The producer at Yostar Pictures (Inagaki-san) told me,
“When Ame-chan is spiraling in the anime, her lines sound exactly like the messages you send me when you’re depressed (lol).”
That couldn’t be true, so I checked.
And to my surprise, the things I’ve been firing off to Inagaki-san during my recent downturn lined up perfectly with Ame-chan’s lines in the show.
Uncomfortably so.
To the point where, from the other side, it must look like I’m joking.
I wasn’t.
I had no awareness of it at all.
Of course the editors would be startled—because it’s literally the same words I’ve been sending lately.
The truth is, the way I cling to someone when I’m really sinking—
that tendency has an original source.
It comes from my mother.
When my emotions overflow and I start reaching out,
I behave exactly the way my mother did when she was unraveling in front of me as a child.
The urgency, the confusion I copied it without knowing.
And now I find myself converting it, unconsciously, into Ame-chan’s depressive lines.
Which means:
my mother’s words in her moments of collapse
→ my own thoughts when I’m pushed to the edge
→ Ame-chan’s gloomy lines.
No wonder no one else could write lines for KAngel, either for promo or social media.
And when it comes to Ame-chan, that’s even more impossible.
Her head—her little toybox of impulses are an untouchable space only I can access.
When Ame-chan speaks these lines in the anime, she is not only Ame-chan to me.
She is also a piece of my own mind.
More than that, she is the voice of my mother.
Once her lines receive an actual voice in the anime, it becomes even more confusing.
I no longer know who is speaking.
Is it Ame-chan?
Is it me?
Is it my mother?
It becomes difficult to understand whose inner world we are in, and eventually I begin to feel that all of them overlap.
After spending eighteen years together, I am realizing how much of my mother’s thoughts have blended into mine.
Through Ame-chan, who feels almost like a daughter I created, I see that inheritance clearly.
It is frightening, but there is also a small warmth in recognizing that my mother’s presence still lives in me.
I am undoubtedly your son.
And this black-haired girl carries your influence as well.
She speaks in the same way you once did.
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