Spoilers ig

I know this is probably a pretty unpopular opinion to not praise this show to high heaven, since that's what everyone and their mother have been doing for the last 2 decades, but I thought it was average at best.

But to be nice I'll start off with what I liked.

The music is generally fantastic, Openings and Endings slap and it adds to the mid 2000s punk vibes that come through in some parts of the show. I remember yelling "I NEED YOUR LOOOOOVE, IM A BROKEN R-O-OOOOOSE" at the start of almost every episode (when it had that opening yk).

Character designs are also unique and have translated really well from the original manga, it's definitely a part of the show that differentiates it from the crowd of other josei titles and most anime in general.

The english dub is also really good and the definitive way to watch the show don't @ me.

Also the show is pretty funny, like I think I laughed almost every episode and it never felt corny or forced, not many people talk about that so I thought I should bring it up.

And now for everything else.

I think the first thing that I can knock the show for is how fucking drab it looks. Something about these specific 2000s Madhouse shows I find to completely miss the point of animation as an artform as it tries it's best to looks like some shitty HBO drama in the aim of being realistic. I'm looking at you Monster. I'm frankly tired of seeing boring looking shows with muted colors and dull directing. Even the music scenes have to make use of the weekly release schedule and just pan and zoom for the effect of creating motion. Seriously I can't think of a single stand out sakuga moment in all of Nana, and no I don't want to hear the excuse of having strict character designs, code geass's designs are extremely complex (especially the mechs) and there are plenty of stand out cuts I've seen from that show. It just wasn't fit into the schedule, or they didn't have the time, or the director had different priorities. Madhouse have made dynamic scenes during the shows made around that time, I could just point at Death Note for something that is directorially a million times more interesting than Nana while also having a "realistic" color palette and design sensibility.

Anyway, Nana is about two girls trying to make it in the big world, you've watched the show I don't need to do some boring recap. Essentially it's a college drama about the web of relationships born from these characters and their friends and their coworkers and bandmates and blah blah blah. I definitely could get behind college drama as it pertains to the interest of the characters pursuing a certain goal, you know so that the show is going somewhere, but that's the thing.

Nana is aimless.

And I mean that in many ways in the sense that the series doesn't have a definitive end, and neither does the manga which seems to be on a indefinite hiatus. The relationship that is clearly hinted at between Nana and Hachi ends unsatisfactorily with Hachi marrying that bastard Takumi, although some people still hold out hope that they'll get together even with other people who clearly want either just as much such as Ren Honjou, Nobuo Terashima, and Yasushi Takagi.

But it's also aimless in the sense that the goals of any of the characters shifts upon the revelation or introduction of some other person entering their lives. This show is called a drama because "drama" is supposed to be people making decisions for other people, blaming people for bad decisions you have made, confiding in people when another person has hurt you, and generally not having any interest in actually removing toxic people from certain relationships.

The characters of Nana consist of horrible people (Takumi, Layla, Shouji, ect), their victims (Shinichi, Yasu, Hachi, Nobuo, ect), people who make horrible decisions (Hachi, Nana, and almost every other character at least once) and people who exist to carry the burdens of their bad decisions (Nobuo, Yasu, ect).

Is it "realistic" in a sense, yeah, but it's realistic in the same way that one dude I used to know in highschool dropped out in the first year of college because he spent all his time partying instead of attending to his studies. That was real, doesn't make it any less shitty.

Look I understand the appeal of this drama but I'd prefer for it to go somewhere and actually lead to good outcomes for the characters I'm supposed to root for. Seeing both Nana's in a situation comparably more shitty at the end of the series compared the beginning just made the whole thing feel like a waste of time. Even the scenes of the characters just hanging out had this uncomfortable malaise due to the complicated histories these have with each other because of the bad things they've done to each and have had done onto them. No one can make a god damn decision on their own and when they do it's Takumi manipulating and abusing Hachi and Layla being a pedophile.

I just don't get good vibes from this series man, I watched all of it so it was rather bingeable at least, but it hardly stuck with me in anyway.

But hey if you enjoyed it, good for you