IKUSAMONOGATARI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

CHAPTERS

NOVEL AdventureShinomonogatari
NOVEL DramaTsugimonogatari

REVIEWS

• 

  TarnishedFloozy

  100/100
  If you're that unfortunate, you'll just have to make up for it by being extra happy from now on.

  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.
  

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• 

  inspirashamul

  80/100
  A second chance for the damaged.

  Family Season
  Only 6 years for Koyomi and 4 years for me (since I started this franchise). It’s easy to see change in anyone else other than yourself. Especially since we have seen so many entries in Koyomi’s head, we learn a lot through him. And his last lines in this entry really spoke to me.

  We’ve been together for so long, after all, you’re practically family to me. We may disappear for a while.
  But if you ever miss us, feel free to call out to us however you like.

  That’s the beauty of fiction. I can at any point go back to rereread or rewatch whatever I’d like because the anime or text is a snapshot. It can’t really change but the way I interact with it will. Hell it’s been over a year since I last read anything by Isin. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten the finer details. Plus any insight of how it spaces the way I live takes many iterations to implement because we are pretty stubborn as human beings. Randomly I look back at these older reviews that I always write right after I finish reading the given entry and sometimes as shocked at my own thoughts. But Koyomi not only accepting Shinobu as a proper daughter or Hitagi as a proper wife but also the viewer as his family is heartwarming. Like Floozy’s review, it’s rare to truly grow up with your main character. Due to the space and time and NisioisiN unable to retire that pen of his (thank goodness he is such a prolific writer), it allows for constant new entries to enjoy these characters.

  Crazy to think that this is the first time that Shinobu and Hitagi interacted officially. I even double checked and yeah they were never paired together for an audio commentary in the anime either which definitely makes sense if Isin wanted to save that for this itself. Also thinking of the first 3 arcs of Bakemonogatari as the Senjougahara Trilogy is cool. Fun to see all the callbacks to everything in the past even the way of using “love” in English as a Hitagi thing or Araragi being both hyper-focused and observant yet tunnel visioned in the same way. The way that he described his hatred for Shinobu eating humans and how that intensity has faded over time felt very in line to Oikura’s hatred which was a fantastic parallel. Even finding out some of the reasons for Araragi becoming a police officer because of Kaiki and Hanakawa was very cool insights. Especially when you consider the little twist in who Kanbaru actually called was in fact not that conman but the new specialist Nadeko. All and all this was a refreshing read and am very excited for the next one coming out within days as a blast from the past of another family that has been skirted around for years, hell in decades at this point.

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