Going back to Mawaru Penguindrum to watch it one more time is like going back a second layer of a story that never ceased to whisper secrets. This time the emotional charge falls in a different way, heavier here and lighter here, more calculated in the manner it entwines its tragedies with its outbursts of absurdity. What initially seemed like fashionable quaintness slowly turns out to be a finely-calibrated emotional grid.

The initial vitality of the series is still contagious: the penguins are still anarchy little embryos of themselves and mirror the internal disorganization of every character, the changes are still dazzling, and the jokes are still like a sugar coat on a razor blade. However, when it is watched again, the opposition between the comedic exterior and the sadness within cannot go unnoticed. Since the very first episodes, the Takakura family has a desperate tint. Their love is won but easily--as it were, a sort of happiness that is only there because everybody has decided not to stare directly at the reality.

The second time round, Kanba is more tragic rather than romantic. In all his choices, there is a sense of inevitability, and the awareness of the entire picture makes his sacrifices hurt the more. In the meantime, the soft clumsiness of Shouma comes across as the compensation mechanism of a man who has to flee the history of his own life. He is the one who changes most once the entire context of the narrative is considered; his guilt turns out to be the invisible weight which drags the whole narrative inward.

Himari, though, is the heart whose weakness provides the story with the shape. Even on replay, her radiance seems like a borrowed time, a sweetness the show has been crusading to defend even as it is being tore by fate. Her attitudes to the world are somewhat melancholic and heroic, her role only more vital and more tragic.

The revelation of Ringo is perhaps the largest. What was previously erratic or bizarre is excruciatingly explainable. Her sorrow is ugly, hysterical, and completely humane. It hurts even more to watch her hang onto the story that she created to get through her heartbreak as a girl when you understand how lost she is. Her development is made to be one of the most promising threads of the show.

The presence of Sanetoshi as well becomes in an all too sharp unnerving silence. His allure is an act, and his philosophy turns even deeper into a sinister when one goes back to it with the proper context. His easy manner of pushing other people toward their destruction becomes a terrifying source of human memory of how destiny, with or without the capital of the letter P, can play around without so much as uttering a word.

The symbolic objects of the themes (apples, boxes, rails, cycles) will become deeply more understandable on the second viewing. What appeared to be obscure is now deliberate, the commentary on inherited trauma, social beliefs, and the desire to make oneself a choice is more personally touching. Circles, loops, repetition become a blue print and not a puzzle regarding the visual language.

Eventually, the rewatch turns Penguindrum into a surreal mystery into an intimate tragedy that is enclosed in hope. It is a story that poses the question of whether we can escape the things that were left to us- whether love, sacrifice or connection can rewrite the past we never wanted.

The second watch does not only help to understand the storyline, but rather it enhances the humanity. Mawaru Penguindram is no longer a tale of destiny it is a tale of the price and the loveliness of making an attempt to alter it.