Roving Thoughts archives

Daiba Nana gets her day in Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight

I may have a muted and mostly intellectual reaction to Revue Starlight as a whole (per my summer comments), but there is one character that the show completely sold me on and got me emotionally invested in, and that was Daiba Nana. And whatever else I may feel about the show, episode 7, her focus episode, was an excellent and amazing thing. For me, it was unquestionably the highlight of the entire show.

At one level it's not surprising that I like episode 7, because one of my things is episodes that reveal a totally new perspective on events and force you to completely re-evaluate everything you've seen so far. I'm predisposed to love them unreasonably wherever they crop up, whether it's in an otherwise ordinary show or in generally excellent works such as Madoka Magica.

(In general I'm all for unusual narrative tricks, from this through non-linear storytelling to all sorts of things. Just do them well.)

Beyond what it revealed, "Daiba Nana" (really, that's the episode's title) was really well put together and presented, like much of Revue Starlight overall. Given something to emotionally connect with, all of the show's technical work paid off for me, as everything built up over the course of the episode to really pack a punch. The show's understated presentation with drip after drip of unwelcome, unpleasant change sold me on Daiba Nana's mindset and on why she felt the way she did and reacted as she did. Her ultimate choice was not a surprise but an inevitability, and in the process it ripped off her mask to reveal the person underneath.

(In retrospect, the episode also sold me on why she was the winner of the Revue. Out of all of the competitors, she was the one who had a concrete goal that she understood, not an abstract desire or vague target. It's fitting that Hikari was the one to defeat Nana, because Hikari too had a very concrete goal that she was aiming for.)

In the end, Daiba Nana got what she wanted but not what she needed, and on top of that what she wanted was slowly turning to ashes in her mouth. In a single episode, Revue Starlight transformed her from a cheerful cipher to a quietly, desperately lonely girl who broke our hearts and so very much needed a hug.

(If you want to read more about episode 7, I recommend Emily Rand's writing.)

As a side note, looking back, my experience of Revue Starlight as a whole was definitely interesting even if it wasn't necessarily engaging. I don't often have the experience of watching a show while knowing that things are definitely flying over my head and there's an entire layer of things going on that I'm barely grasping the edges of. Here it was Revue Starlight's entanglement with the Takarazuka Revue (part of which is its multimedia nature, where the full Revue Starlight experience extends well beyond the anime alone). In that respect I'm reminded of watching Joshiraku.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Sidebar: Another little impressive thing from the episode

One of the little things that episode seven showed us (at least as I remember it) is how Daiba Nana's collection of mannerisms and habits seems to have evolved over the course of her many loops. In the very beginning, Nana wasn't really 'Banana', although she clearly liked bananas. It was only through relentless repetition and refinement that Nana boiled herself down to a cheerful supplier of a stream of banana themed foods and so on, with all of the foods (and many of her mannerisms) carefully honed through far more practice than any of her classmates had any idea about. The authentic, imperfect, uncertain Daiba Nana was far in the past by the time of the first six episodes of Revue Starlight that we saw; we saw only a polished front, the person Daiba Nana had made herself into for the sake of her goal and her classmates.

The seventh episode quietly showed us that the Daiba Nana we'd seen in the first six episodes was a polished, rehearsed role, and it showed us how that had come about, how Daiba Nana wound up playing a role instead of being herself, because she had to in order to keep everything going.

(I suspect that all of this is in part something the show wants to say more broadly, about the Takarazuka Revue and other things. But even just as a character piece, it was beautiful and wholly convincing.)

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2018

Last year I wrote about some shows that didn't work out for me, and this year I've decided to do it again for my own reasons. As with last year, these are shows that I started with high hopes, shows that by all rights should work for me, and then things didn't work out. I'm almost always sad when this happens, because I want to enjoy everything I watch and I want to have more things to watch that I enjoy. As with last year, this is not to condemn these shows, it is to create a little memorial to them and to what could have been. That these shows didn't work out for me can say as much about me as it does about the shows.

(To a certain extent, these shows teach me something about my own tastes, which is part of why I want to write all of this up.)

