I want to make clear that i'm in the minority here, this has a pretty good score in MAL and people also seem to be enjoying S2, so don't take my opinion as absoluteAchromalia wrote:
this helpfully digested some of my ambivalence toward it... i was not really picking up on these problems explicitly (except little pieces of the text/subtext/context of arranged marriage and women's rights, because it was evidently set in awful conditions, but i clearly had not gathered enough awareness to digest it) and needed more clarity on what could have been going on
...i think it was one of the last anime shows i watched, sometime within the last year
or maybe it wasn't? i wish i knew what exactly i've been seeing/doing in these past few years...
anyway, i specifically remember starting it and somehow seeing some of myself through the protagonist's passivity and fears and unfairly self-critical thoughts so i was blurrily attached between that and the very... unfamiliar contexts of these settings(culturally, interpersonally, while also knowing this is part of a narrative but not knowing how to take note of what composed that narrative in real time)
, knowing they were different from life as it is now. i remember uncritically submitting to the course of the story, vaguely wanting to like the husband and in many ways being led by the "vibes" of the story to still feel like there was something sweet in it... but ultimately this reminded me of how little substance there was when much of the story was presumably founded on being someone with minimal power or specific skills beyond housework who could finally find escape from exploitative and dehumanizing abuse or despair. it didn't inspect power or culture, it didn't explore the troubles of trying to find or build skills in this ecosystem beyond being his complementary housewife(and the part i recall from later in the story clearly doesn't count)
, it didn't explore the features of the relationship that much beyond hoping he's happy and learning that he's happy with you and finding that he wants you to be happy too(i think? i forgot a lot of what happened in the middle other than family drama)
and it seemed like i was attached to the thought of being able to heal through comparatively kind people, but realistically it would never be a sufficient or helpful analogue at all...
it's not necessarily explanatory(as in, the following observation/impression is not assumed to be fully correlated or causative of my blurry acceptance)
but i notably am not very sure how romance forms for different people, and it's hard to know how exactly i would relate to it myself... while at the same time i'm often very fixated on stories About it, wondering what connections between people mean and wondering what i could possibly want or hope for. but i doubt i've ever really had or held onto reliably representative expressions of healthy relationships, and i've regularly drawn my guesses/impressions from scarce or otherwise sensationalized examples in fiction and the various things people describe online. my own family life doesn't really have good examples of romance either, so, all of that is how i would contextualize(or, considering the way i've been writing my approval of the review, more like apprehensively self-justifying)
the fact i didn't really process any of this and understand their roles and implications during the anime, if i remember correctly then i was exactly that person you described in thinking "oh... that's cute ;v;" and had not thought ahead
i'm wondering what made it so hard to just view it as clearly and realistically as you seem to...
inexperience with life? detachment from reality and implications? things which i obsess over the consequences of that i forget about immediately if i'm in a different mood or setting that reframes my limited awareness. it's frustrating, tiring, unclear, but
it's helpful to get clearer vision from other people. i just wish i understood how to not rely so heavily on them for feeding and anchoring my own thoughts, but if i don't, then i often find i'm drifting off into my own bubble-world and lost in self-indulgent things that couldn't ever have existed. too many critical questions, too tired to know where to start and endure answering them
again, ty for the review, will hopefully recommend more things i want to see reviews for soon
also, on the comment of "to see things as clear and realistically as yoU", that just comes to me watching things very critically and having certain tastes in media, while watching I was already thinking what to write for this thread. Also, I can't not admit that the reason why I personally spotted some of the things I consider problems are because I already disliked the anime at a surface level, it was not like I liked the anime then I started thinking about it and started disliking it. I feel if you for some reason do want to do as me and develop a more critical eye the only thing you have to do is just start doing this. I don't mean making a thread like this one but just take things ythat you enjoy and break everything in elements and explanations that make sense tyo you, think "why does this evoke a certain feeling" and just go on based on that
going further than that, I think you already have said vision, you already make insanely long analytical comments in OT, like the one you already did, the difference is that you search the answers in yourself and I search it in whatever i'm looking. You don't seem to want to atribute negattive traits to any media that you've seen another person enjoy, as you can't really fanthom the idea of someone enjoying a thing that you personally may consider bad written, I personally don't really have that way of looking at things