heads up, this one's gonna get heavy and personal. i'm very glad to be back, but i have a lot to get outta my system. it's also really confusing. i'm a little jumbled right now. welcome to my blog !
for the best experience, please listen to: this song.
I've just finished watching Bang Dream! My Go!!!!! episode 7; having not seen much of the rest of the series, it's one of the most pleasant surprises I've had with anime in a long time. My friend Matpi who introduced me to Bang Dream via Roselia and Raise A Suilen, still probably my two favorite groups, also told me to check the new direction Bushiroad is taking their girl's band franchise. (Paraphrasing, the exchange went a little like this:
I buried the lead there... for a long while, I haven't been as into anime as I used to be. And I felt it, bad, man; I've felt like my old depersonalized self. All my favorites taste bland, and my self feels farther away from my body than it has in a long time. It's not an easy world to be a girl in, especially not a girl like me. By which i mean, someone who feels so much and yet, can only express it by collecting cute things for the sake of finding them, giving them out as gifts; and screaming from the soul. that's what this lost girl is doing on her website, screaming from the soul. it's the only way i can express myself.
that's why my blog looks like this.
ah, it's so refreshing to write to just my friends. the kind of disasterous passion i feel isn't conducive to audiences or close relationships, or to being seen properly by many of the kinds of people i'm most drawn to. oops ! my typing tone is coming out again. this is a blog, not a novel, so it's alright, right ? it's kind of difficult to say, but i think i've given too much in the fight against a ghost with no name; the way i'll hunch over piles of papers or a project, ruin my posture for passion; i don't think anyone i love takes things as seriously as i do. and yet, in the same breath, a lot of the people i surround myself with have taught me to relax. has it ever helped ? all the love to most of them, but i feel like, other than my blogging bestie Matpiand a few other people, i'm slightly misunderstood by most of my friends. and that's not their fault, so much as mine, i haven't screamed from the soul much at all lately. i've matched that ghost without a name, or carried in my chest from the bones of a house in rural maryland, as far as i still know, someone i can't go back to. another friend of mine who understands me so much as Matpi once told me, indirectly, that saving someone's life is reason enough to live for the rest of your days. and i did, i had thought-she told me she never flinches, but she almost got hit by a car and knowing i knew her was enough to pull herself out of the way. i'll always remember that, and one of the last things she said to me, "i think we've sort of traded places since we met. i'm where you were, and you're as empty as i was."
well, that's just context for later on. this is about girl's band yuri.
i haven't felt this much about anime since i saw end of evangelion in theaters over a year ago, and if you know me you know that's been a life goal of mine. nearly everything about bang dream! my go!!!!! hit me right where i was at right now and so i'm pretty tempted to call it as close to perfect as i'm willing to get with a series this laden with franchise baggage. there are so many little details that i don't have much to say about but which warrant mention. i love the way anon's run-in with her old classmates is shot and framed; it hits all the beats of classic edgeshit anime which are so near and dear to my heart. the shrunken pupils+waverering eye edges, and the fisheye perspective, all really capture the feeling of having the world pulled out from under you by something which should be completely innocuous. that's one trope i'll always go to bat for done exceptionally well here. the aquarium date is fucking gorgeous ! more on the specifics later but insofar as the Pretty Colors go, they are so pretty. i love the tanabata theming, especially as it relates to the themes of the script, these lovers kept apart by celestial distance only to meet once a year. the repetition of the planetarium theater scenes... what does it mean, that tomori and iuka both went there before meeting up with important people ?
there's this amazing scene where anon and tomori are at karaoke, and tomori breaches her fear of contact with a plea to "make this band forever", something neither of them are able to responisibly commit to at that time, but which could also not feasibly be negotiated down to "until the first live" because then there's the fear of being a one-show band. and i get it, like, tomori, i feel that in my chest. my hands shake, how badly i would want to stay in the studio and keep the band together; and sitting across the booth from another girl, asking her to spend forever with you as the lights hit purple and flash rainbow... it's a beautiful confession scene, and i wouldn't forgive myself either, tomori, if i passed it up. it causes problems later on, and even knowing that as i watched this beautiful swell i couldn't help but feel that asking for "the rest of our lives" was, at the very least, not the wrong thing to say.