In the order that they aired and that I walked away from them:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko: It's been a pretty long time since we had a show like this, but sadly the show we got had pacing issues that I eventually got tired of. I really do want to like action/adventure shows that revolve around women, because they're relatively rare, but this one didn't work out despite quite a lot of initial promise. There was a time when I'd have kept on watching this despite the pacing, but not this year. There's a part of me that still regrets not powering through to watch all of Katana Maidens.

• Violet Evergarden: This is a beautiful and well crafted show, one that by all rights I should have been more fond of than I actually was. I have theories about why I wound up failing to really be pulled in emotionally, but they're at best hand-waving over the fundamental reality that this is yet another KyoAni show that didn't work for me.

• Lupin III Part V: Lupin is a classic series and has been doing its general action and adventure thing for a long time, with a well honed stable of characters and a bunch of movies that I've generally enjoyed and so on. It definitely feels like I should enjoy Lupin TV series, and it also feels almost like an obligation as an anime fan to do so. But I keep bouncing off the actual TV series, with the notable exception of The Woman Called Mine Fujiko. Apparently I don't love these classical characters quite enough to follow them around for six or twelve hours or so at a time, even if that time is spread out over one or two cours.

• Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory: As I put it, the magic leaked out for me somewhere over the past decade (or more) since the last time there was any Full Metal Panic!. The good news is that the old FMP lives on in my heart, no matter what.

  (It's odd, but this hurts less than Little Witch Academia did last year. I think it's because I already have the pleasant memories of the original Full Metal Panic! series.)

• My Hero Academia: MHA is pretty good shonen action and all of that, and I stopped watching it just before a climactic arc or two that were apparently very good. My feelings on dropping it is that this says something about the pacing issues endemic in a long-running shonen series and also something about how long I'm willing to watch one series these days. I look back on the days when I could watch a hundred episodes or more of something and wonder how I did it.

  (Possible the answer is 'less other things to eat up my time with'.)

Then there's some shows that I'm more mildly let down and sad about, where it doesn't hurt as much that I and the show didn't work out.

• GeGeGe no Kitaro: There's a lot of nice things about Kitaro, and it would be a perfectly wholesome show to follow on a regular basis (with some great characters). I just don't have any real interest in following a kids show, because some of the things inherent in its nature leave me too unenthused.

  Sadly this is a bad omen for me ever really enjoying any of the Precure iterations, because they're fundamentally kids shows too.

• Golden Kamuy: This is an acclaimed action and adventure manga with some great characters and a well realized anime version (bears excepted), but I wound up not really caring about what was going on.

  Looking back over everything that worked for me and didn't work for me this year, I suspect that this is a sign that I'm losing my interest in straight action stories. Over and over again this year, I've passed or dropped shows where the primary appeal was action and intricate cunning plots going on. It's not just Golden Kamuy, it's also things like A.I.C.O., Angolmois, Sirius the Jaeger, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Persona 5 The Animation (and Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory to some extent).

  (On the other hand I definitely enjoyed B - The Beginning, for all that it was very firmly planted in this genre. It wasn't anywhere near high art, but B knew full well how to be both entertaining and compulsively watchable.)

• Darling in the FranXX: I said way back when that I didn't have high expectations for DarliFra, which is why I'm not more let down when I decided that it wasn't interesting enough to continue watching. When you don't expect much to start with, there's not much letdown when it doesn't work out.

(I don't list Hinamatsuri here simply because comedies failing for me is the routine state of life.)

Writing this up has helped me clarify and put into words some things that I was already feeling in my gut. For instance, it seems pretty likely that Vinland Saga is not going to be something that I enthusiastically watch in 2019, since it falls straight into the general genre area of Golden Kamuy and other similar things.

As with last year, I'm deliberately excluding shows that I finished, even though I have things I could say there (and I may do so in another entry). This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

A moment where SSSS.Gridman exploits distorted camera perspective and superdeformation

(There's a bit of a spoiler for SSSS.Gridman here.)

One of my ongoing interests is things around the anicamera, the imaginary camera that 'films' anime, and along with it the various deliberate artistic distortions animation uses (including in CG), such as smears and super-deformed things. Studio Trigger is of course no stranger to any of this, as anyone who's watched their shows like Space Patrol Luluco or Kill la Kill knows, and so it is not surprising that various aspects of both of these show up regularly in SSSS.Gridman.

