I’ve been watching Monogatari for a long time.
Monogatari
Owarimonogatari & the Courage of Choice
We are always starting down our pasts when we look to our futures. There is no past that vanishes once it becomes a memory—stories last forever until forgotten, and the stories we don’t forget will last forever. Swallow down your memory, reject a past. An end, a beginning.
All you can do is make the choice to move forward.
Owarimonogatari: The Mathematics of Happiness and Misery
In the end, what we turned out to be studying was neither mathematics nor Euler. Life is not a zero sum game; even darkness and light, happiness and despair will never entirely cancel each other.
It is our fate, perhaps, to live with both.
Aniwords – Mean Girls, Anime Style
This topic’s been banging around in my head for a while since I started wondering what it was that attracted me to characters like Yuuko from AKB0048 and Miki from THE iDOLM@STER. As has been pointed out to me multiple times with both, neither are particularly nice people or the kind of person you would want as a coworker (or even as a friend, maybe!). Yet, some how I still found them enchanting. Likewise with Maka Albarn from Soul Eater, who I touch on in the article—why was it that my favorite episode of the show was the one where she’s at her very worst? Well, I think I at least somewhat cracked the code—and this piece is the result.
Thank Kanbaru: Personal Narratives, “Feminist Anime,” and Normalized Media Portrayals
Let it be known that asking me questions of ask.fm is like is a sneaky way to get me thinking about topics you’d like me to cover in a blog post…this was originally an ask.fm answer, then grew too large for the ask.fm and so became a tumblr post, then kept growing and became more of a philosophical manifesto/personal story than I had originally intended, and thus here we are. To begin, I know I’m treading on sensitive ground here and so, of course, I’d love to hear feedback in the comments. [1] For me, this is very much still a topic I’m learning about and pondering through. But here’s where I am right now.
Mage in a Barrel 