Ohhhh my GOD, y’all. I just got my hands on some fresh prints of Gravitation, and I have been flung face-first back into the early-2000s anime fandom trenches like a war flashback. If you somehow missed this glorious mess of a series, buckle the hell up, because it’s a ride. The basic premise is this: a tiny, aggressively pink-haired menace named Shuichi Shindo is the lead singer of a band called Bad Luck (a name that foreshadows his entire existence). One night, while he’s doing his usual routine of running around like a feral toddler high on Pixy Stix, his lyrics get yeeted into the hands of a mysterious blonde man who reads them, makes the most disgusted face humanly possible, and tells him they suck. This absolute dreamboat of a bastard is Eiri Yuki, a romance novelist who exudes the kind of icy detachment usually reserved for Victorian ghosts. Naturally, Shuichi immediately imprints on him like a lost duckling and starts throwing himself at Yuki’s feet, begging for attention like a dog whose owner left the house for five minutes. Yuki responds by barely tolerating his existence and actively negging him at all times. And thus, a romance for the ages is born.

Look. I will not sugarcoat this: these two are a terrible couple. Shuichi is like an emotionally starved, hyperactive chihuahua, and Yuki is an emotionally repressed disaster man who deals with affection the way a housecat deals with being picked up—by stiffening up and looking vaguely offended. Their entire relationship is just a never-ending cycle of Shuichi throwing himself at Yuki while Yuki alternates between ignoring him, insulting him, and then maybe showing a brief, fleeting moment of affection before slamming his emotional walls back up like a drawbridge during a castle siege. It is peak early-2000s BL toxicity, and somehow, somehow, we all ate it up like starving feral creatures. Was it healthy? Absolutely not. Was it peak entertainment? Oh, hell yes. If you did not have an emotionally unbalanced attachment to this disaster relationship at some point in your anime-watching career, then congratulations on your well-adjusted psyche, but I was feral for this nonsense.

Now, let’s talk about the anime. Because this show? Ohhhh, it committed to the bit. Specifically, it committed to playing the exact same damn song over and over and OVER again until it burrowed into your skull like a particularly aggressive brain parasite. Super Drive was everywhere. Every concert scene? Super Drive. Dramatic rooftop moment? Super Drive. A moment where literally any other music could have fit? NO. Super Drive. If you weren’t sick of this song by episode three, you had the patience of a saint, because I promise you, by episode five, it felt like Shuichi had only ever written one song in his life. And the best part? Shuichi keeps acting like he’s working on new music. SIR. WHERE. WHERE IS THE NEW MUSIC. Because I sure as hell haven’t heard it. Is Bad Luck just a one-hit-wonder band that keeps pretending they’re making new material while they ride this single into the ground like a meteor? The audacity. The sheer nerve.

And for a BL anime, Gravitation was so damn tame that it barely qualified as spicy. I’m talking a whole lotta build-up with no damn payoff. It was like watching a soap opera where they keep teasing a kiss for sixteen episodes and then cut away at the last second. You got longing glances, a lot of dramatically charged staring, and the occasional emotionally wrecked declaration of feelings, but that was it. If you were a BL fan in the early 2000s, you were starving for content, and Gravitation showed up with a single saltine cracker and said, “Here. This is your feast.” And you know what? We took it. Because that’s all we had. It was this, Fake, or trying to track down grainy, half-translated VHS copies of Kizuna from some dude at a convention selling bootlegs out of a cardboard box. We suffered for our fandom.

Speaking of sketchy VHS tapes, I had this anime on a bootleg subtitled VHS, and it was an experience. The subs had been translated into Chinese and then back into English, which meant that everyone’s names were wrong. Shuichi was something like "Xiu-Xi," and Yuki was just. Elliott. I don’t know where the hell they got Elliott from, but I lived with it. I got these tapes from my friend Robin, who was an absolute legend and mailed them to me in a shoebox along with Weiss Kreuz because she knew I had needs. Robin also roleplayed as a blue cat named Pattrick on Furcadia, and we spent an unholy amount of time doing dramatic, over-the-top RP sessions about nothing important. I haven’t heard from her in twenty years, and sometimes I just sit here and wonder, Where the hell is Robin? Is she still out there? Does she still roleplay as a blue cat? Did she ever escape the eternal loop of "Super Drive" playing in her head? Maybe one day, I’ll find out. Or maybe she’s just out there somewhere, in the great wide internet void, still hoarding weird bootleg anime tapes and waiting for the right person to ask, “Hey. Do you wanna RP?”