So, for example, there's this beautiful shot from episode 10:

This isn't just beautiful, it's also full of deliberate anicamera artifacts, including lens flare, veiling haze, and the wide angle lens effect of putting curves on horizontal and vertical straight lines.

But the case I really want to talk about is from SSSS.Gridman's sixth episode, where Yuta meets a little kid who wants to talk to him (and yes, this is kind of dim, as they're in an alleyway; the kid is on the right):

She really wants to get Yuta's attention and Trigger winds up giving us this classical looming, super-deformed shot:

Ha ha, no. That's not super-deformed. She's a kaiju.

To be fair, she told us that she was, and there was some advance visual warning as the scene unfolded (eg the shadow here). Trigger didn't spring this on us by complete surprise, however funny and startling that might have been; instead they built up the atmosphere for an unsettling moment. But it was still a pretty startling moment for me, and probably for a lot of viewers. Everything in our anime viewing pushed us towards a reading of that first looming shot as being exaggerated and super-deformed, not literal. And then SSSS.Gridman cut away to confront us with the unsettling reality.

That's why in the title of this entry I used 'exploited' instead of 'used'. Trigger did not actually use superdeformation here; instead they deliberately exploited our expectations of it in order to give us a startling moment.

(There is probably a bit of implicit wide angle distortion going on in the looming shot, for impact, but in a comedy SD moment it would be exaggerating the SD looming.)

PS: The revealing side shot is unrealistic in a normal cinematographic way, because the characters are nominally in a pretty narrow alleyway. In real life there's no way you could back the camera up enough to get that sort of normal perspective shot from the side without running into the side of the alleyway, so you'd have to do this on a soundstage. Which is of course routine in films.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

On watching a lot less anime this year

Looking back on this year in anime for me, one thing that definitely stands out is that I've watched a lot less shows than I usually do. It hasn't been because I'm out of time, or because I have some limit on how many shows I want to watch. Instead it's because I've become a lot more willing to listen to my gut, to mostly not watch things unless I'm actually enjoying them, and to drop shows that I've stopped being interested in even if they're quite late in their run (and I thus have a lot invested in watching them, in a way).

(It would be snappy to say that I'm watching less but enjoying it more, but that's not true. The shows that I'm enjoying are not magically better than they ever have been, it's just that I'm not watching much else.)

Looking back, things here have probably been building for some time (cf my Winter 2014 grump), but this year is evidently when my feelings quietly boiled over and I started cutting back pretty drastically. I dropped or didn't even start a lot of perfectly decent or okay shows this year that I probably would have watched in past years, and I've mostly not checked out shows that are outside of the areas that usually work well for me, even if they're getting a lot of praise (this season, for example, there's Bloom Into You among others).

When I started watching less, I think that I wondered if I'd feel idle and bored and wind up just coming back to fill up my time with anime again, especially since in the past I've used various shows basically to fill the time over a cup of coffee or the like (cf, and also). It hasn't worked out that way, for all that there's a part of me that wants to feel the urge to watch more. Although I sometimes think 'a year ago I'd have been watching anime at this point in my week', I've not wound up short of other diversions to fill up my time with (if nothing else, there's always my technical blog).

This all feels like a vaguely unsettling big change of some sort. I've been watching anime for a fairly long time, and usually a fairly decent amount of it, much more than I currently am now. When you suddenly get less active in a fandom you were previously pretty active in, well, it's natural for certain thoughts to spring up in your mind. Is this a sign that I'm about to quietly slide mostly out of anime fandom entirely, as I've slid out of other things in the past? I don't think it is, but then I probably didn't think that about the other fandoms either, not at the start.

(On the other hand, my past dropping out of fandoms has generally been pretty abrupt, even if I didn't do it deliberately. This is not that kind of 'doing it one day, stopped almost entirely the next' that those have often been.)

However, this also doesn't feel like something that's going to reverse itself. I don't look around and feel that there's spare time I could watch more shows in if I wanted to (perhaps old classics, or things I have fond memories of, like Stellvia); instead I feel that I'm basically watching as much anime as I have both time and interest for.

Who knows. Maybe I've just gotten a little too jaded and worn down about anime, and it'll wear off in a while. There's certainly a part of me that wants it to, that identifies as an anime fan who watches fairly voraciously, that wants to go back to four or five shows a season the way 'it should be'. Or maybe I've finally stopped feeling like I should watch everything just because I started watching anime in an era when we grabbed for whatever scraps we could get because they were so rare. Anime today is a feast of simulcasts and available shows that we can pick or choose from, and that's a great thing.

