There’s just something about that open road. Modern society is an inescapable monolith, and wherever you go will be just one more spot on the map, but when you’re young and hopeful and feel like freedom is a real thing, the road has a real power to it.

In its best moments, Terror in Resonance was the road incarnate – a hard pavement of practicality laid down merely to guide the path of its hopeful, hopeless teenage dreamers. And in its single best moment, Resonance made that feeling of desperate, devil-may-care youth absolutely visceral, absolutely real. The show sometimes got bogged down in thriller narratives and dramatic minutiae, but I can’t hold that crap against any show that creates a moment as powerful as Lisa leaning back and smiling, the wind catching her hair as she races into oblivion. That’s the stuff I watch anime for, the stuff where something fundamental to the human experience is made absolutely universal – where what makes us beautiful is evoked in the spirit of human connection, like a full audience screaming along to their favorite song. That is a goddamn Naota Swings The Bat moment right there – that is something poignant and beautiful and true.