As I near the end of this franchise I look back on all the emotions it has made me feel. Joy, sadness, relief, pity, heartbreak, contentment. It has been a journey seeing Natsume transform from a fearful boy who could never open up to anyone to a young man who seems to have everything he could ever want. A few moments come to mind when I think about this transformation. One is early on in this season when he is briefly transformed back into a child. He loses all his current memories, but he still has Nyanko-sensei at his side and is quickly found by Taki and Tanuma. This young Natsume is in disbelief at the life he apparently has, thinking that surely it's too good to be true. He decides to accept them as being his friends, even if it's a lie as the youkai nearby try to convince him, because it would be better to believe in a happier future.
The next thing is when his friends are all talking about what they want to do after graduation, where they want to go, what they want to grow up to become. Natsume simply says he doesn't know what he'll do, but he wants to stay in this small town forever because he's never been happier than he has here. I don't know if this is true to life, but anime has made me believe that nothing could be more wholesome and fulfilling than living in the Japanese countryside. You've almost got to wonder if there's some agenda to over-romanticize moving away from the big city in the same way they hypersexualize the idea of having a wife at home making lots of babies. Almost like there are crises of declining birthrates and depopulation of rural areas... or something.
Anyway I loved this series as a whole. It's not quite 10 out of 10, partly because it's so long with not much of an overarching story to carry it, but it's still a fantastic show. I still have a few specials and some movies to get through and I'm hoping that we'll finally get some solid answers about Reiko and Natsume's grandfather who was teased at in the finale. It'll probably still be good either way, I wasn't really expecting a definitive ending for a series like this at this point. Still, 9/10