(These personal ramblings and reflections are part of my contribution to the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

In appreciation of Gun Gale Online's band of sisters

There's a lot of reasons that I like Gun Gale Online, starting with it being great fun to watch, but certainly one of them is that it is a very exceptional show in a couple of ways. To put it simply, Gun Gale Online is an action show that's all about a bunch of women, and it's almost completely free of fanservice (and romance). Gun Gale Online is about a bunch of women gleefully having fun together shooting each other up in a game, and sometimes shooting men who make the mistake of getting in their way.

(There are some men, and a couple of them matter. But mostly not.)

But the show's not just about the action, not really. It's also about the things that happen outside of the Gun Gale Online game, in the time when Karen and others aren't playing. It's about how these women interact with each other in their real life, how they connect, how the strands of their friendship and fellowship entwine. Gun Gale Online is an action story about GGO the game, but it is also a story about people. GGO would not be half the show it is if it didn't make us believe in those women and their connections. The show is not high art, but it makes everyone come alive; everyone is pretty much a real person. And in the show, almost everything that really matters, almost everything that has real character, is interactions between women (on the battlefields of GGO or off it).

I don't really have words for how rare this is in anime. Shows with all-female casts are almost entirely confined to a small slice of genres, and when they do escape they must almost always come with fanservice, romance, or at least the prominent and important presence of some men. On top of that, in action shows with women, only infrequently do they get to simply be people. In anime, male characters get to have plenty of shows with bands of brothers (it's the default state of ensemble action shows); women so very rarely get shows with bands of sisters. Gun Gale Online is a very welcome exception, gleeful pink rabbit and all. Especially our gleefully murderous pink rabbit, having a great deal of fun in a game that she enjoys a lot with her friends.

(As a long-term anime watcher, it is very hard for me not to be cynical about anime in some ways, whether or not what I am seeing is actual reality, and I think I'll leave it at that.)

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Netflix versus the discourse (on Anitwitter and elsewhere)

I usually think of myself as someone who watches anime as a pretty solitary activity. It's not really true, as I've understood for some time (for instance, I know I face the tacit pressure of conformity), but most of the time I can not really be conscious of the social side of my watching; it's just sort of there, as something that happens. This year, Netflix provided an interesting reminder of that social side.

With a weekly show, there's always a current episode, the most recent episode that aired and then became available here, and that's what most people are watching and reacting to and talking about. While the discussion is generally at its most intense the day the episode becomes available, not everyone watches it or reacts to it right away. And even if you watch it later in the week (as I often do for some shows), there's still people to talk to about it or read current reactions to it in various places. This whole environment enables a discourse that is focused on that episode; it's the obvious thing about the show to talk about, to react to, and to frame a discussion around.

Netflix shows did not work this way. Netflix released most or all of the anime shows it funded this year in the same way that it releases other TV series, which is to say all at once, with every episode immediately available. In particular, it released Devilman Crybaby that way, with all episodes available January 5th. Some people burned through the entire show in the next day or two; some people burned through it in a week; some people took much longer. One of the results was to distinctly attenuate the discussion about Devilman Crybaby, because people who wanted to talk about it lacked the common ground of a 'current episode'. If you were an early watcher, you might avoid discussing things because of spoilers, or have only limited other early watchers you could talk about things with. If you were a later watcher, you might have to carefully not look at early discussion in order to avoid spoilers and in any case your current episode might be old news to a lot of people.

(And even if you didn't deliberately avoid spoilers, you had to go find old discussions, or have them already bookmarked and saved; they weren't on top of Anitwitter, feed readers, Animenano, and so on.)

I don't know if this lack of fan buzz hurt or even helped Devilman Crybaby, either to get more viewers or to get people to think about the show more independently than they might have in the discourse's usual echo chamber. I do know that it made my own experience of Devilman Crybaby feel distinctly different from watching weekly shows, and I likely didn't discuss it half as much as I would have done if it was a normal show.

(Also, of course, the experience of burning through something as intense as Devilman Crybaby over a short period of time is definitely different than it would have been seeing it at a one episode a week pace. I don't know if a forced weekly pace would have made Devilman Crybaby more or less powerful, but it certainly would have made things feel different.)

