Someone might have done this already but I gave it a shot! Feel free to correct me if I made any mistakes.
“In Some Ways, Armin is My men”
[Referring to Image] That was a sketch of Armen from this month. I thought it was a little too dazzling, like a summer commercial, so I erased it and drew it over. But for some reason that impression didn’t change much in the final drawing.
While drawing this month’s chapter, I thought that Armin is strongly influenced by one of my hometown friends.
While he and I were in elementary school, playing with B-Daman and air guns, we would always say stuff like, “We can’t get the toys we want as kids, but when we grow up and can spend money freely, we’re gonna buy them all.” That kind of thing.
Now, as an adult, he’s fulfilling that wish and gradually collecting all the things he wanted back then. And he reports back to me all happy, like “This is really great! The such-and-such of so-and-so is just the best!”
But in my case, now that I’m 30, I’ve unsurprisingly lost my childhood interest in B-Daman and air guns and Zoids and Yugioh and CoroCoro Comics.
Somehow, I feel really guilty about that. And I think this is probably the reason:
That purity of his is something that was supposed to be incredibly important to us – it’s the sensitivity we once had that we leave behind as we get older.
And I think that’s normal for everyone. It’s normal to gradually kill off your old self like that, without even knowing it.
But he hasn’t killed his old self at all. In other words, you could consider him sinless and pure.
My friend reaches out to me, and I killed my old self long ago. And I impersonate the old me so my friend doesn’t find out.
That’s what I feel guilty about. And I envy him. And maybe I always wanted to write about that.
It’s not like I went into this with that in mind, but writing manga is kind of like an unconscious psych test. So that part of me that I killed off… I think Armen might be him.
