Emotions are a funny thing, a person's appeal to logic can be completely undercut by a strong enough appeal to emotion. It's common for teenagers to believe the world should conform to their logic, and to enforce your brand of logic onto the world you interact with, and struggle and lament when it doesn't work out. But as an adult I've found it much easier to understand that which cannot be interpreted through this childish thought that life should "only" work this way.
I reluctantly grew up.
I will keep growing up together with those that matter most to me.
I'll grow in ways I won't notice.
My relationships will change for better and for worse.
Sometimes things will happen so gradually that I'll wonder how I got here.
And sometimes they will happen so suddenly that the past me would never understand how it came to this.
Which is why I'm glad to have Araragi grow old with me. It should be no secret that Araragi's struggles are my own, and that I would still be lost without him.
Lost
Even a lost snail grows up, even the dead cannot stop growing, so I have a duty to grow while I'm still alive.
After 18 years, or rather in the 3 years since I've started Monogatari, I've been able to grow thanks to Araragi.
You could say he helped save me, and he's not so silly anymore to say I did it without his help.
Even if ultimately my decision to give the series the chance it deserves is how I saved myself.
I'll be 25 soon, I constantly feel like an old man, and yet still too much like a kid as well. Araragi growing past the age of adolescence has allowed me to cope with my own, and yet we can both keep growing past what we thought should have been our expiration date.
We can see the world through new eyes.
We can accept the first great tragedy that we caused.
We can both see past the ending where no one was happy, to the future where happiness blooms.
Not our happy ending, but our happy continuation.
I'm reluctantly growing up after 18 years, or rather 6 years.
I'll grow with my favorite protagonist as my guide.
I'll grow thanks to the beauty conveyed to me by a person I'll never meet, translated from a language I might never learn, and find my own happy continuation.
This has been the beginning of Family Season, whatever that uncertain future will bring, it has started beautifully and this illustration at the end will surely stick with me for the rest of my life, and is the only reason I felt I had to write a review at all, despite it being more a review of myself than a review of Nisio's work itself.
Spoiler, click to view
