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Date Published: 08.31.2026
Hi everyone.
My personal regard is that artfight is very fun, and continues to be fun every year. It does seem, however, that mother nature has other ideas. This is the 2nd artfight I've participated in where a typhoon hit the island of Guam and somewhat deterred my initial plans to for how I wanted my artfight run to go.
I have a rather large tale to spin on my experiences regarding typhoons and artfight. This is a more personal retrospective on my last few artfights than my previous blog post. This is something new I'm trying. As much as I would like to remain impartial and unknown online, I am attempting to make an effort to express myself differently.
The first instance was in 2023, when Category 4 typhoon Mawar hit Guam on May 24, but left most of the island without power for at most 8 months. My home situation wasn't that bad during Mawar. We had running water, but no power until September, 2023. It was nearly 4 months without electricity. Cellphone towers weren't able to stay online after their generators had run dry, so approximately from 8pm to the next morning, we also didn't have stable internet. When there was internet connection, videos wouldn't load, online messages wouldn't send, and the most you would get is the WhatsApp or Discord notification on your phone screen. The actual message, of course, would not load, but at least you knew the other person responded.
There were a lot of days spent sitting on the home porch and chatting into the still of night.
I think, I changed a little bit. You don't really notice you're any different until the worst of the storm has passed. I dropped some habits, picked up others. I found myself losing my patience with arguments online. Because, well, I went through 4 months with no power, no way to access the outside world. The roundabout arguments that keep the circulation of online discussion "alive" was so... meaningless.
Fights on fandom, celebrities, scandals, and topics were foreign to me now. Internet phrases, memes, and jargon had faded into something of the distant past. How could I possible even care about online debates when there were hardships across the islands.
There was a viral video going around of a Tacoma truck getting flipped over during the height of the storm. In the morning during Mawar, my siblings and I, with nothing to do, watch our neighbor's tin roof get ripped apart and lifted away.
The storm came and went, and regular life continued, apparently. I still had work, my siblings still attended school. Life continued. It was different, though. Stranger. People were panic buying. Demand for essentials were high, but supply was extremely short. The entire island was going through a black out. This was a remote island in the middle of the Pacific, with 70%-80% of power lines down.
People treated it like it was the end of the world. Lines for food banks were long, the lines for gas stations were longer. Gas refueling trucks needed to be escorted by police cars for safe passage. Restaurants that had stable power and water flourished. Our family visited the nearby Denny's frequently. None of it felt normal, but it was our normal for the next 4 months.
The following months proceeded monotonously, strangely enough. Yet, we didn't have electricity at home. We didn't have internet. There was nothing to do, but somehow we entertained ourselves. We had a routine.
On weekdays, I would usually charge my family's devices underneath my desk. My workplace was generous enough to buy take home platters for the families of employees who still didn't have power or water. The typhoon had hit the north of the island, where nearly 1/3 of the population resided. A lot of us took platters home. It wasn't a frequent offering but it was something I always made sure I grabbed. I didn't have time to go out and sit in the 3 hour food bank lines, and the platters were sufficient enough for everyone to be fed. If we didn't get platters, we'd go through our pantry and cooked canned food.
After dinner, we'd all sit in darkness on the porch. Cellular data was spotty, but that didn't stop my younger nieces from trying to reach out to their friends via messaging apps. 1
I had a mountain of books I had wanted to get into, but it was difficult to read through fickle candlelight. And, well, it was more fun chatting with the family outside than staying cooped in a house with an old book I strained to read. On Fridays, I would take my two younger sisters out to eat at restaurants that had free outlets and WiFi. My brother did the same with his family, and we would often see him with our nieces and nephew around the same places.
The weekends were tough. The once deserved respite from work and school obligations had turned into two long grueling days. I usually charged a large capacity battery at work. It's sole purpose was to dedicate it's power source to a small fan, but it would only keep us cool through the night while we slept. In the mornings, the battery would have drained leaving us to deal with the rising tropical temperature.
The summer days were hot, and irksome. Sometime after suffering through the oppressive summer heat, we had decided that even if it was costly, we needed to get back into an air-conditioned room. On weekends, we started hopping across the various hotel cafes for free Wi-Fi and a place to charge all of our devices.
It was near the end of June when my sister had brought up artfight. I can't recall where exactly the conversation had taken place. Between the restaurants and the expensive hotel cafes the days started blurring together.
She had showed me her new character sheets, and shared her absurd plot to draw as much as she could for the duration of artfight.
I remember thinking she was a little too ambitious. I laughed her off, reminded her that she was going to do artfight during exam month.
But, I think I understood something that was unsaid between us. Because I did the same thing during artfight 2023.
I drew as much as I could. For what reason, I'm not too sure.
My sister and I had occupational and educational obligations. We didn't have internet, we didn't have power. The days were hot, and the night was dreadful after the large capacity battery ran out of power and our fans stopped working. And yet, somehow, despite the craziness of our lives, we still sat down every evening and every weekend to just draw.
It was therapeutic. It was fun. When I was working on attacks during my weekends I stopped thinking about the stupidly expensive drink I had to buy just to stay in the cafe. I stopped thinking about how stressful work was becoming.
