Pillar #4: Anime and D&D, and Politics, Oh My!

This is the fourth and final post in my pillars series, a collection of posts all about me and the person that I am now (January 2026). In the last post we talked about video games (especially Kingdom Hearts), before that it was all about the wacky and wonderful word of pro-wrestling, and my first was about being weird.

Anime is for Nerds LMAO

It's the Summer of 1999 and a gray, blue, and gold robot named T.O.M. is telling me that he has the best anime ever to offer me. He's got this souped up space ship called the Absolution and eventually he gets this AI friend named SARA who upgrades T.O.M to a new and sleeker design as well as sounding a lot like Spike from Cowboy Bebop (and a million other voices from my childhood and beyond).

And well, who am I to say no?

I'm not sure which anime was the first I ever watched but I remember the one that stuck with me the most: Dragon Ball Z. Even if you've never watched anime you probably know all about DBZ. Whether it's because of the constant screaming to power up, the transformations, knowing who Goku is because of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, or some other more obscure reason, DBZ was/is huge.

I loved the fight scenes of course, they were so frenetic and I was always worried about what was going to happen if Frieza won, and then if the Androids got their way, or what if Cell defeated teen Gohan? And so on and so forth, to the point that I traced Goku SSJ3 when I was a kid and this was coming from a child who had no interest (or business) drawing! But that's how much DBZ inspired me as a child, it made me consider creative outlets I normally wouldn't.

I, of course, bought the video games (I especially loved Budokai Tenkaichi 2 for the Nintendo Wii), the action figures, the movies. I remember watching Cooler's Revenge and a lot of the other TV specials. If there had been movie showings anywhere near me I'd have begged my mom to take me, etc.

I'm not saying I was some super fan, plenty of other kids were probably way more into DBZ than I was, but it was something I loved and, thankfully, I still do.

But of course, DBZ wasn't the only anime that graced me with their incredible Japanese animation (what anime is short for), here's some of my Toonami faves:

1. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing - So edgy, so much fashion, awesome action and politics that definitely went over my young uneducated head.
2. The Big O - Another mecha show with deep philosophical themes of agency and personhood, also robots fought each other, so that was fun!
3. Outlaw Star - Everyone loved Cowboy Bebop but I never got into it as a kid (probably didn't know about it), so this was as close as I got for a long time.
4. Rave Master - The twist in this show blew my mind as a kid.
5. Duel Masters - It was like if Yu-Gi-Oh! was self-aware!
6. YuYu Hakusho - I've re-watched this twice as an adult and with the exception of the last season, it still holds up. This was my #2 anime if there ever was one.
7. Yu-Gi-Oh! - I was such a huge fan of this show that I got into the actual card game for multiple years, I still have all of my decks and binders of cards.
8. Naruto - I mean, come on, everyone does the run for a reason. I've gone back to watch some of the best fights and they still rock.
9. Tenchi Muyo - It probably doesn't hold up culturally anymore (and I'm not interested in finding out) but what teenage boy wouldn't want to watch a show where a bunch of hot alien women are into the shy, awkward, introverted boy?
10. Sailor Moon - OK, to be fair I don't remember how into Sailor Moon I was as a kid but I definitely watched it and can't exclude such a popular show.

There's more I loved that were on other channels (Pokemon, of course) but Toonami was my biggest inspiration for my love of anime. And it wasn't just the shows either. TOM gave video game reviews, there were amazing "bumper" videos that I look back on now and get chills from like Broken Promises (Dreams) and I wonder just how much that affected me as a child.

Unlike video games, I'm pretty sure I always kept up with anime to one degree or another. In recent years (that is to say the past 5 or so) I've used CrunchyRoll and YouTube to really keep up with at least the biggest anime series out there like My Hero Academia, Chainsaw Man, Dragon Ball Super, Dandadan, and others.

I have a Naruto backpack, a Kingdom Hearts (which is basically anime in a video game, let's be real) wallet, and a premium subscription to CrunchyRoll so I don't have to deal with ads, though honestly I'm less and less proud of that last fact.

I probably have more anime shirts than any other genre of shirt and I've watched enough Japanese subtitled anime at this point to know some basic Japanese phrases off the top of my head, but nothing especially cool or interesting.

Basically, I'm a massive weeb.

