And before you say it: yes, I am weird. No, I did not have many IRL friends growing up. Yes, something was and is wrong with me. 😀

Of course, I’m not all the way off my rocker; I did have crushes on real people, too, the first of which was in third grade, on a boy who would later become one of my archnemeses in high school; and each one after that ended up just as badly. Disaster after disaster, crisis upon tragedy!! (Until I met my now-husband, that is.) Crushes on fictional people were, I found, so much more fun; so much less disappointing. Yes, it’s true that they are fictional, which is disappointing in and of itself; but if you have a vivid enough interior life, the company of fictional people can be quite fulfilling. So I always preferred fictional people. Which preference of mine was, I think, an early symptom of the AvPD that would only much later be diagnosed.

I post this in the spirit of humiliating myself, because why not. I recently made a whole 3,000-word post about what an idiot I am, so may as well just drive the point home with these ten mind-blowingly-stupid examples.

10. Sesshomaru (ca. 7th grade). This one’s in last place because, for one, I didn’t even watch Inuyasha, nor did I want to. I tried; it bored me. A friend of mine in elementary school liked it, and somehow via her I saw an image of Sesshomaru, and thought he was captivating, and proceeded to log onto AOL on the ol’ Family Computer and print off a bunch of pictures of him and tape them to my wall. All I know is, he’s some sort of dog-person creature and has a tail? A big fluffy one?? The tail was a turnoff even then, tbh, and I chose to pretend it didn’t exist.

9. Buzz Lightyear (ca. 1st grade). My first real crush. I was obsessed. I have no idea why my first grade self found him so dreamy. I had the talking action figure and all the merch and even the sweatsuit from the Disney Store in the mall and everything. Who remembers the Disney Store?! I wasn’t even huge on Disney, necessarily – I was never a “Disney princess” girl – but I loved that place!

8. Hideki from Chobits (7th grade). I think I just found him interesting to look at because Chobits was the first manga I ever actually read, and this was where I caved and finally admitted that I could see the appeal of the genre, which I had been shit-talking all year, looking down my nose at all my friends who were becoming manga-obsessed. Chobits was cute, I had to admit. Even though it still irritated me that I liked it at all. To this day I still feel conflicted about the genre: it’s such trash, so stupid – but some of it is so aesthetically pleasing.

7. Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (7th grade). Disgusting, right? I am truly ashamed of how cool (and hot) I thought he was when I was in seventh grade. I positively adored him, and treasured a secret belief that I would be the only person he didn’t want to kill, that it would be he and I against the world. I cannot tell you how many hours I spent hiding in my room reading or just gazing at the Director’s Cut with my headphones on, listening to songs that reminded me of him.

6. Clopin, a.k.a. The Puppet Guy, from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (2nd-3rd grade). I think it was the hair that did it for me.

5. The mystery protagonist from the mystery manga I can’t remember (8th grade?). Maybe someone can help me with this!! It’s been driving me crazy. In 2003 or 4, maybe even ‘05, my best friend introduced me to a manga she’d found, which she knew I would like. I think it was by an American artist, a female. I’m pretty sure the artist had won some contest or prize and as a result got this, her first manga, published. It was a high school story about a guy who played guitar, and something supernatural happened to him – some magical companion started to follow him around, or something? Some kind of friendly spirit or demon? Pretty sure it was only one volume. I just remember the protagonist was gorgeous to me at the time, to such a degree that it made me deeply sad to look at, because he would never be real and even if he were he would never like me, which is perhaps why I put it away and blocked the whole manga out of my memory. Does this shoddy little description ring any bells to anyone?!

4. Invader Zim (5th-6th grade). Yep, another JV creation. Nope, I’m not joking. He and I would take over the world together! I was extremely obsessed, and also super weird about keeping the obsession a secret, because I was so embarrassed for anyone to see me enjoying the show. It felt insane, isolating, desperate: in every way just like a grown-up addiction, but so childish and innocent. How weird, in retrospect: the lengths that I went to just to get a chance to catch a glimpse of that show! I still remember the original air date, although I didn’t watch it until it aired again on Sunday evening. I saw it kind of on accident – it came on after something else I’d been watching, and it was like: the world shifted beneath my feet, and suddenly nothing was the same, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could seriously write a full book about my obsession with that show and how it affected my life.

3. Rei Kashino from MARS (8th grade). Okay, I know I said earlier that anime/manga is trash, but MARS is the one exception. Beautiful story, beautiful characters, beautiful artwork, each page a composition, like a poem: absolute perfection. And hugely, hugely influential on me at that time. I’m embarrassed to admit that I can still clearly see its impact on my own writing. It also gave me some really unhealthy, unrealistic, starry-eyed ideas about what a romantic relationship ought to look like, hahaha. Alas, I still own all fifteen volumes, and still, if I pull one off the shelf and crack it open, I get immediately sucked in. One of the greatest love stories ever told, and I will die on this hill.

And finally, in first place, we have:

2 and 1: Miguel and Tulio from The Road to El Dorado (4th-5th grade). This one is a no brainer. Come on, they’re adorable! I made no secret of this crush, as I was still just a child. I even shared it with some of my friends at the time – we had the soundtrack on CD, and sang the songs together on the regular! Ah, to be so shameless again. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I did have beef with Chel (as well as a proto-girl-crush on her) because Tulio was my favorite. My 10 year old ass was ready to throw hands.