I suspect that Netflix's mass episode drop also lead to less blog entries and so on about Devilman Crybaby than there would otherwise have been. Certainly I expect it led to less episode by episode analysis, because there really wasn't much point unless you wanted to do a close reading of the whole show or record your reactions and thoughts on an episode by episode basis. But with that said, Shin Mecha Guignol did a very interesting series of articles on each episode.

I also watched Netflix's B - The Beginning and some of A.I.C.O. - Incarnation, each of which was made available all at once and each of which didn't get too much discussion that I saw, but with both of them I think there are what you could politely call other factors at work as well. Violet Evergarden is an odd case, because it was available week by week everywhere except in the US, where it was available all at once at the end of its weekly run; as a result, I experienced it week by week as a normal Winter 2018 show.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

The moment when Laid-Back Camp's Nadeshiko won me over

In the beginning of Laid-Back Camp, Nadeshiko comes across as mostly your typical progatonist for these sorts of shows; an energetic but ditzy newbie, all full of both enthusiasm (to drag us along) and ignorance (so we can have things explained to us). She had her moments, but in the beginning I was worried that I'd get tired of her.

In the fourth episode, Nadeshiko and the other two members of the Outclub head off to a campsite in what turns out to be a longer walk than they expected. The other two turned up at the starting point with reasonable modest amounts of stuff, but Nadeshiko had a significant load and as they started walking, what I was expecting was the obvious cliche that Nadeshiko had made a newbie mistake in her enthusiastic loading up.

Laid-Back Camp didn't do that. Instead, Nadeshiko walked the other two into the ground; as Chiaki and Aoi were slowing down, she was still cheerfully going along, load and all. Nadeshiko hadn't made a mistake at all. Instead, she was just that strong, untiring, and capable. That was the moment that sold me on Nadeshiko as a great character, not at all the genki maniac airhead that I had expected and been afraid of.

Looking back, there had been flashes of that even before the fourth episode. For instance, in the first episode Nadeshiko had biked all of the fairly decent distance from her home to the campsite, and didn't seem any the worse for it. But the fourth episode was where it became clear to me, and that moment in the fourth episode is what clinched it.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Devilman Crybaby

So, yeah, I watched Devilman Crybaby. It was an experience.

Before I started watching, what I knew was that this a Yuasa adaptation of a famous early 70s Go Nagai manga, funded by Netflix and so without broadcast content restrictions. The first episode pretty much delivered what I expected in that regard; as I said on Twitter, it was very over the top in Go Nagai's usual way, and gleefully and faithfully rendered by Yuasa (eg). I also said something that I didn't intend as foreshadowing, but:

I didn't get emotionally pulled into Devilman Crybaby because many parts were absurd, but that's probably the best way to consume Go Nagai. To be actually in the show would be terrifyingly intense even in this episode; distance helped a lot.

Yuasa's Devilman Crybaby turned out to be very good at kicking you in the feels, to put it in the modern idiom. It became nothing like it had started out as, mutating from an over the top operatic exercise in excess to something very powerful by the end. I went into Devilman Crybaby expect to get interestingly executed pulp. I wound up getting far more, with real emotional impacts.

(In retrospect, the mood of the striking and compelling OP was also foreshadowing. That's not a pulp show's OP, in either animation or music.)

To talk of whether or not I liked Devilman Crybaby seems almost beside the point. Devilman Crybaby is not here to be liked; it's here to put you through the wringer, and what you make of that experience is up to you. My own ride through Devilman Crybaby was quite the rollercoaster, even though it didn't entirely pull me in (also).

After I'd finished the show, I read Wikipedia's article on the manga, which covers the metaphor Go Nagai intended for the whole story. I see where and why Go Nagai was going, but only intellectually and I have to view it as very much a product of the early 1970s and the Vietnam war. It's not something that resonates with me, for all that it feels like Go Nagai had to have been very passionate about it when he created Devilman.

(Although I don't know if it's the case, it certainly feels like Devilman has to be an angry work, with Go Nagai railing against one aspect of the world and people. But this is all me reading things into Go Nagai's central metaphor.)