If you're wondering about the title of this section, I have a sticker on my backup laptop with the character Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion sipping a cup of something saying ANIME IS FOR NERDS LMAO.

And yeah, she's not wrong.

But that nerdiness got me through a lot, so no regrets in the slightest here.

Dungeons and Dragons and Dory

It's the Fall of 2019, and I'm looking for some way, any way, to connect with the college students around me. I'm in college for my second (but not last) time after having dropped out 7 years prior due to financial concerns and being unsure whether my philosophy degree was going to do much for me professionally.

But 7 years later I was back and decided, ah, fuck it. The world is fucked up and I'll be unlucky if I ever have to pay back my loans. Plus, I just like thinking deeply about the world alongside others, so I'll go back for an even more vague humanities degree (with a focus in philosophy) because it's down the street.

Enter: Dungeons and Dragons

I had heard about it before, of course. I knew about it first(?) from the Weird Al song "White and Nerdy" (which, side note, would totally be my theme song if I was a pro-wrestler) and later from, of course, Stranger Things. I got into it even more in 2016 when The Adventure Zone caught my attention and ended up sobbing to some of the episodes because I found them so moving. From there, I watched Team Four Star's TFS At the Table and started considering myself interested in playing D&D and not content to just watch it, but actually play it too.

So in 2019 I joined my local RPG group at the college I went to. I'd already made the acquaintance of some of the members of this group and was happy to play my first D&D game ever with some of them. Unlike high school I do keep up with one of them but for the most part, it was the games that really kept us together.

My first D&D adventure was done with a friend named Dan who had been playing for a long time and probably DMing (Dungeon Mastering) for longer. As soon as I started playing I asked him about DMing and who I should learn from so I can be good at it myself. He recommended people like Matt Colville and his series Running the Game which you can find in its entirety on YouTube.

But back to the game itself: It was set in a medieval time where democracy is still an unheard of concept, nobility rules the world, and the word "communism" is still seen as very dangerous. So, of course, my first character was a chain-smoking sounding woman named Liv who was a bisexual libertarian-socialist.

Yeah, I'm pretty cool.

She eventually became the leader of our motley crew of vigilantes, leading them in a fierce resistance to the nobility and monarchy. I still remember when one of the characters in the campaign (and again this is my first ever time playing D&D!) sacrificed himself for The Good of the Cause and he had been pretty much the de facto leader, given his experience in role-playing. He gave this grand speech about how Liv needed to take the reigns, lead everyone to liberation, bring The Embers (our group) to victory. But Liv (and really me) was pleading with him that I don't deserve this, telling him that I can't do this, and that he should pick someone else.

He never relented, and I'll never forget this moment.

As I've mentioned prior, a couple of years before, 2017, was one of my worst and my self-confidence, although slightly repaired by 2019, was still fragile. It's not an over-exaggeration to say that this speech from my comrade in arms was exactly what I (and Liv) needed in that moment. We needed someone to see us, really see us, and believe in us anyways, despite how fucked up we obviously were.

Ultimately, Liv and the Embers overthrew the monarchy in a protracted war and although there were still other places to overthrow and spread the cries of freedom to, we had succeeded in our mission. I've never used Liv since but there isn't a day when I think of D&D that I wouldn't smile and think of her. She was my first ever character and, honestly, she was also probably my favorite and best.

I also got really lucky with Dan.

There are countless horror stories out there about first time campaigns making people want to give up D&D and never play again. Maybe that's because of bad players (I also got lucky here for the most part), but more often it's because of a bad DM who doesn't know what they are doing. Dan not only knew what he was doing but was (to me at least) ultra-confident in his decisions. His political maneuvering and grand orchestrated plots are something I still aspire to.

After that though, I went on my own in the club and started DMing. I had a plan that I was going to run a game called Bubblegumshoe, which was basically Scooby Doo or Nancy Drew in high school and turn it into a cooperative TTRPG. I had gotten together three players for it and we were all set to start playing.

One problem: It was March 2020.

So yeah, the first campaign I ever wrote was during the lockdown and had to be done over Discord. It wouldn't be the last one I did during lockdown either. But I was determined to make it work and even managed to have the player's characters play D&D within Bubblegumshoe and that was really audacious, looking back.