it's a lot to ask, but if it means that much, and you can ask that well, i don't think it was wrong.
as beautiful as the karaoke scene was for me, it just keeps getting more bowl-you-over beautiful jumping to episode 5. first off i really appreciate how proactive anon is in her experience abroad, standing up for herself in a very reasonable way and leaving when she was treated unfairly... i'm used to shoujo MC's being complete doormats to their suffering, and so in a very shoujo-ey story made for a diferent, otaku audience, its interesting to see those genre conventions flipped on their head ever so slightly to create a more dynamic yuriful atmosphere. and i like that it's not so cut and dry as "glad i got out of there." it makes sense she's ashamed, even if she shouldn't be, because she's saying something now; like tomori said, trying to find a path. i don't know. i'm a sucker for yuri and seeing two girls vow to pull each other forward, as two lost girls in an aquarium, always hits different, especially when they've gone through a lot of the same mental hoops that i have.
tomori is literally me, obviously, this just needs to be gotten out of the way. but i can very much empathize with almost every girl in my go!!!!!. they're each lucky enough to experience and at times push away from, this bond between girls which is as sacrosanct to me as anything, in real life and in media. one of the quickest ways to get on my shit list is mistreating a friend, and that's also, rightfully, one of the hardest things for me to forgive myself for. this perfect thing me and my best friends share keeps my wings from breaking, and my wings were only made to work with them around. so whe sakiko runs off from a friend screaming from the soul to reconnect, or when taki lashes out at anyone who might hurt tomori again, and goes too far; no, i get it then too, twist the knife and finish what they started. i get that, slamming right back into being a sort of aloof protective type rather than someone reaching across vast distances like i want to be. but i can't help but feel like my sense of self in relation to this show would be more clear if i'd never given up that scream from the soul for the sake of a lifetime. soyo is the only other character who punched me in the gut close to the same level as tomori, seeing her composure break at the end sof episode 8 begging for saki to come back, saying "i'll do anything" only to be met with "do you even know what you're saying right now?" totally fairly, the time to do something was when her friend was screaming something truw and beautiful. the thing to do was to cut ties with saki, but that's so much easier said than done i feel wrong even suggesting it. i guess, being caught between two bands like that is the kind of situation where someone's gonna get hurt, and you just have to do the best you can to push begging "please, take me back" off until you're out of earshot... i don't really know. all i know is how to scream from the soul
why avoid it at my own expense, i don't know; and it'd be revisionist to act like this is the only time i've felt better since she left. seeing my favorite band live at the venue i grew up going to, watching end of evangelion in theatres and reaching the point where Asuka strokes the cheek of her rightful enemy, and now this. the character i'd been passively relating to on the merits of being painfully shy, painfully earnest, and having a choppy layered asymmetrical bob has pulled me out of a pit of hazey immolation smoke and yelled in my face a reminder: "This is what you're like! Act like it better!" and it's in her lowest moments, too. i brought up all that nonsense about depersonalizing and being lonely not to trauma-dump, but to make it make sense when i say that yes, i get hurt by pure joyous expression, or i used to before i learned to choke it down again; as i should, as i should. i hear Tomori talk about Saki bringing her to a bright place, i think of crying to her that i'll be graceless when she goes back home, and... no. i think feeling like that is the sign that something's hurting my heart so deep it's trying to scratch your soul, and the only cure is to scream from it. but for some reason, probably a newfound and malignant self-consciousness, i just couldn't put it to words in a way that satisfies me. even now, it's an effort, to even reach my soul, much less scream from it. it's an effort to whisper a soundcheck. and this isn't even particularly rigorous, it's honest and that's what it needs to be. i've just let myself go, a little bit, and now that i see it, i wanna reverse course ^-^ the only one who's gonna save my life and keep my heart from needing to be fixed is me.
it's hard to hit send on this one... talking about actual mistakes i've made isn't very flattering, but either way. i'm back and that's enough for me. for how long remains to be seen, but i have a lot to say. love and peace, go watch some anime :)