As an indulgence I re-watched the first episode of Hibike! Euphonium today–don't worry, this isn't a TV episode review! We've got a lot of barrel to scrape before we get to something like that. And anyways, it was muted, no subtitles and in the first place I was only watching to count how many shots the episode had. 363 give or take, not including OP or ED. I wanted to count them because eventually I'd like to draw the whole episode. Pre-viewing I dreamily, uncritically thought 'I'll be able to do a cut a week and be done in a year!' Well. Doing a cut a day would be rough, but I think that's what the goal will be. Before that, though, I'd like to draw through the Evangelion character designs and then the Hibike! ones before starting the episode. Establishing a figure drawing habit sometime soon would be good too. "Patience and persistence" is the lever of unqualified ambition. That's why re-watching the episode was an indulgence.

At the risk of–no, there is no risk, this isn't a review of a single episode: it's a contrast of perceptions. Rewatching Hibike!'s first episode was striking. It felt almost depressing: the lackadaisical high school life felt empty and sad. What are you doing? I wanted to ask. My impression, years ago when it aired, was that the episode was cheerful and fun. In addition to being a look back on an episode, it was a bit of a look back on anime: I haven't watched any in six months, and very little for a year and a half. It was more fetishistic then I remembered. 'Oh, I can see why people dislike this.' I thought, because it was just...less. That dream of anime, that possession by the medium which fans experience, is gone from me. I don't feel ecstatic watching shows, I don't enjoy things even when they're bad. Anime is no longer inherently great to me. No, the high school setting feels a little sad, the vision a little narrower.

Why do we get possessed like so? Is it an indiscretion of youth, a last remnant of childhood, extended and distorted to last beyond it's time? Now it's gone and done. At least I'll remember lying on the hill with Shinji, Asuka and Rei. Traveling into town with a merchant named Lawrence. All so warm and brilliant and comforting, those passages from the past. Funnily enough, I don't remember them being so brilliant at the time. It's like Ursula Le Guin says in The Dispossessed 'You can return home as long as you remember there never was a place called home,' or something like that. Our memories are not as they were; the past inflects on them and then they are past!

What does the eye of retrospect unveil, I wonder?