Drawing was the distraction I needed to escape from the world.
On July 6th 2026, typhoon Bavi hit Rota directly, with winds affecting Guam and the neighboring CNMI islands. This was the 2nd typhoon to hit the region directly all in the same year. I was in the middle of planning out my artfight attacks around end of June, but found that I needed to typhoon prep instead.
Despite experiencing 3 powerful typhoons in the span of only 5 years, it does not get easier. With each storm, it gets a little more frightening. Family members grew older, and responsibilty somehow fell on my siblings and I.
We prepped the house for the storms better than we did during Mawar. Typhoon shutters were closed, tarps were taken down, gallons of water was reserved. I went an a giant shopping spree and panic bought what I thought was essential. Candles, canned food, lighters, towels, flashlights, and batteries.
I remember standing at the checkout line and wondering if I should go to Home Depot and buy wooden boards to block out windows. I was wondering if our porch's tin roof was going to weather the storm, or be ripped out like our neighbor's during Mawar.
I stopped thinking at the checkout line.
We had a few days to prep, but my family had finished by July 4th.
July 4th - 5th we were hunkering down, sitting in airconned rooms and waiting for Bavi to make landfall onto the Mariana Islands. In the evening, the winds had started to pick up. The storm began howling.
In my anxiety, I couldn't stop checking social media. Specifically, Guam social media, which is a small circle of Whatsapp village group chats and private instagram accounts. It wasn't everyone's first rodeo, of course. People were making memes, sending jokes, trying to alleviate the growing fears the we all were experiencing. These storms ruins homes, causes floods, causes mold. It could stop the world from turning, and we were all aware of that.
The storm was slated to hit July 6th I couldn't sleep on both nights before the storm.
Instead, I was drawing.
My old middle school friend had been uploading new characters to artfight before July. I was planning on attacking them towards the end of July, but something strange happened. I knew they were still on Guam (well, I see her frequently these days) and I knew they was going through the same ordeal I was going through. And, well I was thinking about her. I was thinking about the rest of the Guam artist I found on artfight.
My sister had found a whole crop of them on a university chat. I was really thrilled, because most of my art friends who lived on Guam moved away.
The impulse hit me, I had to draw for every single Guam artist right now, right at this moment.
I didn't understand why. I just needed to desperately, urgently.
I go to artfight to download the refs I needed onto my tablet and computer and I find something truly insane.
They drew for me first.
There it was, in my notifications, a new attack for one of my characters and a private message that felt like a beacon of hope in my spiraling despair.
Thier message was so funny? They were in the middle of an impending typhoon! I was too! Why did they do this?
I was... so... Entertained? Happy? I was distracted from the reality that the winds were picking up, the rain was not letting up and the storm was hours within striking distance. None of that mattered. My worries were gone in an instant. All I wanted to do instead of fretting and fearing was to just to give something back that very moment. I wanted to give them art, but also I wanted to wish them safety during the storm. I wanted to wish that their house would not be damaged, that the storm will pass, that their family stays safe. I'm not good with words though.
So instead, I drew. And, well the art stopped feeling like an obligatory piece made during a silly internet game. It felt like talisman for my dear friend. It held my deepest regards for them, my sincerest wish for them to see this and be distracted, for even just a moment, from the anxiety that the storm will bring.
My sister too had received art from other Guam artists before the storm. Hell, we were also drawing during the height of the pre-typhoon winds. We were drawing on a time-limit. Drawing before a pending disaster snapped up Guam's power lines and knocked down it's data towers.
How strange. How, so very strange. It seems that in the heart of anxiety, and fear, people, strangers turn to comfort each other. Why did we all unanimously decide to do this, without every communication across any channel that we were going to draw for each other? Why did strangers in my sister's university chat draw for me, despite not knowing who am I, what I do with our only connecting being "fellow Guamanian sheltering from the upcoming storm."
People have very busy lives, and a typhoon uproots it all. You'll spend days prior prepping yards, pulling tarps, assisting family. The outcome will be uncertain, and whatever hardship that follows will be the burden the entire island bares.
And yet, despite it all, they drew for me. I made art for them too. It will be alright.
Art is such a diverse medium for expressing yourself. In a world where images generated by machines is prevalent, countries whose environmental damage affects innocent lives on the other side, and gasoline tankards are escorted by police while hundreds wait in food bank lines for hours, sometimes we just need a distraction.
Maybe I'm being overtly sentimental here, but this is what I wholeheartedly believe. Drawing little anime guys in my notebook saved my life, sharing art with my middle school friends changed me for the better.
Art can be a distraction. It can be a talisman, a token to remind people that you're thinking of them. Art can be a little wish for them a to have a safe passage through the storm.
It's Over Casta
Mega Raichu defeating me in Black Jack during Typhoon Bavi.
I'm the type to habitually not check my phone after work hours, since work messages had always landed at the top of my push notifications.
This habit of mine was true before Mawar, during Mawar, and it was true after. I had actually been called out at work by my higher up's higher up for going silent for approximately 2 days after the storm passed. They wholeheartedly believed me to be MIA (Missing in Action), which, I wasn't. Can't a worker go through a Category 4 typhoon in peace? Return to Text
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