#monogatari series

Araragi and Shinobu's dynamic is genuinely unmatched because ive never seen this in another anime. It feels very bittersweet. They arent even romantically involved with one another yet their relationship feels deeper than that. They're literally eachother's halves. This is the type of bond between characters that I'll remember for years and I wish I had a good enough vocabulary to put it into words. Its def the reason why I started this franchise. Paired with the vampire angst its perfect :) I also love how Araragi's first encounter with Shinobu seems to be based on a Buddhist story about a starving tigress. There's a dude on tiktok who did a brief analysis of that and he explains it far better than I ever could so take a look, he also has other monogatari related analysis