Complicated Age: Passion, hobbies, and aging through the lens of Complex Age
Content Warning: Brief mentions of suicidality, dysphoria, and fatphobia
Spoilers for all of Complex Age
Sakuma Yui’s Complex Age came to me in June 2016, right on the cusp of my departure to Japan. I’d just finished my Masters and for the first time in my life, I’d be leaving America. Gone was my time as a student: I was stepping into adulthood and finding a manga where the cast of characters mirrored maintaining a hobby familiar to me–cosplay–while being expected to meet markers of maturity felt like a warm hug, making those tender first steps even easier.
And at its core Complex Age is a story about passion and growing older. It’s a story about the passion of a hobby that consumes you, about the passion of wanting to live in the moment of the snick of a camera’s shutter forever. It’s all about growing into a hobby and growing old with it.
It’s about the hobby being so intimate to you that you can barely breath without it.
At least, that’s the way it is for protagonist Kataura “Nagi” Nagisa, who actively hides her cosplay from her coworkers and her parents. After all, who amongst us hasn’t hid a nerdy hobby? Perhaps not as much now, but I certainly hid my passions as I got older, revealing the cards I held close to my chest less and less as time has gone on.
Nagi holds her cards close too, feigning “normalcy” at her day job while cleverly calculating funds on a weekly basis to dedicate to her true passion: cosplay. And dedicate herself she does, squeezing herself into the 2D image of her favorite character, the titular Magical Ururu, a red riding hood-type of girl with all the magic in the world in her eyes and a cute catchphrase to summon her power…until someone tells her she’s too old to play a magical girl.
Complex Age and Its Fashionable Look at Ideals vs. Reality
“Love is a curse. It’s suffocating...and so...comforting.”
For many of us growing up, we have ideas on what we and/or the world should be like. We look at our surroundings, process everything around, and then decide whether to adapt or strive for something better. What we believe based on our experiences becomes a huge part of our identities. While this is a good thing for the self, the world almost always stands ready to go against what you hold to be true. Case in point - look at fandom vs. the real world. Geek culture has become so prominent that it creates ideals and ideology in people on how things should be. Alas, the nature of reality has shown that even fans are not immune to bias.
I want to take another look at Yui Sakama’s Complex Age to highlight how the main character’s ideals become broken over time and how it isn’t such a terrible thing to happen.
As I discussed in an earlier post about the series, Complex Age is about a 26-year-old worker named Nagisa Kataura who cosplays outside of work. She hides her hobby in order to not be judged. However, when she gets into cosplay mode, Nagisa turns into a harsh critic over how the perfect cosplay should be. She obsesses over details that most fans don’t think about. Nagisa will go as far as to criticize whether fans watch the series they cosplay from if they do the wrong poses or say the wrong catchphrases. However, Nagisa has some doubts due to her age as she feels insecure about anyone younger than her that can pull off the same cosplays she does with no problem.
That tension becomes escalated as Nagisa & her friend, Kimiko, meet Aya Kurihara, a new young cosplayer who wishes to learn from Nagisa out of admiration. A cosplay of Nagisa’s from a series called Magical Ururu-chan is a central part of the story. Nagisa cosplays the main character, Ururu, and pulls out all the stops to cosplay her despite her tall height and aging looks. However, Aya is considered to look just like Ururu. She was regarded to have perfect resemblance to Ururu if she cosplayed her. During a cosplay shoot with Aya, Kimiko, and another girl named Shiho where everyone cosplayed Magical Ururu-chan, Nagisa becomes insecure as she considered herself to be the perfect Ururu. Kimiko reassures her that Aya still has a way to go to be a perfect Ururu, as Aya notes that she was only copying Nagisa’s poses without thought about what goes into doing them.
Having ideals is important because it makes us into better people. People need to believe in something in order to take on life without hesitation. Chasing after important goals gives us a reason to live. Reason is what has gotten human society to progress as far as it has. Ideals are the foundation of what makes certain communities stronger than others.
