When I was in eighth grade, two of my friends came to school one day with some new jokes.
“Haha,” one of them said, “look at this milk. It has a cow on it. Moo.”
And then they would laugh for a while before the second friend would respond with “Dance, cow, dance!”
I stared at them in confusion, begging them to tell me where they heard this joke and why it was so funny. It was from an abridged series they told me. Look it up on Youtube.
I, who still had to survive on obscenely slow dial-up internet on a computer located in an exposed corner of our living room with speakers that had only two settings – impossibly quiet and heard-by-everyone-in-the-house – did not watch the video.
Over the course of the next several months my life underwent three enormous changes. The first was that the eldest of my two brothers officially moved out of the family house. This was marked by his spending the summer at a house he rented in Eau Claire, instead of returning home to work his usual summer job. The second was that the rest of us moved family houses, from a town just along the Wisconsin/Illinois border to one farther north. The third thing was that I started high school in a completely new school district.
So there I was entering my freshman year of high school with no friends. Not an ideal situation for anyone, but still a fairly common experience to go through. People pack up their things and move away all the time. Sometimes they do it for a better job or to get an education. But I was fourteen. I was fourteen and had no idea how to really make lasting connections with anyone. I had gone to summer camps and weekend-long writing workshops where you just kind of learn to grab on to someone in your group and hope for the best, but nothing like moving to an entirely new school. Nothing like leaving behind for any long stretch of time the friends and family I had never been without. Not to mention, at this point I had yet to discover a lot of key points about myself. Like that I had rapidly developing social anxiety which would later develop into chronic anxiety which would even later cause repeated periods of depression. I had yet to even start developing any sense of comfort in my own body or realized that I was not just a “late bloomer” in the department of developing crushes on all the cute boys around me. And when you’re a shy, socially anxious, advanced student your chances of connecting with other kids your age are significantly lowered.
All this boils down to the fact that I would dive at absolutely any opportunity I had to make a connection to someone. There was a girl in band with me named Megan, who would become one of my best friends. But for most of that first year she was just a girl I happened to have a class or two with and we happened to share a love of all things Japanese. I found out that she also liked anime and I latched on. And then one day that mysterious video re-appeared in my life.
“This milk has a cow on it! Dance cow, dance.” And then Megan and her friend laughed.
I, in my desperate need to find a way to connect to humans, watched the video that night. It was hilarious. The video was titled “Naruto Abridged,” and was the first episode of a series of videos by two friends. These videos made fun of a cartoon called Naruto by re-dubbing each episode of the show in a humorous way. I loved this for reasons I cannot entirely explain. When I had finished all the episodes I wanted more. And more I certainly found.
The makers the Naruto Abridged series had an online friendship with another abridged series maker who made Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series (YGOTAS). This was how I discovered Martin Billany, who goes by the online alias of “Little Kuriboh.” Now Yu-gi-oh! was a show near and dear to my heart. It had been one of my favorite shows as a kid and I still watched it and its spin-off shows nearly every Saturday morning. Somedays one of my brothers, Cody, would watch with me. We’d have nearly the same conversation every time.
“Ok, this show makes no sense,” Cody would say.
“Well, no. But what exactly are you talking about?”
Cody gestured at the TV, “You can’t attack on the first turn. Don’t any of these guys know the actual rules of the card game?”
“Cody,” I said with an exasperated eye roll, “the show was made before the card game was invented. The writers had to make the rules up as they go. It gets better in later seasons, though.”
“Yeah whatever. Their hair is still ridiculous, though.”
I looked at the main character’s red, yellow, and black-spiked hair. “Now that is something we can agree on.”
Since I was already used to talking about how crazy Yu-Gi-Oh! was, I was immediately excited to watch someone else making fun of it and pointing out all of the silly stuff in the show. The first episode of YGOTAS is barely four minutes long. It has terrible video and audio quality. The voice acting is sub-par. The writing is iconic.
