I hope you all had a very merry Christmas!
Originally, this post was going to be about my realization about what a crappy seasonal watcher I am, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this year has really been a great year for my siblings and me in terms of anime and that’s what I want to dedicate my last 12 days post to. So, here it goes.
My brother, Brandon, can be pretty great sometimes. When the kid isn’t refusing to speak to me or running away from me, he’s one of the cutest kids I know, is surprisingly wry, and makes some great faces. He’s also a budding anime fan who, at this point, ironically, watches more stuff on a weekly basis than me. Though I generally don’t pay attention to what he watches, when he asks me for suggestions, I tend to steer him away from anything with lots of blood or fanservice since he’s only 11, and I have to at least try and be a good big sister sometimes.
Well, a few months ago, despite being initially perturbed by the amount of blood I told him would be in the series, he came up to me and asked me if I wanted to watch the first episode of Attack on Titan with him (he just didn’t want to watch it by himself). Since I hadn’t seen the first episode yet either, I agreed and that weekend we sat down together and watched it. It was a pretty great experience.
Even though we both sort of knew how the episode was going to end, as it turns out, that didn’t help at all when it came to helping actually prepare us for the end, which was pretty darn brutal. I remember my brother and I both staring at the screen in horror as we watched the fate of Eren’s mother unfold; I think I might have even teared up, but that’s beside the point. The best thing about that first episode was my brother’s reaction to it as a whole. After Eren’s mom was killed and the episode ended, my brother simply got out of his chair and, as he walked towards the door, said, “I am scarred for life.”
It was a beautiful moment.
(Though he hasn’t gone back to the anime (yet), he picked up the manga a few weeks back and told me he liked it better because there weren’t “red juices flying everywhere.”)