From there I ran other campaigns and one-shots for people. Currently, I'm running my first homebrew campaign (my own world) in D&D and it's been successful as far as I can tell. This was a big step for me after over 5 years of dungeon mastering non-original content, but I'm glad for it.

To Be Governed

I briefly touched on politics when I wrote about being a weirdo. It is probably no exaggeration to say that politics have been a motivating factor for me through much of my teenage and adult life. As I already said, the band Rage Against The Machine got me political back in the late 2000s when I was in high school. From there I read The Bill of Wrongs, was already watching The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, plus I lived in Massachusetts (a word I still struggle to spell!) and was raised rather non-religiously.

So it was pretty easy for me to be some kind of leftist of varying degrees, at least starting out. Then I discovered some (and I can only apologize, I was an impressionable teenager like any other) forums on MySpace that had the word "libertarian" (and not in the cool sense of earlier). This led me down a rabbit hole of generally discrediting the government (good) but also being blind to social dynamics and not factoring those in to my philosophy as much (that's bad).

Luckily, that didn't last too long, though it influenced my actions and behaviors in ways that I regret to this day. Soon enough though I found myself dissatisfied with boiler plate libertarianism and started looking into anarchism. I still liked the focus on individual rights and being inherently suspicious of the government, but corporations, and capitalism, deserved our ire as well and so I tried to fuse the two.

Over the years I led the charge with others (under another name, another life), to turn the libertarian movement leftward. As you can probably tell if you know anything about politics, it didn't go well. Around 2016 when Trump was getting into office and I was figuring out that I wasn't a dude, I started feeling more and more out of place within the movement. Heck, even within the anarchist subsections of the movement I started feeling out of place.

Some of that was definitely my fault and I don't blame anyone else for the mistakes I made during this time. But whatever I want to blame or don't want to blame, the end result remained the same and I went on to pastures new in 2017.

From there I started organizing around matters of work which I had already been doing for a few years prior. I blogged, wrote a book (again, different name and life), and did a lot of online organizing that led to a lot of cool momentum. Unfortunately, in the process this ultimately led to me getting burnt out on political organizing entirely. Again, a result of my own mistakes and actions.

All of this is why I call myself a "burnt out part-time anarchist". I mostly organize in my own daily life and try to spread basic messages of liberty, solidarity, and equality, through my actions towards others. Especially as I work with children and want to make sure the next generation does things better than the millennials have at changing the world for the better, or at least better than I did.

I still have a fierce dislike of authority and probably always will. I generally dislike how work is organized under capitalism and likely always will. My politics are of an extreme nature and I haven't magically changed my positions because I got older and realized how naive I was when I was younger or whatever.

People like to say, especially when you're an anarchist, that you're a dreamer. But I'm OK with dreaming if it leads to some action down the line, can't make a building without schematics, can't build sandcastles on clouds.

To quote Henry David Thoreau:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

And the foundations for me are a society that focuses on three key things:

1. Liberty - That is to say, individual freedom for everyone, regardless of age, ability, creed, or what have you. This is not just a"liberty" in the positive sense that anyone can do whatever they want, but also a negative liberty which denies that your liberty should not infringe on the liberty of others.
2. Equality - Specifically equality of authority. I have no interest in faux equality that makes us equal under a system of oppression. It brings me no joy to see queer folks, for example, go into the military and bomb Afghani children, any more than it does to see cis hetero white dudes do that. Instead, I envision a world where authority is held collectively and equally among individuals.
3. Solidarity - A world where people can freely and easily show support for each other in direct and material ways. Mutual aid funds, direct action support networks, online organizing and activism that can transcend international borders (which are just imaginary lines anyways).

For the record, this blog is not particularly political. I won't be, for instance, writing about how terrible Trump is or how fucking atrocious and Nazi-like ICE are, for example. I'm also not a preacher, I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything, just sharing what positions I'm coming from so you can know me better.

I'm much more likely to write about media (video games, anime, movies, things I'm reading, etc.) than I am to do so about politics. But occasionally I read political things or have takes that I'll share. Basically, it'll happen, but it won't be common and if I do, then you'll at least now know where I'm coming from better.

All of that said, this is the last pillar blog. Next week I'll be talking about video games and financial politics and how they can frustratingly intersect.

...Dammit I'm already writing about it!