In the coming months I would learn many things about the man behind the animation. It turned out that Martin Billany was the inventor of the abridged series. Martin grew up in England and moved to the U.S as an adult. He voiced and edited the first episode of YGOTAS and released it in 2006. It was meant to be a one-shot, but the overwhelmingly positive response he received encouraged him to continue. Today, that first video has some three million views. I’m not going to say how many of those belong to me and my friends (it’s a lot). Martin has so far abridged sixty-four episodes of the original show, two movies, several spin-off episodes, and Naruto Abridged; and created a dozen themed song parodies.
Martin’s videos became a staple of my life. Whenever I had a bad day I would go back and watch one of his videos. I would laugh if I could but even if I did not feel like laughing that day there was something comforting about knowing those videos were always there. And I am far from being his only fan. It eventually became commonplace for my friends and I to quote his videos.
One morning after staying over at her house, I locked eyes with Megan over a bowl of cereal and deadpanned “YugiOs, they’re yugi-licious.”
She shot right back with an “anyone who makes a Little Kuriboh reference around here is going to get their kneecaps busted in with a wrench…specifically this wrench.”
I returned with the ever classic “screw the rules I have money,” and the quote war was on.
As weird as some of this may sound, I promise I have never quite made it to the point of obsession. “Fascination” may be a better word. When I develop a new interest in something I suddenly get the need to learn absolutely everything about it, and I had become interested in the work of Little Kuriboh. He was a comedian and a brilliant writer, all things I still strive to be. And he seemed to be living the life I had always dreamed of. He was married to a person he loved, he was making money doing the things he loved, and he had a hoard of fans. And I couldn’t imagine how a life could get any better than that. However, life has a way of hurting the best of us.
Let’s back-up a bit. Remember me, friendless in high school? Ok. Fast forward a few years. Don’t worry about missing anything. Trust me when I say the highlights reel is all you really need. It is now winter break of my freshman year of college. I am no longer friendless, I am definitely not heterosexual, and I have had several extended periods of anxiety. In the same span of time, Martin had gotten divorced from his first wife and remarried to a voice actress named Marianne Miller.
“Megan!” I yell excitedly through the phone. “You’ll never guess who’s going to be at Kitsune Kon this year.”
“Is TeamFourStar coming back?” she asks.
“Yes, but this year they’ve convinced LK to come with them!”
She gasps. “No way! Little Kuriboh is coming to Wisconsin? We have to go.”
I nod enthusiastically, already anticipating the day I would get to meet one of my heroes. Megan, a couple other friends, and I had gone to Kitsune Kon, an anime convention that at the time was in Appleton, for a day the year before and had a lot of fun. So it was no problem coordinating a group for a second year. We left early in the morning from my house to make the hour-long trip to Appleton. The sun was just rising, casting the sky in hues of orange and red. But not even the early hour could dampen my excitement. I was buzzing the entire ride.
“I’m gonna be at all his panels early to get a good seat. Do you think he’ll have his booth set up to sell t-shirts?” I wondered aloud to my then-boyfriend in the passenger seat.
“Heck’d if I know,” he eloquently responded, “I don’t even get what the big deal with this guy is.”
“He’s Little Kuriboh. This guy got me through so many crappy days in high school. I don’t know where I’d be without him.” I couldn’t understand why this was such a hard concept to understand. I was excited to meet Martin, a person who was a fantastic writer and really funny who had helped me through some dark spots the past few years. But my boyfriendcouldn’t seem to grasp that idea, that there was a life behind the show making it move. I wasn’t just interested in the guy because he was the creator of something I cared about. I just wanted to know more about him as a person. It’s a need for connection that I think everyone feels at some point.
At registration, I looked at the convention guide and found the exact location of his table. I went straight there. Martin was sitting down, talking to another attendee. He was wearing his favorite hat, black with the triforce from The Legend of Zelda in gold. I looked across the table at the t-shirts he had displayed and my eyes landed on a poster. It had only recently been released: an art commission of every single character that had been featured on YGOTAS up to that point surrounding Martin as he sat on a golden throne. Mildly narcisstic? Yes. But still wickedly cool. I pulled out my wallet.
“Um, excuse me? Can I please have one of these posters?”
Martin looked over at me and smiled. “Sure. Do you want me to autograph it?”