Devilman Crybaby is in some ways a messy show, one that feels abbreviated in spots; I suspect that people who've read the Devilman manga will have a deeper appreciation of the show than I do. I'll probably never rewatch it, and I certainly don't love it; not only was it wrenching, but Yuasa's version stays faithful to the manga's downer ending (which is apparently famous and iconic). But I'm not going to forget it any time soon, and I have no regrets about watching it. It is, very definitely, a powerful work. And a very Yuasa one.

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Briefly checking in on the Fall 2018 anime season 'midway' through

I know, in my fall brief impressions I said that I probably wouldn't do a 'midway' post. I changed my mind because there are a couple of things I want to note before the shows end and my views change again.

Excellent:

• SSSS.Gridman: This show is amazing, and it's also reached the point where the giant robots and kaiju fights are essential drivers for the compelling character drama. It also continues to sneak in straight faced jokes and absurd situations that are both funny and illustrative of the strange setting.

Good:

• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I caught up on this and I'm enjoying it as straight entertainment, which is pretty much what I was hoping for. This is not deep drama, but among other things it's a fundamentally pleasant show. It could easily have been about war and fighting, but instead it is ultimately about building up a community.

• Thunderbolt Fantasy S2: I'll now say the thing that I didn't really say in my brief impressions, which this is not as good as the first season. It's picked up lately, but it still lacks a vital, compelling spark that the first season had. Still, I was very pleasantly surprised by one character in the latest episode.

  (Part of my dissatisfaction with this season is that the Mistress of Cruelty was a punching bag from the start. There were shades of Gen Urobuchi's treatment of her in the first season as well, but it had other characters to make up for it.)

SSSS Gridman is amazing and the other two are perfectly enjoyable, so I'm currently considering this a perfectly good season. That I got back on the wagon of watching and enjoying Slime is nice, even if Thunderbolt Fantasy S2 is a little bit of a letdown. Still, I can hope for a strong finish to the show; it definitely still has potential and room for twists.

Letting my memories be: on not rewatching Full Metal Panic!

Back in the days, I watched all of Full Metal Panic! and I remember enjoying it pretty well (although the original FMP more than Fumoffu); I still stand by what I said in my memorable anime from 2002, including there being good reasons that people have always wanted more of it. Then this spring when everyone finally got their wish for more, I completely bounced off of the new season. For whatever reason, FMP! Invisible Victory didn't click with me.

That hurt, and in the aftermath of that hurt, I thought about going back to rewatch the original Full Metal Panic! for the first time since I'd originally seen it. Part of me wanted to enjoy its magic again to make up for Invisible Victory not working for me, and part of me wondered if my fond but vague memories of the original would hold up in the light of a rewatch or if they'd been selectively gilded by the passage of time.

(I'm sure there are shows that wouldn't be as good as I remember them if I saw them again, where today they'd be far less novel and new and I'd be more attuned to their flaws and limitations.)

After toying with the idea a bit, I didn't. I decided that I was better off leaving my fond memories be, as they were. If my fond memories are gilded, I don't need to shatter them by a rewatch. If my fond memories are true to what I'd feel today, the honest answer is that Full Metal Panic! is still not something I think of as a compelling classic, and realistically the first season was a 24-episode 2002 production, so if nothing else I'm sure that parts of it were slow. My wish for a rewatch is more a product of nostalgia and my disappointment at Invisible Victory not working for me than of any fundamental interest in seeing Full Metal Panic! again.

It is, I think, a good thing to be able to leave things in the past. I definitely enjoyed Full Metal Panic! back when I saw it, and that is sufficient in itself. I don't need to revisit and critically reassess it or in fact anything, to re-judge it by my standards today. Nor is my enjoyment of Full Metal Panic! in the past injured by my feelings about Invisible Victory now. Nothing is wrong with enjoying one then and not the other now; it is just that things change. The Sousuke, Chidori, Tessa, Mao, and the others that live in my heart are still there, as fondly remembered as always. I had fun with them back in the days and nothing now changes that unless I let it.

I don't think this is quite nostalgia, I don't yearn for the past when I enjoyed Full Metal Panic!; I just appreciate that I did, and find it sufficient without further questioning of it.

(There are some things where I might want to take a critical look at what I uncritically swallowed back in the days, but I don't think Full Metal Panic! is a show like that.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime 2018.)