Major 2nd Rewatched:

It's nigh impossible to fulfill my oath of watching and rewatching all great anime to prove it is great -- the only way to do that would be to watch the same episode of One Piece, Pretty Cure, etc. twice every week.  Which means for currently airing shows there will always be a time lag of a year or two before I actually get around to rewatching them.

But today is the closest I've ever gotten to fulfilling that promise.  By finishing my rewatch of Major 2nd, every series that isn't currently airing or slated to continue airing soon (like with Index/Railgun and SAO) has been rewatched.

As for the show itself, I really like Major 2nd when it isn't being melodramatic.  The story of Daigo is the story of every millennial -- we try to emulate our parents, but find out that the things they could do so easily are nowadays infinitely more difficult, to the point of impossibility.  The times have changed and yet somehow expectations haven't changed, resulting in this enormous gap between reality and ideals.  Daigo is the incarnation of that gap and the ensuant suffering.

But perhaps as a relief for that realism is the healing power of Mutsuko Sakura, an incredibly cute girl, voiced by Kana Hanazawa herself, who is head over heels for Daigo and does everything she can to improve his life.  Is it unrealistic for a guy suffering from his inability to live up to any expectations for a cute girl like Mutsuko to be stalking him?  No!  Because she's a groupie impressed by his wealth and fame -- due to his father winning the World Series and the Cy Young Award!  Booyah!  A cute girl -- realistically attained, that fits perfectly into the plot!

Like all great girls, if you can just get their attention long enough, they'll start to see the deeper qualities in you and start to love you as a genuine person.  If you can just get that initial hook of interest, then Mutsuko discovers plenty of other reasons to like Daigo, like his work ethic and passion for baseball, his loyalty to his friends and his courage to take on seemingly insurmountable challenges (like hitting Michiru's slider).  Even the fact that he isn't easily swayed by her charms and isn't just a pushover she can get her claws into is, according to Mutsuko, a factor in his favor.  And seeing Sakura appreciate all these things in this everyman-Daigo gets us to appreciate her in turn.  It's a virtuous cycle.

As a generation of Daigos, people who can't succeed despite their best efforts, Mutsuko is the perfect heroine.  I really feel like Major 2nd is an encapsulation of the entire 2nd generation experience.  It's amazing that the author could write Major, a success story, for the previous generation where success was just taken as a given, and then just turn around and write a failure story for the next generation where failure is taken as a given.  It really shows his empathetic breadth that he can understand both sides so well.

Major 2nd is tainted by the ridiculousness of a little league baseball accident resulting in a broken neck, by Hikaru moving away as soon as he moves in, etc.  But the central core of the story, Daigo struggling with how hard everything is, even the things other people take to be easy, and Mutsuko rooting for him despite that, is golden.

All that's left is a few oav's and movies that haven't been rewatched yet, like Zokuowarimonogatari or the Broly movie, mainly because they just came out.  However, just to drive the point home at how zealously I've been fulfilling my oath, I guess I'll go rewatch all of those next.

This wouldn't have been possible if the amount of anime that came out last year and this year hadn't been so low.  But by giving me a bit of a breather like this, I was able to catch up on everything.  If possible I'd like to wait before any rewatch of Fairy Tail, SAO, or Index/Railgun until everything slated to air is out in blu-ray, but I suspect I'll end up rewatching them even before then just for lack of better things to do.

It might even get to the point that I really have watched and rewatched everything aside from the latest episodes that came out this week.  If the output of new great content stays low enough I suppose that outcome is inevitable.

Kimetsu no Yaiba can't enter my rankings until I've both watched it in full and rewatched it in full and then deem it worthy, so that eventuality is still a ways away.  I certainly hope that's what happens.  2019 could use a rookie great series to finally get things going.

When you're talking about this many hours of anime watching, it's impossible to feign love for it.  Only a deep and abiding appreciation of these series could be enough to devote this much time and energy and effort to them.  The proof is in the pudding -- if these series weren't great then how could I have given so many years of straight play-time directly over to them?  There must be something to them.  And if I like them this much, then there must be some objective reason for that, which anyone can at least partially observe for themselves.  I believe the human soul is universal enough that all good things are good for everyone.  There is a God-given universal human nature/soul template.  And if you aren't some sort of warped mutant mentally ill grotesquerie you should at least like these shows.  I'll allow that people vary enough that what I love could be seen as only halfway decent by others who are halfway decent people, but I refuse to believe that anything I love could be seen as bad by others who are not themselves bad.

If your soul is so warped from the main that it can no longer appreciate the truth, love and beauty inherit in these shows then there's just no saving you as a human being.  You should be reclassified as a subhuman animal and then fed to pet turtles.