I think my heart stopped. “Oh my gosh you’d do that? That would be amazing!”
“Of course, it’s no problem. What’s your name?”
Oh my god he wants to know my name, I thought as my heart pounded from nervousness. “It’s Cassie. C-A-S-S-I-E.”
He laughed at that. “Want to hear a funny story? The first person I ever got drunk with was named Cassie.” Or at least I think he said something like this. It’s been a while and I really was still nervous.
“No way,” I laughed at that, felt myself relaxing a little. I remembered what I had been telling myself since I first became a fan of Little Kuriboh: he was a person like anyone else.
And then he asked me another question. “Do you have a favorite character?”
I know at this point my brain stopped. I panicked. “Um, Bakura?” Bakura was not my favorite character in the original show. He was not even my favorite character on Little Kuriboh’s abridged series. I still to this day am completely confused as to how on earth that name is the one to emerge from my mouth. But there it was, out to the world with not enough cerebral function to take it back.
Martin ended up autographing the poster and writing “Hey Cassie! Why so British?” I thanked him profusely. Our hands brushed when he handed me the poster.
On January 12, 2015, Martin released a video that would further change my life. In fact, I think it’s fair to say this video set my life on a different path altogether. The video was entitled “LittleKuriboh’s We’re Still Here - 1 - Meeting TeamFourStar.” At this time in my life I had broken up with my boyfriend, lost a grandfather, lost a job, and once again moved family houses. My anxiety had sky-rocketed as a result of taking twenty credits of courses and all this in turn was spiraling me into the longest period of depression I had ever faced. And then I saw the video in my Youtube subscriptions feed.
After being diagnosed in 2014, Martin decided that he wanted to find a way to not only help himself work through everything he was facing, but also find a way to help others. I think that’s one of the things I admire about him the most. He has never allowed all his years of internet fame to change him as a person in a negative way. And so his sense of kindness prevailed. In every episode of We’re Still Here, Martin, or occasionally his wife Marianne, will talk about something that makes him happy. This was one of the first things his therapist told Martin to do: make a list of everything that makes you feel happy and fill your life with those things. Remember those things when everything feels wrong and you can’t remember what the point of existence is. These things that make Martin happy have ranged from making funny character voices, meeting his best friends, going to a specific convention, or just spending time with his cats. The second half of every episode is sometimes harder to listen to. These sections are about some experiences of having depression. Martin talks very openly about having bad days and public breakdowns, feeling suicidal, or feeling worthless or discouraged. It can be hard to listen to.
If I thought Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series changed my life in a positive way, then We’re Still Here altered it completely. I started thinking a lot about how I had been feeling for the past few years of my life and comparing it to the experiences Martin was talking about. The more I listened the more of a chord it struck with me. I started to think of days I couldn’t really remember. Times where I was just going through the motions of life and pretending like it didn’t require every single ounce of energy I had. I thought of all the days where I didn’t eat. It just didn’t seem worth the effort. With the help of LK I realized that I too had been suffering from depression, more than likely triggered by my anxiety. This realization was both terrifying and comforting. I discovered something new about myself that threw my life in a new direction. However, I had a friend to guide me through it. And I think that has made all the difference in the world. Depression exhibits itself in different ways depending on the person and that was something I had yet to realize. By sharing his experiences with the world, Martin has created that possibility. He is working step-by-step to create an accurate image of what mental illnesses are really like.
In “We’re Still Here #4 - Monty Oum/Bad Days,” Martin addresses the death of Monty Oum, another web content creator who worked with the production company Rooster Teeth. In it, Martin describes the only time he met Monty in person. LK emphasizes how that one experience was enough to understand Monty as the genuinely nice person he was. That is the same way I feel about my first encounter with Martin. I only met him in person once, we had an incredibly brief exchange, and then we went our separate ways. But between that encounter and watching everything he has created in his life, I feel like I’ve gotten to know him. His work is inspirational and has created so many opportunities for people around the world. Someday soon I want to go to another convention he is attending so I can tell him how much he has helped me. I want to go and tell him “I’m still here.”
