Coming back to work after vacation only to feel even worse about daily life, feeling the good times and adventures go so fast and the mundane sticks so long, to never move on from the past; these are some of the feelings that can obsess us for months on end. This is a video essay about how to cope with daily life, analyzing four great stories and their characters (the anime Cyberpunk Edgerunners, Sonny Boy, A Place Further Than the Universe & Arcane) to explain why we must, and how we do move on from the best times.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners explains why we have to move on from the past, as David Martinez’s story turns from adventure to meaninglessness when he holds on. We can analyze the once poor student to single mother Gloria, as David becomes a legendary punk, only to get stuck in a time that’s past as Night City rips away Maine, Lucy, and more friendly characters. Unable to accept the loss, he loses himself instead, having his better world but without actually living in the moment of it.
Arcane (season 2) adds a layer of why the best moments can’t be rejected either, with Ekko going from a terrible world with Jinx to an ideal one with Powder, and refusing to accept it in fear. Always preventing the worst, he’s forgotten how to actually dream of what could be, and how to leave it once he does. And without living in this best time, how can he know what to make in the worst ones? Ekko embraces this new, ideal mundanity, and uses it to fix his own world, Jinx included.
Sonny Boy, one of the greatest but hardest to explain anime, follows Nagara, Mizuho, and Nozomi as they seek to escape a summer vacation of immortality and stasis to return to the mundane daily life they once lived. They leave this infinite adventure because it’s meaningless; as Nozomi teaches Nagara, nothing good comes without discomfort and limitation. The way we become better isn’t from our great moments stretched out forever, but from the regret and despair that follows their end. To ever live full lives, they have to return to awful ones.
A Place Further Than the Universe (Sora yori mo Tooi Basho) follows Kimari on her adventure to Antarctica, an attempt to escape her comfortable daily life, as she’s realized her moments at home feel meaningless and purposeless; she’s simply existing. However, this Antarctic vacation serves to show her that the best parts of it already existed in her life, but she didn’t have the right perspective to appreciate them. The harshness of a journey allows Kimari to reanalyze and enjoy her usual world.
Combining these four stories, this anime analysis video essay explores how to come back to reality, discussing how we leave a great past and live in an average moment.
0:00 Introduction
2:33 Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
17:00 Arcane
30:41 Sonny Boy
49:38 A Place Further Than the Universe
1:07:23 My Part
#sonnyboy #edgerunners #arcane #professorviral
Ambiment - The Ambient by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/