mDuo13

More and more each year, I find coming home for Thanksgiving to be a surreal experience. It occupies a strange space in my life: it's too short to get used to being at "home", but it's not like it's a vacation, since I'm spending it at the place I used to live. Instead, I get this strange impression that I've driven some untold hours through a portal into the past, and arrived in the life I lived up to four years ago.

Suddenly, I've reverted from being an independent adult to living with parents. The only possessions left over in my room are things that I didn't find exciting enough to bring to college with me, which are mostly much older than the things I did bring. Suddenly, I've gone back to living in a climate that gets cold once in a while and (not just at night), where the air has all the scents of my childhood. Even my bed feels like a thing of the past: my feet hang over the end, making it seem like a child's bed after the twin extra longs at college. This feeling also makes me more conscious of things like the year that certain stories take place. Perhaps it's a sign of age, but I'm starting to notice anime that take place in the '90s. Monster of course has a very specific time-span, mostly in the late '90s if my memory serves, but I also noticed that CLANNAD (the "school life" sections, at least) almost certainly takes place in the 1990s, also: nobody in the series has a cell phone or even a computer; in fact, the staff room has what might be a typewriter. There's mention of stores selling CDs, but Sunohara mostly listens to things on cassette tapes, and they have VHS tapes but no DVDs. Being as CLANNAD actually came out back in 2002 (a shockingly-long 6 years ago now), that makes a lot of sense. If you figure that After Story skips several years ahead in time, and its present is roughly concurrent with the game's release in 2002, then the school section of CLANNAD is probably set somewhere around 1997, making it more than 10 years ago now.

While it's kind of shocking, I think that there may be something to be said for setting things in the '90s. It's recent enough that you don't have to do a lot of research on historical details, but it dispenses with some of the most pervasive recent technology (like Google). It seems like it should be difficult not to sound lame if you included details like people IMing/texting each other. Imagine a scenario where your galge protagonist meets a girl in his school and the first thing he does is become her Myspace friend. See what I mean? There are other things that you can't really do the same way any more. For example, a Japanese professor of mine once told the story of a couple whose first date was to be at the zoo, so they agreed to meet by the panda statue - but as it turns out, there was a panda statue in the park and another in the train station, so both of them ended up waiting 3 hours to meet each other. For their next date, they decided to try again, specifying the train station statue... only to discover after 7 hours of waiting (each) that there was a large panda statue at one end of the station and a small statue at the other end. (The happy ending is that eventually this couple managed to get together and ended up married.) But this is a cute mistake of a story that can't happen today: both of them would have cell phones, and they'd just call each other and realize their mistake right away. Yes, you could create a variation of the story that works with cell phones (like someone's phone breaking), but you'd be treading on thin ground to keep it from turning hokey. By contrast, just setting something 8 or 10 years ago allows the tried-and-true option, and gives the impression of being a "period piece", too.

P.S. Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving, eh?