Solarcat20v2 wrote:you carry an astro keychain plush in your purse as a good luck charm. I have one that a friend of mine gave to me for my birthday one year. (i'm not quite sure what number this is exactly)
Yours would be 856.
857: If, when you were about 14 years old, you made an Atom paper doll and a Uran paper doll, and secretly carried them to school in your backpack. Yep, I did that. Or at least, I think I made both Atom and Uran... or maybe it was just Atom? I can't remember; the memories are a bit fuzzy by now. But I recall that one day, I realised that I forgot my Atom paper doll at cram-school, so I rushed back to get it because I knew I would get REALLY angry if some kid found mini-Atom in my desk, and then made fun of me for watching a ''childish cartoon''.
At that age I was like, ''Nobody insults my favourite characters in front of me! ESPECIALLY Atom!''
Back then, and I assume right now in 2022 as well, Astro Boy is well-known in Taiwan but only as a ''kid's cartoon'', on the same level with Powerpuff Girls or Doraemon. From 2012 to 2014, at the height of my ''Tezuka fangirl years'', anime was all the rage among kids at school, but only the more modern ones like Naruto and One Piece. (There were also a few Studio Ghibli fans though, which was great because I always enjoyed Hayao Miyazaki's work. A quick look at my old ''Windswept Cloak'' account can attest how much teenage me LOVED chatting about Ghibli stuff, even on this forum.) Point is, in my school years, I didn't want to tell people that I was an Astro Boy fan because they'd call it ''childish'', and I didn't want Atom to get insulted even though he's fictional.
So I settled with carrying that paper doll around in great secrecy...