I'll watch 11 today, and 12 tomorrow.
Windy Tales 11
The conflict between doing what you want and doing what people expect you to want.
Nao tends to be very introverted, and this episode emphasized that in a lot of ways. I could empathize with moments like when she was walking back from the audition with her classmate, listening to their conversation. There was also the part where Nao's family was watching the idol group on TV, and she was never in the same frame as her father.
The framing here is so conspicuous, it's impossible not to notice. Poor Japanese fathers, always so distant from their children.
But what probably struck me the most was the way the city was portrayed. The series so far has largely taken place just outside major urban centers, in the quasi-city quasi-suburb areas that are all over the place when you get farther away from metropolises like Tokyo or Osaka. The city itself is different. The buildings are constantly moving. It's part of a process of making the people in it feel small and insignificant.
The way they bobbed in the background distracted me from the conversation in some ways. It was rather hypnotic. Maybe I'm reading too much into a cheap way of simulating the characters moving through the town, but at a certain point they move in ways that just don't make sense for that kind of thing.
It can beat you down sometimes when you realize how many people there actually
are in the world, and how many of them are smart and talented in ways that make you feel stupid and worthless. But if you focus on the things you care about and keep trying, maybe chance and coincidence will eventually smile on you, and you'll find your place.
Cities tend to remind me how enormous humanity is. When I stop for a moment to think about how many people I anonymously pass during a day in the city, it's staggering in the same way that it is to imagine just how far the distance between stars is. Living in the countryside now, I sort of miss that feeling.
I'm glad I've watched so many shows in this backlog season that respect me as a viewer. It's a nice change of pace.
