Soul Phrase

When I first started paying attention at ACG characters, I have always looked at male characters who were short or child-like. That was approximately 10 years ago. Some of the characters that caught my interest at that time include Harry Potter, Yellow (Pokemon Adventure), Edward Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist) and Ruronin Kenshin (Samurai X).

My interest to cosplay short male characters was probably because I used to be a short boy during secondary school. During my first year of secondary education (7th grade), I am the shortest boy in class. I still remember my parents and grandparents were so worried that I would stay short for the rest of my life. Alas, I was constantly forced to drink traditional supplements such as old groundnut root soup which was believed to be able to improve height growth. During that period, I actually resigned myself to the fate of being a short person for the rest of my life. Likewise, I started to look up at fictional male characters that happened to be not tall. Perhaps I was just finding a role model, fictional or real, to guide me in the challenges I will face in the future for being short.
My growth spurt period only took place when I was 16 years old, which was really late as compared to my fellow classmates. By the time I graduated secondary school, I was about 1.69m tall which was considerably average for a Malaysian teenage boy. For that, I am grateful. But at that time, I possibly was not aware of my own height increment and I continued to seek out interesting but short characters in all the fictional works that I encounter.

Looking back, my mentality during my teenage years have shaped me into someone who was sensitive towards tall people and protective towards short people. However, because of my sudden growth spurt, this became sort of an irony. After all, being at my current height of 1.72m, I am deemed by society as neither tall nor short for a young male adult. As such, it's getting difficult to pick suitable characters for cosplay purpose.

Perhaps this is the best time to stop this hobby of mine and concentrate on real social life.