Saturday, December 19, 2015

TWELVE DAYS OF ANIME 2015: Space Bros and growing up

A quick one today and I feel like I already mentioned a lot of these things in my full review on Space Brothers but I still wanted to say thanks again to the show for being something I didn't realize I would need.

I started watching the show while in college, I was going through a period where I was completely sick of high school settings in shows so the idea of adult characters (and not just young 20s, like, people in their 30s, they're totally adults!) was cool to start with and space? Space is pretty cool. But Space Bros was a long running show that took me even longer to finish so I was long past college once I finish and, problems in the show aside ("racist cartoon theater") I found that I enjoyed it even more once I was a little older. Aside from giving me a little bit of real world adult advice ("oh I can tuck my lanyard into my shirt pocket so it stops choking me when I lean over? Brilliant!") it was really satisfying to come back to the show after a break and really see just how all of the characters, Mutta especially, just become more confident in themselves. It was really obvious in one of the last arcs, the undersea training one, where Mutta is handling unexpected stress and moving forward while his friend Kenji, who seemed more put together and much more confident previously, is suddenly having to deal with stress that he's never had before and panicking a bit (he does get better later but not before he notices that hey, Mutta is actually doing better than him in all of these tasks for once). 

It seems like an obvious reminder, that yes, you will get better at dealing with what life throws at you as you get older (it's even backed up by some studies that if you have some stress in your teen years you handle it better later vs someone who had none) but it still made me feel better to hear that one more time.