Welcome Home, Sousuke

In what seems a lifetime ago, I was hardcore into anime. I used to collect the original animation cels that the production companies used to create the shows. I sold a bunch of them not long after Gabriel was born, but I still have a hefty collection. One anime that spoke to me on an incredibly deep level was Full Metal Panic! The show released in 2002, and I didn’t see it until a year or so after its original run, when I was in the cel collecting fairly seriously. The show is about a secret agent from mercenary organization Mithril who was sent to protect a high school Japanese girl from falling into evil hands. The reasons why they want to protect her are very anime to explain, but it’s not the why that made FMP such a great show; it was watching Sousuke Sagara try to be a regular high school student when the military life is all he knows. For most of the show, I laughed a lot, because his reactions to some situations were similar to how Shawn reacted after he returned from fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan.

Then I saw one episode that hit me straight into the heart. The high school girl, Kaname, eventually finds out that Sousuke is a military agent, and since she’s not always in danger, sometimes he is called away to fight other battles. In this particular episode, he goes back to Afghanistan (they never say that in the show, but it’s heavily hinted and then explicitly expressed in the manga) and Kaname is left alone. She wanders the beach alone, watching her friends play in the sand and surf, and wonders what Sousuke is doing. She points her finger like a gun toward the water, says “Bang,” and then the show cuts back to Sousuke who is heavily under fire trying to keep his team alive. And the episode ends.

How many times have I done something similar when Shawn was in Afghanistan? How many times did I wander off by myself when my friends were having fun as I wondered what he was doing, if he was safe?

I had to have everything about this show, and that included any piece of animation I could get.

Unfortunately, FMP was one of those that was CG animated, so there are no cels, only sketches that were turned into rilezu cels (post-production cels) and many sketches ended up in the incinerator. I have a fat collection of sketches from the show, but I love the colored cels, even though they are post-production and were never used. Purchasing these cels is also the only way to get these sketches, since they come with the cel.

The above rilezu is from Full Metal Panic! Fumoffu?, the second season of the show that took all of the super silly issues from the manga and animated them. In one episode, Sousuke as a flashback to his childhood when he was a guerrilla warfighter in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 6. I have wanted this rilezu for years, but the owner swore she would never sell it, that she would be buried with it. I gave up on never owning it. At a chance meeting at San Diego Comic Con this year with a few cel collecting friends, I learned that this woman was selling off her entire collection. One of my friends is good friends with her, so she was able to purchase it on my behalf for a far lower price than I ever thought imaginable.

The cel arrived yesterday, the day before Shawn was heading back out to the Middle East for tour of duty.

I don’t know how this series keeps connecting to me on a personal level with Shawn’s military career, but somehow it always finds a way to bore into my heart when he is called away.

Welcome home, Sousuke. I’m so happy you’re finally here.