Sound! Euphonium, season 3
One powerful reason that Sound! Euphonium is so anxiety-inducing is that the flow of storytelling practice is grating against the natural flow of the thing depicted. The shit here is so raw. I feel it in my blood and in my head. I feel so anxious about how every single thing goes. Every stupid little self sabotaging decision these girls make about their happiness and their selves. I want the narrative to just resolve things nicely, I want them to be happy in place of me. High school band was the closest I ever got to happiness and fulfillment inside of that place. And I want to scent my memories of that time with sweetness. I guess you could say I want to overwrite some memories… but I think that’s in a normal way, lol?
But it is a painful show, though, because authorially there’s a clear fixation on the reality of growing up into a college education system and the emotional & social loss that comes with it. With this, like in Liz and the Blue Bird, it just fucking cuts ceaselessly into your flesh with the blades of a practical system. God, I am so glad to live how I do as an adult where I can keep my friends regardless of geography! The heartless, natural-yet-not-natural edges of life and education-under-capitalism are traumatic. Like Kumiko says, “High school band is a strange space” – the wordless, true expression of music multiplicatively complicates those factors, when art, ability, the abstract, and the abject all collide.
(spoilers below)
I think this season really makes powerful foils of Reina and Kumiko. Kumiko constantly denies her simple animal feelings for the sake of being club president, but also for the sake of not getting to know herself better - but she does, ultimately, have to reckon with these issues, and comes out knowing herself and "herself in the world" better for it. Reina never denies her feelings, but never reckons with herself in the world - she's the best trumpet player in the group, she wants to keep playing trumpet, she has a link from her dad for a music college abroad where she can do that, and her crush is an older man that she plans to bag by being a professional musician.
In a sense, it's kind of the same path as Liz and the Blue Bird, isn't it? One character isn't as committed to music and has to break up (in a generic sense) with the other, who doesn't undergo as much development. In Liz, the 'inert' character is Nozomi, who (disclaimer that I haven't seen it in a while) already has the emotional intelligence to understand that she isn't ultimately the right person for Mizure's fulfillment as a person, and Mizure has to learn more of herself and her relation to the world as a consequence. In Sound! season 3, the dynamic is reversed somewhat; Reina's biggest obstacles throughout the season are A, "Everyone needs to trust Taki more", and B, the loss of her fantasy of Kumiko being there with her - she's more-or-less inert while Kumiko struggles with how to fulfill herself as a person. Hell, Kumiko struggles to even know who she is. She also loses a fantasy of Reina being there with her, but I dunno, it's different - Kumiko didn't even have a sense of where "there" was to begin with!
Ultimately, Kumiko gains some of that sense, and I'm so, so happy for her. I shouted at my screen multiple times this season. (I hope Reina slows down and gets to know herself.) I felt it in my blood and in my head. (I hope Suzume stays weird, and Yayoi keeps telling the worst jokes on the planet, and Kaho keeps losing her shit at them.) My memories of the time aren't really being overwritten with pleasantries only; they're being augmented with the particular eye of a camera and the sense of my now-self. And though I feel the intensity of the day past, I sort through it in my head and in my blood and make sense of it all, now. I feel better. Thanks, Sound! Euphonium. It helped.