Of course, chasing for ideals can mean chasing for a sense of perfection that can’t be attained. Nagisa gets challenged by her mother and a new boyfriend (later turned ex), both of whom criticized her love of cosplay. They try to tell Nagisa that her hobby isn’t worth it as she gets older. Nagisa fights them off as she proclaims how her cosplay self and her real self are the same. While dealing with how Aya seems to pull off an amazing aura in cosplay, she becomes confronted with another cosplayer, Rui-tasu, who admires her to the point that she becomes a harsh critic like her. Rui sets up Aya to be harassed online on various message boards and Nagisa had to put a stop to it, but not without thinking about how her perfectionist behavior may have hurt cosplayers who didn’t deserve it.
For a hobby like cosplay, perfection appears to be an end goal for many who do it. They want as many fans and social media “likes” as possible to get the attention they feel they deserve. Once cosplayers get the praise, it can become a drug. They want more of it. Positive comments give cosplayers the drive to keep going. For them and also us, it comes down to being treated as never good enough by critics and wanting acceptance of any kind. During high school, Nagisa dreaded the daily routine in her life and wished she could do more. It wasn’t until Kimiko insisted that she start cosplay after bonding over their shared love of otaku hobbies.
Fast forward to later events in Volume 5, where Kimiko decides to quit cosplay after doing it with Nagisa since their high school days. It’s revealed that Kimiko wanted to focus more on photography than cosplay as her main hobby. She later thinks about how she was chasing Nagisa for the longest time as the latter was the better cosplayer. Kimiko wanted the attention Nagisa got. When Kimiko knew that all her efforts were meaningless in the end after taking many cosplay photos of Nagisa over the years, she said to herself that she felt stupid for trying to get to Nagisa’s level in cosplay personification.
It kind of throws a wrench into the whole “hard work beats everything” notion, doesn’t it? Kimiko did everything that cosplayers would do to get better. But what happened? Some studies do mention that while practice at an activity does help someone get past gifted individuals, what also matters is the environment they’re in and whether their cognitive ability is excellent. Both Nagisa and Kimiko went through the same environment, but Nagisa’s ability to process and comprehend her cosplay tactics in an effective manner combined with hard work put her way above Kimiko.
And speaking of environment and genetics helping someone, thanks to the training of Nagisa, Aya became an excellent cosplayer in her own right. A mesmerizing scene happens near the end of the series when Nagisa takes a drunk Aya back home to her place. She sees Aya’s Ururu costume and a colleague puts it on Aya for fun. Nagisa’s Ururu fantasy comes crashing down after seeing Aya in full Ururu cosplay. She then goes home and cuts apart the Ururu costume she made with hesitation. Afterwards, Nagisa notes that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be.
In the end of the day, what does it take for someone to realize their limits? Complex Age poses the age-old question of how big do you let the gap between ideals and reality grow. You can’t make every dream come true. One answer the series suggests is to figure out what exactly do you love about the hobbies you enjoy. For Nagisa, she found out that the process of making costumes for herself and other people keeps her going. Nagisa starts her own costume-making business as a result. That was her answer in the end.
It perhaps comes down is how much someone values winning above all. Competition does bring out the best between people involved (as we’ve seen in so many manga), but it’s very much more about the self versus others. There’s a mentality that you have to win above everyone else in areas surrounded by those similar to you. It can be effective, but it burns someone else fast if expectations aren’t reached. A better tactic is to be genuinely likable. Nagisa’s efforts to help her friends slowly paid off over time to bring forth further evolution of her dream. This will bear repeating - genuine kindness exists and there should be more of it. Being kind to others is a win-win for everyone.
There was a scene in Volume 4 after Nagisa tells off Rui and she says while thinking about her friends.
“I’m pretty sure...I must have looked like that (Rui telling Nagisa she was worthless to her) to someone. But now...I want to think that I haven’t only ever hurt people. I’m the luckiest of us all.”
Friends will always be more important than ideals because the ones who preach those ideals aren’t exactly your friends. Anyone telling you that they’re truly right about something is trying to sell you something that should be met with some skepticism. I wish more people realized this.
That’s why I enjoyed Complex Age’s look at fandom because all it’s trying to say is to not let any kind of self-absorbing beliefs poison something that’s supposed to be fun for everyone involved. If you’re happy you’re better than a group of people, guess what? It will never get you the kind of love that really makes a positive difference in your life. And no one is truly better than the other in various areas.
Having good friends to take on the complexities of life with you, no matter what age, helps ease the harshness of reality and actually make your reality not so complex.
