Five Years in Sound Horizon Kingdom

When did it all begin? If we're going all the way back, I could say September 22, 2018, the day on which I watched Spirited Away for the first time and kickstarted my now 6-years-and-counting love for Japanese fiction. Or maybe July 14, 2019, when I heard Revo's music for the first time in the form of Attack on Titan's first opening.

But the fifth anniversary I'm commemorating today is not of either of those. It's of February 21, 2020, when I watched 5th Story Concert Roman on YouTube. And the rest is history.

It's crazy to think about how different the world was - how different I was - five years ago. Those were the early weeks of the coronavirus spreading across the world. I was still living in what I consider my definitive childhood home. I was a 9th grader, about to graduate middle school and move onto high school, utterly unaware of how much that experience would be shaped by the pandemic.

I was fifteen when I discovered Sound Horizon. Probably the best possible age it could've happened, when I was slowly maturing and becoming less of an insufferable idiot, but still able to have my entire brain rewired by something as seemingly insignificant as a fragmented anthology of sad little stories, told on a stage in another country 14 years earlier, conveyed to my senses through a fansubbed DVD rip on YouTube.

The pandemic years were rough for me mentally, for various mostly personal reasons. Having Revo's music in my life during those times genuinely helped and comforted me. There were moments when I really did need to hear Aramary say "anata no uta ni mo imi ga aru" in Kioku no Minasoko.

And now, at the age of 20, as I'm in many ways entering a new chapter of my life, that music is still with me. 

The Sound Horizon (and wider SH/LH/Revo) fandom has also been nothing but lovely to be part of. Experiencing the releases of EmaNegai's Prologue and Full Editions and most recently HaloAsa... going crazy at the long awaited announcement of LH's return to AoT... those are moments I'll remember for as long as I live, and I'm so glad I was able to be part of the community during them. 

I realize this blog post is getting increasingly sentimental, so I better wrap it up before I say something truly embarrassing.

Thank you. To all the people I've talked to on Twitter and Discord - to Guren, Kaido, Liz, Miguel (just to name a few off the top of my head), to the Int'l SH Discord mods, to all the translators who've made Revo's stories accessible to me as a non-Japanese speaker, even to CDJapan for getting my CD orders across the world fast and unharmed (no, seriously!).

And of course to Revo himself. Thank you for telling those stories, Heika.