I’m not sure if anyone here feels the same way—there was a time when I was obsessed with tanks, mainly because of their design; I loved drawing them. But I soon began to feel a strong sense of blame, primarily because I found it horrifying that weapons were being portrayed as cute and cool in streaming media, and I felt it was even more unacceptable that I had long agreed with this view. I’d rather not go into the rest of it for now.
Last year, I took an elective course on ‘The Aesthetics of Weapons’, hoping to explore others’ attitudes towards the aesthetic appeal of weapons. Perhaps it was because my lecturer didn’t explain things very well, but I actually sensed a slightly unsettling undertone of incitement; the way he went on at length about their lethality made it impossible for me to view my past hobby in the usual light.