If an idea makes you afraid that no one will ever love you again, then it’s probably a good idea. Here’s a dirty little secret: Murderers get loved before, during and after the fact. There are Slavic people who think Hitler was a good guy. You could literally cause the deaths of millions and someone, somewhere will still love you.
Now, I want to go on record here and say that the official AJATT policy on murder is that it’s a bad thing, right up there with pins-and-needles and bleeding hangnails. And Starbucks shops that close too early, because WTF kind of coffee shop closes at 9pm? And genocide? Oh, don’t even get me started on genocide…that’s worse than immigrants.
What? They’re takin’ our jerbs.
But I also want to go on record and tell you that, if you could do something morally reprehensible and still be loved, don’t you think you could just do something weird and still be loved? Again, not necessarily by a specific person or group of person, but by some person and/or group or persons. Rhetorical question. You could.
You aren’t gonna die and only people who were inclined to hate you are gonna hate you anyway 1, so please, play that anime, shadow them voices and visibly carry around Japanese books like you own the place, because you kinda do. You own your personal space. It’s your little moving kingdom. No one can take it away from you (Pauli Exclusion Principle, mate).
A lot of people are afraid of shadowing — embarrassed to be seen or heard doing it. But as I see it, the socio-economic prospects alone of the kind of people who would make fun of someone for learning things are so woefully abysmal that they inspire only pity. You should feel sorry — bitterly, tearfully, Bambi’s-mother-just-died sorry 2 — for the kind of people who would make fun of you for shadowing. A few years from now, they’ll literally be begging you for help with Japanese and then they’ll be begging you for advice on how to learn Japanese, but by then you’ll be, like, I dunno, Nelly in Ride Wit Me. It’s a total non-issue.
Nobody you want to be like would make fun of you for practicing, even — especially — if your practice method looked and sounded weird. Because everybody you want to be like knows that looking like an ugly duckling now is just a swan precursor. The uglier the better.
That is all.