FAMILY, THE ARTS, AND CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA: PRESENTING APARLIN23!

AParlin23 is a bright, artistic, soft spoken, and kind girl who I’ve known for years. I can’t recall exactly how long I’ve known her, but I know I’ve known her for a very long time.

While we aren’t “close”, we have both had our fair share of interactions with each other. I can honestly say, as a person who doesn’t care for most people I encounter, that she is one of few people I can tolerate and actually enjoy being around. Her bright, bubbly personality gives me a vibe of someone who is trustworthy. To be honest, she’s not like a lot of people I know, and isn’t the type of person who you just don’t want to be around, which is rare in society nowadays. As for AParlin23’s avatar, it was made including a radio inside a red heart with a rain splatter at the top of the heart in front of a simple white background all encapsulated inside a simple, thick, dark frame.

While looking at AParlin23’s avatar, a few things drew my attention first. For starters, the thickness of the frame, keeping it simple and having large, prominent borders. Next, I noticed the rain splatter on the heart and was drawn to it, as it made me think about the feeling of sadness of depression, feeling as though the troubles of life is raining on your heart and drowning you in it. However, after further discussion with AParlin23, I realized I was entirely wrong about that. According to AParlin23, she described rain as a nostalgic symbol, saying “I feel like I can be a kid and just splash around in puddles”, which makes sense given that kids like to splash around in puddles. It was interesting to find out the different way of seeing rain as a nostalgic symbol as opposed to being a symbol for an emotion. Back to the avatar, AParlin23 also had a radio inside a heart. The heart reminded her of AO3, which is a website where “after you read someone’s work, you can leave kudos a.k.a a heart”, as AParlin23 described it, AO3 also has a deeper meaning to AParlin23, when I inquired what it was, she explained it is “a website to escape to when I feel like I can’t breathe”. We all need a coping mechanism, and this one is really cool, if you ask me. The radio has dual-symbolism for her love of music, and also a singer named Rod Stewart. AParlin23 says “singing in the car as loud as I can makes me feel I can be myself”, and that Rod Stewart has “one song I can scream to and makes me feel happy”. Her second to final part to her flag design is art. As mentioned previously, AParlin23 has always been artistic and an amazing artist as long as I have known her. She used color to symbolize art and says “art is mostly made up of color and it is used everywhere”. Valid symbolism. And lastly, her frame was made thick and dark symbolizing family and friends. AParlin23 says her “first memory of family is making a picture of me, my parents, and my unborn sister”, therefore emphasizing how much her family means to her given the fact it is one of the most prominent things in her overall design.

Now onto how our designs differ. Mine and AParlin23’s designs differ a lot from each other. We both went for simplicity, and has frames with hearts inside to symbolize stuff we cherish and things that have great meaning to us. I went more for meaning over simplicity, and she went for simplicity with meaning. We had sort of reverse thought processes on this, in a manner of speaking. We both had frames, hearts, and music involved in our designs. However we had different approaches to making the designs. My final design also had more details than AParlin23’s, hence why I said she took the simpler approach, therefore showing where our design techniques differ. Mine is still simple, yet has a complexity-simplicity balance of its own, as does hers as well. While we both kept our designs simple yet meaningful to us, AParlin23, I feel, did the better job of keeping her design simple yet meaningful, while I tended to focus more on meaning of simplicity.

In conclusion, AParlin23 used a thick bordering frame, a heart, a radio, a rain splatter, and simplicity for her background to convey her love for music and how it makes her feel free and like she can be herself, her family and how important they are to her, how rain brings back missed, cherished childhood nostalgia, and how she has an effective coping mechanism website to turn to whenever she feels she can’t breathe. Ladies and gentlemen, that is AParlin23’s introduction through avatar design.

“NaNa, Chikako Watanabe, Shigeo Tamaru, 田丸恵男, 渡辺愛子, Remember Me, Cover Art, Warner Music Japan” by nanaworld is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Avatar by AParlin23