Second Life

My youngest's avatar is quite a doll -
a slender twenty-something, cool in fuck-me
-pumps and skimpy skirt slinking down the mall.
My little ninja! Suddenly it struck me -
you're growing up! Ichigo and Rukia,
now cast aside, instead Sex and the City
repeat shows on Sky. Which one is spookier
for Dad? - who knows! Ms. Bradshaw's hardly pretty,
and morally corrupt, but Shonen Manga
blood lust's even worse. I ask, 'Why not read
a book?' She kills me with one look - in anger?
No, it's pity. Watch my century recede -
its history’s her school project!  This old boomer
just bows before strange gods, like Montezuma.

This one, posted for comment in January 2009, probably reflects a Christmas period of concentrated cyber activity on the part of my youngest, Laura. Born in 1995 she is very much a child of the Internet age, especially as her siblings are some years older so she grew up as a toddler and tweeny watching the same TV shows as the older two. She leaped straight from the Tellytubbies to Sex in the City without going through any interim phase of being forced to watch dodgy remakes of the Famous Five.

Laura took to computer games really early, especially enjoying 'virtual reality' games like The Sims at first.



Laura, aged 6, and her Sims Avatar

Soon she graduated to more exciting first person shooters and spent many a happy hour exterminating a bizarre menagerie of aliens, robots and vampires. On-line gaming brought her into contact with other enthusiasts and by the time she was 10 or 11 she had discovered Japanese manga and anime and was co-creating fan fiction on-line with others kids around the globe. At times it was a bit scary; as a parent, you could not monitor all the time who and what she was doing and of course the media was full of stories about children being 'groomed' on-line. On the other hand Laura, when hanging out on fan fiction sites was writing enthusiastically. The material itself, when I did manage to get a sneak look at it, was not at all text-speak gobbledygook, but written in proper sentences full of vivid action, breathless dialogue and a serious amount of anglo-american dodgy slang. So I suppose as parents we just kept a quiet eye on the situation and looked for signs of disturbance or distress. Finding none we let Laura get on with her thing.

Having a late child does keep early onset middle age at bay. Laura announced in February 2006 that she had found a costume on-line and wanted to dress-up, sorry, cosplay as the character Sakura from the anime Naruta at the forthcoming MCM Expo in Telford. None of us could have predicted where Laura's enthusiasm would take us. In the end it took us to Japan, to Tokyo's 'electric town', Akihabara, our first stop-off on an extended trip to Australasia in 2011. One of the delights of having children is that parents learn as much from them as they do from you, how else would I recognise the steps of the Hari Hari Yukai or get the opportunity in a sonnet to rhyme Rukia with spookier.



Laura at MCM Telford with fellow cosplayers and a Dalek.

To the uninitiated cosplay events come as a bit of a culture shock, a whole new world with a language rituals of its own. Something of their unique atmosphere and spirit is captured in a video I made of the London MCM Expo.

The enthusiasm and energy of the mainly teenage cosplayers is uplifting and infectious, its a huge fancy dress party and at times the participants spontaneously dance for joy. Not often you can say that in England!

Laura's love of all things Japanese eventually took us to Tokyo, shopping in its crowded streets, having quiet moments within the calm spirituality of its temples and finding ourselves the only western fifty-somethings amongst the manga shrines of Akihabara.



Shibuya shoppers

Laura and Gill at the Fox Shrine, Tokyo

Among the anime emporia of Akihabara



the horned shopper browses......

Second Life, the subject of the sonnet is a virtual reality on-line environment which in many ways is more extreme than Facebook and Twitter. Whereas social media sites alow participants to project an extension of their existence by sharing life on-line with friends and followers, Second Life allows users to create an avatar and live alongside others immersed completely in a virtual world with different lands and its own currency. It's very odd.



The couplet likening 'this old boomer' to Montezuma may seem like a rhyme driven piece of fancy, but the sudden, unexpected arrival of the web does at times seem invasive. The world has changed irrevocably in less than a decade. Mostly I am excited and intrigued by it, but I am a child of the Twentieth Century and at times the combination of big business and global connectivity feels alien - a merciless environment where the individual is destined to  lose to corporate greed. Yet within any system one can never underestimate the human instinct for play and creativity. Longlive cosplay! Long live comic man! Where's my blue wig...