Hello! I'm Lamees and also called Lala online. I am female, a Muslimah, live in Saudi Arabia, am on the autistic spectrum, and I'm thirty-one. I love drawing, pastel colours, frills and lace, swimming, sweets, roleplaying, strawberries, nature, and animals! My favourite animals include deer, sheep, cats, wolves, and birds (especially corvids, but also parrots.)

I'm currently watching: Tokimeki Tonight, Yuki no Joou ~The Snow Queen~, Magical Princess Minky Momo, The Powerpuff Girls (original series, rewatching), Candy Candy, Manga Sekai Mukashi Banashi, and Little Memole.
I'm currently reading: Little Lord Fauntleroy, Dracula, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Pokemon Adventures (Pokemon Special) Vol. 1, Dear Daddy-Long-Legs, Howl's Moving Castle, The Diary of Anne Frank.

I'm very nostalgic and love revisiting things from my childhood, I also love vintage fashion and illustrations, even if I'm not very knowledgeable about them! I especially love the quicker pace and charming aesthetics of old anime and manga (particularly the palettes of the traditionally animated era and those watercolour backgrounds!), as well as the the more innocent and chaste, idealized love stories of old shoujo (I'm aware it isn't very "realistic," but I like it as a fantasy, most newer stuff and even some niche older stuff is too sexual for me, and I also have no interest in scandalous stories of cheating, etc.).

I like to press fallen flowers (I don't like cutting living ones, but I'll try to take care of cut flowers we recieve with fresh water and a bit of sugar each day for as long as they last!). I used to have a collection of pressed flowers from nearly every region and country I visited, but I've had to restart the collection. ♥
I like to collect anything tiny and small. I think my love of tiny things began with pastel flocked bears and flocked rabbits–the kind they sold for use in crafts, but which many kids kept as tiny toys. I like to recycle the ribbons on packaging (tied the ribbon from a bouquet to make a bow around my plush pegasus' neck!).
I love Sanrio (while the magenta-like pink of girls toys' aisles and especially Barbie Pink used to cause me physical pain and give me a headache as an autistic child, I've always found pastels soothing and comforting to look at), Little Twin Stars and My Melody are my favourite, I also especially like My Melody's pink sheep friend, My Sweet Piano. There used to be a Sanrio store in my part of the kingdom when I was a child and it was like a dreamy, pastel wonderland! I still have an early Cinnamoroll notebook I used as a sketchbook, with his old name, Baby Cinnamon.

The Little Mermaid was my first special interest and I've collected a lot of things relating to Ariel (the Disney version was my first exposure!) and Hans Christian Andersen's original fairy tale, or even just random mermaid-themed things, growing up... mama brought me a plate from Turkey depicting a mermaid statue! I'm obsessed with crane game and capsula gacha, if they're not rigged, I can typically always win something from crane games! I like to study and anticipate the path they'll take from different angles before letting the claw drop.

My favourite season is winter (my region only has cold, rainy winters and hot, humid summers! I prefer it to two variations of hot and sweltering in the region I went to college in ^^;;) and I love rainy days.

I admire Lolita fashion* [not really related to Vladmir's novel about a predator grooming a child or the resulting nymphet/Lolita subculture online, this fashion simply shares the name because the Japanese people behind it wanted a diminutive, European girls' name to fit the style inspired by historical European dress], but can't afford it yet, not even the indie Taobao stuff, much less Innocent World, but it's a dream for the future!
I love the whimsical, childlike charm of it, the Rococo dress and Victorian children's clothes influence, the poofy sillhoettes, and the ladylike elegance and storybook charm, I love that it's feminine, but relatively modest and wasn't designed to appeal to the male gaze at all (boys and men initially found it weird and off-putting, before it became trendier in Japan...). I also like that it can easily be adjusted to suit a hijabi too (see this video interviewing Malaysian Lolita)! ♥

Update 2023: I have bought my very first Lolita dress! ;3; It's very lovely, a wine-coloured Doll Princess Sleeve OP—although, Wunderwelt didn't seem to give arm circumference sizes, so while it fit well everywhere else, it's a bit too tight there... next dress I buy will definitely be a JSK, so my broader than average shoulders can be free, fff. Might have to blame that on a childhood spent swimming every other week! Nevertheless, it's lovely and so pretty to have and to hold. I also got a nice petticoat from Wunderwelt too. ^^ Wunderwelt is a wonderful website for buying both new Lolita clothes, as well as second-hand pieces, in varying condition (some practically new!) for more affordable prices. ^^

Although I don't regularly watch a lot of the newer (XY, SuMo) series as much (although I love and enjoy PM19/Journeys!), I've been a fan of the Pokemon anime (especially OS->BW!) for the longest time. It remains my biggest, most mainstream fandom, I still draw fanart of it, roleplayed from it for the longest time, etc.! XY was my least favourite (I like the humans-in-harmony-with-nature world, trainer-Pokemon bond, adventures, and friendship stories way more than Pokemon battles, I prefer Pokemon Contests to Showcases, Serena's promising but the way she was handled early on bothers me...). Sun & Moon, I liked during its plot-based episodes and more serious stories (Mallow's mother, the Minior episode, etc.), especially episodes focusing on Lillie!

