When it comes to a new year, everyone’s talking about doing new things and resolutions to become better. But what if revisiting stuff can actually help you a lot more?

I was inspired by two posts I read – Japan Powered’s The Value of (Re)watching and (Re)reading and Use Your Damn Skills’ “Comfort TV and trauma recovery”. The first post talked about how it’s okay to look at past stories you were interested in back in the day. There may be times where you might cringe, but you might get a better appreciation of what that story meant for you at the time. The second post focused on how adults who grew up feeling neglected as kids turned to and rewatch comfort TV a lot to escape whatever trauma they were going through.

On the subject of rereading and rewatching, I’ve been thinking a lot about revisiting Gintama and Fullmetal Alchemist. Both are considered two of the top most popular manga ever by Japanese audiences. Both series have amazing characters and stories that resonate with readers. I remember a great deal of lines and moments from FMA and Gintama. Even back then, I re-watched and/or re-read those two series to a great degree. Nothing else mattered.

Compared to now, where there’s so much manga released, I sometimes wonder because of the amount of manga out there, nothing seems to stick in my head as much. Although I love current hits like Chainsaw Man, there’s nothing about them (yet) that brings out a sense of emotional catharsis that I feel compared to when I read something older like Fullmetal Alchemist. Or should I say, most manga haven’t hit me as hard. I nowadays get that from video games.

But when I think about it, I’m a different person back then compared to now. While I think it’s a good thing, you can lose something during the process.

I want to now address “comfort TV and trauma recovery.” I’ve used anime and manga to “escape” depression. I’ve also used them as outlets to process feelings that I never told people at the time. I think the beauty of revisiting your favorite series is that everything is predictable when out in the real world, not everything sadly goes your way.

I sometimes wonder if I’m doing this with playing K-Pop songs over and over again. They take me back to a place where I know for certain that I’ll be feeling great. Those songs take me back to my younger years when I wanted to be a DJ and blast music at parties with no drama. People piss me off and while I’m able to resolve interpersonal situations at times, I just feel mentally fatigued and sometimes scared over how some people behave. What if my emotional wounds led me to get sucked into fandom in the first place?

There’s a lot of value to revisit things you liked back then. Every work has lessons to learn. Every story reminds us of how human we are. We need other people to share stories in order to feel that we matter in the grand scale of things. You also might learn something new when you revisit a story due to your own changes in perspective.

I’m always looking back into my memories as a hardcore fan when I was a teen to young adult. It’s been fun. I realized how grateful I am to be able to experience those joys even when they weren’t accepted as they are now. Maybe I didn’t have as many friends to share those interests with at the time, but I know being involved in fan interests helped slowly shape the way I wanted to view life and act around people.

I hope it’s the same for you guys. No one should shame you for revisiting older works. What’s important is they help you feel alive and make certain parts of life worth revisiting years down the road.