as for metal, I just didn't listen to it, and whatever metal I did listen to, I made excuses about how it was "actually more similar to hardcore than anything else." You can read my "getting into metal" newsletters from a few years ago for more information on that.) It was the same with GamerGate, which probably single-handedly prevented me from engaging with video games as an art form for a solid 7 or so years.

But I was so concerned with not being "perceived as" an Internet Metal Nerd, as a Gamer, as a Weeb, that I also came off as hateful and arrogant, unwilling to engage with media outside of my personal bubble and dismissive of those who did, even though, logically, i knew that I had plenty of friends who were into all that shit and it probably at least irritated them to hear me slag on it all the time. But I think the biggest reason, even beyond not wanting to be perceived as a right-wing CHUD, is that I didn't want people to think I was autistic, which I'm sure A. you could easily critique as internalized ableism and B. lol I clearly failed on, like, every level from surface to sub-atomic. This is long, long after I had grown up and learned what autism actually was, unlearned the toxic stereotypes attached to it, and been exposed to reams of positive autistic representation and known many great autistic people in my own life. I was still just stigmatizing it in my own head. I'm still not sure why, but I would probably put it down to, as always, being extremely concerned with what other people think of me, which is, maybe even more than being judgmental, one of my most toxic traits.

And the truth is, since accepting that I'm autistic, I've also felt a lot more personal freedom to just indulge my ridiculous interests. Ordering a CD-exclusive release of a haunting, dissonant black metal project from a Canadian distro whose website is entirely in French, which I can't read? Check. Taking leaps of faith on visual novels that definitely look horny but fans insist are actually rich in thematic depth and narrative complexity? I picked up the original Muv-Luv trilogy for dirt cheap in a Steam sale and I’m completely at peace with the idea of regretting that decision and abandoning ship if I need to. I've even put aside my long-standing hatred for high fantasy bullshit dialogue (I always thought Game of Thrones was awful because of its dialogue, even before it shat the bed with its fans) to play The Witcher 3.

My wife, for the record, is a saint and an amazing person for accommodating my constant stream of niche interests, and for supporting them even when she doesn't like them. The other night, I asked her what her least favorite embarrassing autistic hobby of mine was, and out of all of the possible options (including anime tiddies, mecha, corpse-paint black metal, and disgustingly gory horror movies), she instantaneously answered "video games, because it's almost like if you were into sports." And even then, she bought me Tears of the Kingdom for Christmas. (We are incapable of waiting for longer than like 3 days to give each other presents.) Patient! Kind! Supportive! And very amused by the fact that it took me 27 years of life on this Earth to figure out that I am autistic when I specifically separate our eating utensils into "Deanna forks and spoons" and "Ellie forks and spoons" for sensory reasons and, if given a number between 1 and 62, can immediately name the corresponding original-series Goosebumps book.

This is a preview of a complete post, published on Patreon. To read the rest of this post in its entirety, including more detailed thoughts on Godzilla Minus One, various top 5 lists, and some discussion about ambient music and extreme metal, please consider contributing to my Patreon, or hit up my Venmo at xyoudontneedmapsx if you’d prefer to show your support with a one-time donation! If you’re interested in a band bio or some freelance writing, email me at xyoudontneedmapsx@gmail.com to hash out the details. If you’d just like to keep up with my dumb life, feel free to follow me on Instagram at youdontneedmaps. Thank you so much for reading., or hit up my Venmo at xyoudontneedmapsx if you’d prefer to show your support with a one-time donation! If you’re interested in a band bio or some freelance writing, email me at xyoudontneedmapsx@gmail.com to hash out the details. If you’d just like to keep up with my dumb life, feel free to follow me on Instagram at youdontneedmaps. Thank you so much for reading.

-xoxo, Ellie