by Rollin Bishop

I have a hard time remembering the first time I watched anime with someone else. I imagine it was Sailor Moon on UPN — in the middle of the '90s — in the exceedingly early morning slot of somewhere around 6am, blinking away sleep too soon just to watch ahead of getting ready for school. Looking back now, my memory of it is jumbled together with Biker Mice from Mars and Mighty Max, all of which I'd seen with my younger brother. We watched everything together.

Then, some years later, there was Toonami. I recall watching the block religiously after school, regardless of whether we were at home or being babysat. Midnight Run kept me and a distant cousin of mine company during hot Alabama nights at my great aunt's, which never did have AC installed. Gundam Wing and Dragon Ball Z; high stakes and high-pitched screams.

I lost that somewhere along the line. My close friends in high school and college weren't interested, and my brother and I grew apart as we got older. There's only so much you can share with a person when you already share a room before it becomes unbearable.

This, partly, is the impetus behind re:frame's entire existence. Before speaking with my fellow animation conspirators, I reasoned I could start a personal blog, but to what end? For what point or purpose? The camaraderie of it all meant something, to which I applied "accountability" to at the time. In retrospect, however, there is a far more natural instinct at play here as well.

I am excited to once again talk about anime with my friends, to share the highs and lows, and to then share them with all of you. Our internal planning sessions tend to stretch on several hours beyond what we've intended purely because we, both collectively and individually, just can't shut up about whatever cool thing we've seen or want to cover. The simple fact, as saccharine as it may seem, is that the act of talking about what we plan to do — not even the doing — is joyful.

Particularly religious I am not, but one of the core tenets of churchgoing that has always been compelling is a simple one: fellowship. Community is underrated, still, despite our vast digital interconnectedness. It can sometimes feel like every single word is uttered into the void without so much as an echo despite social media technically being both of its constituent parts.

And covering animation as a journalist inherently puts you at a remove. I can be a fan, but I am not a fan, and to participate in those circles despite that is… difficult, in a word. Not impossible, but difficult. There is no cheering in the press box, after all.

Which is why I was surprised to find myself stumbling backwards into a group of likeminded individuals watching and discussing Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury whenever new episodes dropped. I'd only absentmindedly paid attention to the Gundam franchise for years, but the lead of Witch From Mercury being a red-haired young woman and the fact that it was outside of all previously established canon charmed me immediately — and I wouldn't shut up about it.

And then, eventually, collectively we wouldn't shut up about it. People I'd only tenuously known or spoken with online, or not at all, flinging memes and jokes and dissecting thematic shifts and arcs. I suspect I'll fondly remember this time for years to come, as I do now already, even if it was less meaningful for others. What's the saying? Love only multiplies when shared?

I share my love with you now the only way I know how. I can't exactly stay up with you, collectively, to catch the currently truncated Toonami. That conversation has moved to various corners and pockets, my aforementioned group chat included, and distribution deals across Netflix and Amazon and Disney and HBO and more streamers have made the source of all this equally fractured. What once might have been a schoolyard conversation is now both smaller and bigger, with hundreds of schools and yards and conversations at once. The best I can do is to carve out space for my own.

/out of frame

🦸 Kambole: Been dealing with some personal stuff lately which has thrown me off my axis a little. However I did find myself really enjoying the Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 anthology (on Prime Video) as it took recent stylistic approaches to adaptations of the manga artists work and applied them retroactively to his early stories. I am also, for my sins, still a mark for My Hero Academia, which had its big finale over the weekend.

☀️ Toussaint: Been slowly trudging my way through Cronos: The New Dawn and really enjoying that so far. Dead Space by way of 12 Monkeys with a brutal emphasis on scarce resource management, obtuse pseudo-religious worldbuilding, and mutated flesh monstrosities. Also, I caught up on Smiling Friends season 3 (delightful!) and Rick & Morty season 8 (fine!).

👊 Rollin: I've been so busy at work lately that I've not had much chance to check out seasonal anime, but May I Ask For One Final Thing? has managed to squeak through anyway. Seeing that young noblewoman absolutely body slams assholes has improved my mood significantly, and I cannot recommend it enough.