I’m mostly an adult by now, I think. At least in the important ways. After all, I did spend the bulk of my summer working eight hours a day, five days a week, living on my own and cooking for myself. Though, on closer inspection, most of those eight hours at work were spent playing tag or reading children’s books to second graders, and my self-sufficient diet was entirely comprised of noodles and turkey sandwiches. And anyone who reads this blog regularly knows well enough by now that I have a lifelong obsession with Bionicles. So yeah, my adulthood is, at best, contested.
I bring this up because this week I have yet another reason to doubt my adulthood: I’m stoked out of my mind for a Cartoon Network miniseries called Infinity Train. I found the pilot episode on youtube during my first semester at college and became an online soldier through a number of fake accounts to pester Cartoon Network into green-lighting it. Despite making fifteen or twenty new email addresses for this purpose, I don’t think I’ve ever told another physical human being that I’m into it. That’s because, as comes with the territory of being on Cartoon Network, it’s a kid’s show, and a consistently silly one at that: there’s a fart joke in the first two minutes of the pilot, and the main characters are a girl, a robot, and a talking dog. I could add that it’s more complex and darker than it sounds: it pits a sensible child against a senseless world in what I think is a metaphor for how growing up is mostly an understanding of a lack of knowledge rather than the omniscience we all imagine adulthood to be as kids. And while that’s true, it’d be a lie to say its status as a cartoon or a kid’s show was just a coincidence. I like it because it’s kid’s show.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’ve always felt a lot of shame about that. Even when I was a literal kid, I always felt like I should be striving for something more mature and sophisticated, and in high school I illegally streamed my favorite cartoons, even though I could’ve seen them for free and without virus-risk on the TV downstairs, just because I didn’t want my family to know what I was watching. I’ve even been dodgy around admitting that I watch anime, even though most of those shows are made for adults, because it flows into the same kind of stereotypes as watching cartoons: a nostalgia-addict basement dweller living a grotesque kind of prolonged childhood because they can’t live a real life. More than anything, that’s what I’ve been afraid of being, maybe because I partly am. In my first fall at college, learning to live on my own and hearing professors say over and over “I will destroy everything you think is true,” I was flailing around for anything to make me feel like a kid again: spending hours rediscovering my childhood home of Waco on Google Maps Streetview and watching old videos I’d uploaded to Youtube in middle school. I didn’t even plan to go to church in college, but after a disappointing Saturday night at my first college party, I needed to go somewhere familiar, and I found a place a block from my school where they sang the same hymns and read the same passages as I did seven times a week throughout my childhood.
The problem with nostalgia is that, since you can’t communicate your childhood to anyone else, you can’t really defend anything you like. I’ve kept my cartoon and anime habits secret because I have no idea if I like what I like because it’s good, or because it’s familiar. It gets even tougher when it comes to religion, and I can’t defend why I’m a Christian instead of any other faith except that I grew up learning the gospels, and by now it feels so important that I can’t abandon it.
The closest I come to a conclusion is that no one is really any better. No one ever makes a clean break from their childhood and sees the world in objective eyes. Even people who go out of their way to grow up, saying things for maximum shock value and calling out anything they don’t like as immature, are just as influenced by what came before as the rest of us. Maybe I cling a little harder to my childhood than most people, probably because I was blessed to have a pretty good one, but that doesn’t make what I like any less real.
This borders on the old “art cannot be judged, everything is subjective,” argument, which is terrifying to anyone trying to make art or writing or anything beautiful (me, for example). But that’s not quite what I’m saying here. Infinity Train is excellent, at least six out of ten episode in. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s got a gripping story that feels like it’s come out of my most vivid dreams and nightmares. And yeah, on top of all that, it’s a cartoon, and maybe that’s why I like it. But that doesn’t make anything else that I said untrue.
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