I love Osamu Tezuka's works! My favourites include Black Jack (I have an old fansite dedicated to Black Jack x Pinoko here [although the pictures are gone ^^;;;]), Dororo, Unico, and Angel's Hill. I grew up with Kimba the White Lion, Metropolis, and Astro Boy. I also read a couple of his lesser known manga...

I've more recently gotten into old shoujo, I especially love Alpen Rose, The Star of Cottonland, Rose of Versailles and have a soft spot for Hikari no Pansy.

I also grew up with Chibi Maruko-chan, Doraemon, and World Masterpiece Theater anime (like Nobody's Girl Remi, Romeo's Blue Skies, My Daddy Long Legs, etc.). Beautiful Soldier Sailor Moon was also one of my first fandoms, I got into it and Full Moon (w)o Sagashite around the same time I got into Pokemon (in fact, a Rocketshipping Sailor Moon/Pokemon crossover fanfic was my introduction to both fandoms)! Princess Tutu was also an early fandom of mine and one that remains dear to my heart to this day.
I didn't interact much with my peers as a kid and mostly spoke English because we had cable early on—my dad was the second ever person to have cable TV in Saudi Arabia back then! It wasn't officially available, he brought folks over from a nearby country to set it up… so I watched the Disney channel and Nickelodeon, played a lot of educational PC games (Living Books, Jump Start, Reader Rabbit… in addition to a bunch of Mattel/Barbie (the dress-up minigame in Magic Fairy Tales: Barbie as Rapunzel was my first digital dress-up game…) and Craylola games (Crayola Magic Wardrobe was subtly educational, aha, if you were old enough to read the diaries and news in the eras you visit), as well as My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens, and of course, The Sims I!

Back then, I didn't know very much Arabic! I did watch some old anime like Doraemon and Maruko-chan growing up, so I knew a tiny bit of classical/fus-ha Arabic, but it wasn't much and I rather disliked most dubs (we had two channels before cable and if I caught a cartoon in English, then saw the Arabic dub, I'd notice what's missing or changed, and feel put off!)... when I got into Pokemon when I was around 11/12, I had two options! Watch the newest AG episodes from Japan raw and hunt down the channel that was still airing the Arabic dub then! (It was still the dial-up era). So, the way I improved my Arabic skills enough to understand people better and read Quran was my special interest in Pokemon leading me to watch the Arabic dub! Isn't that unique?
In terms of speaking, I would default to classical Arabic/fus-ha Arabic because that's what most anime were dubbed in, but that's fine, as speakers of any dialect of Arabic can be expected to understand it, but my last few years of college, living alone in another region, had me acquiring a different accent from the place I grew up!

While I hated reading as a little kid because of school, when Pottermania boomed in the 90's, I got into reading thanks to the movies piquing my curiosity! I improved my writing even more by getting into roleplaying on Neopets (it's like a prose-style collaborative writing where everyone plays a different character interacting with others!). I even thought I might become an author someday.Now, I'm mostly just content to ocassionally roleplay or write fics every few years, but I do still love the idea of writing and/or illustrating children's books someday! I did achieve my other childhood dream of getting comics published in the Neopian times... multiple times, I even collaborated once with patjade, one of my inspirations!

Quiz results, what-your-favourites-say-about-you, and other fun stuff that sort of fits:

(CW: ritual abuse, CSA, mention of age gap ships) I was a victim of csa and ritual abuse as a child (like the 90's cases written off as"satanic panic," but milder). I understand that the fluffy and idealized, non-sexual age gap ships I like in stories cannot possibly exist in a healthy or safe way now, we're socialized and raised as children for much longer, there are inherent power imbalances, etc. It's a coping mechanism.
Thank you for understanding and if you don't, well, I'm sorry you don't have much sympathy for those in situations you cannot imagine, and I hope you eventually mature past fandom purity politics and learn to have empathy for real survivors in cultures and circumstances different from your own. I think it's dehumanizing that western fandom expects details of strangers' trauma: this isn't for you. I first added this for other victims on (10/5/2020), when a hashtag was trending on twitter to criminalize pedophilia./CW

Go back to the main page?