that shall be queen hereafter

I'm referring, of course, to Star Wars.

I just had a friend over who only recently binge-watched the original trilogy and had somehow managed to get through the last few months without getting spoiled for The Force Awakens. So we watched TFA and I got to witness her flailing and shrieking and gasping over the Ben Solo reveal (the minutes leading up to Han's death consisted of repeated mutterings of "No, no, no, don't you dare--"). It was pretty fun, and since we were on a Star Wars high we decided to start on the prequel movies, which she also hadn't seen. Cue The Phantom Menace.

Now, you have to understand something here. I grew up with six Star Wars movies. I grew up watching both the original trilogy and the prequels (originals first, of course--some things are sacred); the only one I actually remember coming out is Revenge of the Sith, and even then I was too young to really care about seeing it in theaters. There was never a divide for me between the "original" and the "new" movies. Star Wars was Star Wars.

And yeah, I've spent a fair amount of time since then reading meta on how terrible the prequels are on almost every level. And I could accept a lot of those arguments from memory alone (you ave to admit that the romance writing is unforgettably bad). But they remained fixed in my mind as decent movies--flawed, definitely, but enjoyable.

And then I rewatched TPM tonight, for the first time in years.

Hoo boy.

( how could this happen to meee )

Okay, so this isn't really a chapter review so much as...thoughts.

Because I was reading this chapter, right, and I got to the last page and my jaw dropped in shock (you know what I'm talking about). My sister was sitting next to me and she was like, "What happened?"

So I show her the page and just watch her face go from concern to horror. And then she just looks at me and says again, stunned, "What happened?" And...see, my sister doesn't read Naruto. Has never read Naruto. She watched a handful of the early anime that I forced her into, knows a lot of the plot and characters just from me rambling about them over the years. So I was kinda surprised that she cared at all, but she did, because when you're stuck with me going on and on about these characters for so long I guess you kinda get invested against your will.

It just really got me thinking about how freaking long this stupid manga has been in my life, you know? It was probably my first major fandom, one of my first hardcore obsessions, and even when I wasn't keeping up with every chapter it was still there. Like, background radiation of my life. I made so many friends through it, and apparently my eternal OTP came from it. Naruto was always lurking in the back of my mind somewhere.

It's going to be really strange when that's not there anymore.

(On an actual chapter-specific note, though, can I say how wonderful it was to see Sasuke smile? Really smile? Because it's literally been years since he did that, and it was so great to see again.)