It's impossible to talk about Welcome to NHK.
Here's the thing: this is the third time I've tried to write about NHK. I lost the text of the first one. I'm still working on the second one; it's already ten pages long, I still haven't finished this damn text, and I'm extremely frustrated with it. Perhaps, if I get the urge to finish this text, I'll post it here or on r/anime. I don't know.
I feel it's impossible... Not impossible. It's dishonest to talk about Welcome to NHK. This anime has such ridiculously significant value. The price is so high that I've been listening to the opening and ending songs so far. I cried during the second opening. Writing this makes me happy I watched it, sad I can't express my feelings, and angry at myself for trying.This anime hit me hard during a terrible time in my life. This year has been hell for me. I was reclusive for about two months this year because of some very serious traumas I experienced.
All the characters are extremely relatable. I identified most with Misaki's emotional dependency storyline. The last episode of Welcome to NHK is an absolute heartbreaker. Sato wanted to have an affair with Hitomi, and Misaki interpreted everything in the worst possible way. She always had an extreme fondness for Sato, and the anime made that explicit; after all, what reason would anyone have to be with Sato besides affection?When she thinks she's been rejected, she falls apart. This is where God comes in. God, NHK, it's all just little conspiracies we create to avoid blaming ourselves or reaching the most serious conclusion of all: not everything necessarily has a culprit.
Throughout the entire anime, Sato is constantly being pulled away from Misaki's schemes by Sato. This time, it's Sato's chance to help Misaki.
If she feels rejected and he feels crazy, what was once an attempt to help each other quickly reverses. Sato wants to If God or NHK are plotting against our lives, all we can do is kill them. Kill NHK. Kill God. Jump into the entity and put an end to it. Sato fails to kill himself and ends up getting beaten up by Misaki? Yes. That scene is extremely funny and makes me want to cry until I break the TV? Yes. Hearing Misaki's story is incredibly sad, and this anime is unpredictable. I got every single thing I could have guessed about wrong.
That's the problem with NHK. When I watched NHK, I felt so embraced but at the same time destroyed that forming a rational thought about it seems futile. I'm crying a lot while writing this because, besides feeling embraced, I'm feeling defeated. NHK broke something in me that's hard to quantify. Not even Fate/Heavens Feel, which I'm reading, and I identified almost parasocially with Sakura and unintentionally triggered all my thoughts left me like this. Everything I try to write seems either so obvious or individual. That's it, I lost. My rationality lost. My brain lost. My analytical skills are lost. Faced with this anime, I'm just a crybaby again.
There's a quality about NHK that nobody talks about, and that's how NHK's message gets across. There's that AI song that became a meme, right? We only guzzle diesel. NHK theoretically has the same message as that song or that son-of-a-bitch uncle who humiliates you at the family gathering.You don't move because someone is with you and everything depends on you. There's an episode where Yamazaki says that Sato is involved in a bunch of MMOs and losing money. Yamazaki, who's developing True World with him, gives Sato a real dressing-down.He says MMOs are a lie, reveals that the girl in the game was him, creates all this chaos, but not exactly because he wants what's best for Sato: he does it because he wants Sato to work on the game.
The difference between the anime and Yamazaki saying it this way is that NHK says it, but it conveys it in such a painful way that the message just goes right through you. Then you see Sato starving and Misaki wanting to commit suicide because Sato didn't accept her contract. The contract was a marriage proposal, but Misaki doesn't know any other way to phrase it. I identified with that a lot, the search for something that is certain and certain because life is scary. The world is too big and too scary. The past was a mess and the future is a fog. NHK doesn't humiliate you for it; it puts it at the center of the story in such a beautiful, relatable, and respectful way that it melts away any protective layer you might have about your insecurities.
NHK teaches you in a brutal way, but at the same time in such a sweet and caring way that it's hard to describe. I felt like I was opening a box of chocolates that had a bomb inside. And it would be dishonest of me to only come here after a week with my heart bleeding because of this anime and submit a clean essay. I admire anyone who can talk about this anime without crying. Anyone who can put together a good and concise account of this anime.
And I disagree with whoever said that the ending of NHK wasn't happy. I think I heard that opinion somewhere before. The ending of NHK is extremely sweet and extremely happy. How can I say that an ending where Sato and Misaki are in a good moment of their lives, together, returning to normal after years, or in the case of Misaki a whole life disconnection It's "bittersweet, wow, what a real ending". For those who have experienced even a fragment of these two characters' lives, the ending of NHK is almost like a fairy tale. And all the other characters also end up happy. Yamazaki thought his life was going to be a mess, but he's doing really well on the farm. Hitomi participated in a suicide cult and now she's a mother and is with someone who loves her. The mere fact that everyone is living a normal life is an achievement.
And NHK delivers these messages in a way that will overwhelm your nervous and circulatory systems. Watching NHK made me feel so... It's even hard to describe. It's the pain, but at the same time the joy, of identifying with a character and seeing the situation represented with respect, but not in a sanitized way. This is my favorite anime.I don't have any truly relevant criticism of NHK, and even if I did, I'd still be talking about an absolute platinum rating.
Maybe I'll follow the ten-page text, maybe I'll publish it, or maybe I'll just keep it as a basis or personal record for something better. But it's incredible that even weeks after watching it, I'm still in a state of wonder about this anime. Talking about it the way I do in normal texts seems like trying to compress an ocean of feelings and stories —mixing those of the characters and things I've been through— into an ice cube. Well, about what one cannot speak, one must remain silent.
If you haven't seen NHK yet, for God's sake, watch it. I hope that the fact that I only knows how to cry doesn't ruin your experience. Perhaps you'll be able to talk about this anime rationally. I can't do that. Best anime I've ever seen. I have to read the novel.
Live happily!