Nostalgia is Beautiful

Because I can’t leave well enough alone.

I feel like that was a perfect image to use – Tenchi Muyo provokes nostalgia in significant segments of the aniblogosphere, whereas Abbey Road inflames the passions in a very large segment of the world’s middle-aged English speaking population. As for myself, I actually started listening to The Beatles around the same time as I first saw Tenchi Muyo, so its just a double-whammy of nostalgia for me.

I feel like a lot has already been hashed over, what with Eternal’s post and his inspiration, DarkMirage’s post, but I can’t resist the urge to pontificate upon the point.

Like my title implies, I feel that nostalgia is a beautiful thing, something which occurs fairly independently of whatever one is being nostalgic about. Consider this – does the quality of something affect your nostalgia for it? Generally not, because what you are hankering after is the sensation it originally produced in you, the feelings you experienced however long ago it was. I get nostalgic about the old episodes of Pokemon, back when it was just 150 Pokemon and Ash, Misty, and Brock jaunting about the countryside, helping folks and catching Pokemon… not because these are necessarily good but because I enjoyed them and had fun when I watch them. What I’m really yearning after is the happiness I felt as a middle schooler when I watched it, particularly since I was fairly tortured by my classmates as a middle-schooler. Maybe more specifically I seek the sense of relief I used to have back then, that no matter how crappy my day had been, when I got home at 3:30 Pokemon would be on!

However, one must clearly keep a sense of why they feel so rosy about the shows they enjoyed as a youngster, or even simply as a younger person. Pokemon is a bit of a bad example, as no one is really going to trumpet it past their adolescence as an example of something which is “good”. Instead, let us consider the case of Tenchi Muyo from its heyday, e.g. the OVA’s and first TV series.

Tenchi Muyo is something which I consider to be “good” from a detached perspective; it is a show which is quite enjoyable, as it managed to avoid sinking too deep into the more vapid harem antics (fuck yeah, no tsunderes!) and threw in some pretty solid world-building aspects. The OVA’s also had impressive technical qualities for their era. And, yes, it helped that the cast was engaging; yes, Tenchi himself could’ve been a bit more developed, but he did possess enough development to make it possible to relate to him. My nostalgia-vision, though, tells me that Tenchi Muyo wasn’t simply “good” but was AWESOME. And I know that, honestly, it was good but it certainly cannot be counted up there with things such as Night on the Milky Way Railroad or Legend of the Galactic Heroes or (to jump a bit in time) Revolutionary Girl Utena. And I used it as an example specifically because of that fact.

Which brings me to my point – that there’s a lot of knee-jerk reactions when someone says they don’t particularly care for an older show. Older doesn’t equate with better; it is very important to keep firmly lodged in one’s mind that their warm affections for a particular title have much, much more to do with their mindset and circumstances when they themselves watched it.

I suppose I’m arguing a bit for a post-modernist reading of what exactly anime mean and what their worth is. I don’t completely agree with that interpretation, though, because I would say that there are titles which can be marked aside as being “classic” or “great”. However, this itself doesn’t quite translate over into entertainment value – I think it is important to watch the original Gundam to give oneself context as regards whatever they are enjoying of a recent iteration of Gundam, but I don’t think that they will necessarily enjoy it or like it. Depriving oneself of the roots of their present is troublesome in an extreme.

To return to the issue of nostalgia, there is also the sheer fact that nostalgia is something which gives us a very artificial and edited slice of the past. Like I said, middle school sucked… but when I am reminded of Pokemon, that isn’t what I recall; what I remember is the fun I had watching Pokemon in the afternoons.

The reason new fans tend to ignore older titles in favor of the new is that they do not have these experiences we do, ones which are overall irrevocably connected to our childhoods, something many of us feel are completely out of reach. Newer fans tend to be younger fans; thus, there is no opportunity for feeling fuzzy about the fact that one used to wake up at 6 a.m. on Saturday mornings to watch the old DiC dubs of Sailor Moon (that I feel nostalgic for DiC dubs specifically indicates how tied it is to the experience itself as opposed to the object in question, since its a fairly agreed-upon fact that those dubs were terrible*). And, more importantly, these kids aren’t out of childhood yet, so there isn’t the drive older folks have to reminisce about things past; they’re still in the thick of things and often dreaming of being adults (especially if they’re into anime! we’re always the ones who get kicked around as adolescents and teenagers!).

Anyway, on that note, I’m going to go tear into Outlaw Star for the eight-hundredth time. So, have at it, vultures!

* If you’d like to burn some time having fun examining just how bad the DiC dubs were, I suggest checking out Sailor Moon Uncensored. Its a seriously comprehensive look at all the changes made from the original to the dubs (including the Cloverway one), and if you’re feeling loserly and nostalgic, its a ton of fun.