Part 1: Expression
I have had an overactive imagination as long as I can remember. As a child I would spend the half hour breaks between my favorite TV shows either playing back my favorite moments from the previous episode in my head or imagining new adventures for the various characters. I spent hours in front of my family’s Mac, hoping that somehow it had magically obtained the tools necessary for me to construct the epic video game I had always wanted to create, and when they were not there, I settled down in front of ClarisWorks for another hour to start drawing another design that would be half finished when I lost interest. I passed the time between going to bed and falling asleep imagining what it would be like to be Sonic the Hedgehog, saving the world with lightning-fast speed, or Ash Ketchum, standing up for truth and justice with my faithful Pikachu always by my side.
Yes, I could have done better. I could have gone to Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, but it would take the threat of not seeing the movies to finally push me to read the books. I had visited Narnia several times, but that world had an end. Instead, I was left with the worlds manufactured by Japanese merchandisers and animators that were endless simply because the studios refused to allow the writers to compose an ending; there was too much money to be made before that happened. But it was through these marketing ploys aimed at impressionable middle schoolers that I glimpsed something: freedom.
It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school that my imagination awoke with full force. A brief series of events would combine in a toxic mixture that would change my creative expressions drastically. First, I found an old Sonic the Hedgehog PC game at a church yard sale. It was a classic Sonic game involving lots of fast running and pointless robot destruction. This rekindled my love of the series, never fully realized since I had grown up with no video games save my Game Boy, which did not have any Sonic games thanks to the corporate rivalries of the time. I read and re-read the small two-paragraph blurb in the owner’s manual that passed for the story, then settled down to play the game, marveling with Sonic as we both explored the fantastic, bizzare world he seemed to have been flung into.
My thirst for all the Sonic games I had never played led to the second event: the discovery of emulation. In short, this was a way for me to download the old video games I had never been able to own and play them on my computer. The new games brought me new worlds and new stories with them as Sonic and his faithful sidekick fought to bring down a spaceship and save a mysterious floating island from certain destruction.
Since the copies of the old Sonic games were, by their nature, illegal, it took many hours of searching to finally find the right websites. It was in this search that the third event took place. I was not, and am not, the only fan of Sonic the Hedgehog. Many other fans, more devoted than I was, had set up entire websites dedicated to archiving everything about the Sonic games, including various fan-created works. The section that caught my eye was the fan fiction section, where fans imagined new adventures for the various characters in the Sonic universe and wrote them down for the world to see. Some were, as was expected in internet-land, reeking piles of excrement. Some, however, were surprisingly well-written. At least, they were well-written enough for me to focus on the story being told and not how many ways the writer could butcher the English language.
I had always been looking for the story behind the video games; here there were more stories than I could count. As I read and re-read them, a fact slowly dawned on me: these people were no different than I was. They, too, were inspired by the characters in the games or the TV series spinoff and spent time imagining how the characters would behave in different situations. The only difference was that they bothered to write their stories down. Finally, late one night at my grandparents while my parents were out of town and I was satisfying my addiction for stories, I read one work that smacked of the very things I had been imagining my entire life. Here was a writer who was not unpopular with an imagination as crazy as mine! In that moment, I realized that perhaps, with an audience as big as the internet, someone may actually want to hear my stories.
Like all writers, my first efforts were laughable, but I didn’t care. I had found my outlet. No longer was my imagination something to pull out when I had an hour to kill; now it could be put to work. My first efforts are still floating around somewhere in internet-land, even though I’ve attempted to move on.
That summer my family vacation took us to Cumberland Island, an island off the coast of Georgia with no access roads. About half the island has been declared an official wilderness zone. We stayed in an artist’s summer house; my parents took the master bedroom, my little brother and sister shared the guest bedroom, and I took the loft. The room was easily as big as the master bedroom and even had its own working toilet hidden in a closet off to the side. I imagine the artist locked herself in this room for hours on end, not even having to leave to go to the bathroom or sleep, working on whatever her imagination dictated. Left to my own devices, I would have done just that, and while I did explore the island with my family, I also spent my fair share of time alone in the loft, typing out my fan fiction epic on the laptop I had brought along to do my summer schoolwork.
In that loft I caught that same glimpse of freedom first offered by the imaginary worlds of Saturday morning. In the loft I felt closer to that elusive world I was always trying to escape to through games and fan fiction. It was a world free of society’s petty rules and restrictions where I was free to be whoever I was. It was a world of peace and adventure at the same time. It was a world with rules, but here they served their true purpose and provided direction and meaning instead of simply restricting.
All too soon, however, the vacation was over and we returned to civilization. I had found a new hobby and quickly gained a reputation as the kid who sat on the bus passing his time with nothing but a CD player and a notebook. I joined the throngs of Sonic fans online and found friends and critics in unlikely places. But the glimpse of freedom would not be fully realized for another three years.