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Commentary on Good Old Days through an exploration of its stories based in family.

An anthology series marked by the objects of significance for its various characters, Good Old Days explores many themes. Some major reoccurring explorations delve into chasing dreams, love, academic pressure, grief, and more. But what stood out most to me was the way the series handled very different uses of parents in their stories.

Every story was influenced greatly by the parental figures in their lives, whether it was Phu accepting his mother's death and moving on from it, Piang with her dad, Kai and Got coming to understand the generational trauma they were subjected to, or Mai being raised in a family whose expectations led to the death of her uncle.

I'll be focusing on three of the stories within the anthology. Bond and Relationship, Road to Regret, and Somewhere Only We Belong.

*A striking exclusion is likely Memory of Happiness, as Piang's dynamic with her father is quite central to the storyline. But I don't have quite as much to say on it compared to others. To be brief: I enjoy the idea it's going for (about taking on the family business and making it yours; both Piang and Jap transform what their parents did before them into their own, new versions, that are just as great as what came before) but I didn't enjoy some other parts (mainly in relation to how the series explains her dad's actions).

Bond and Relationship, the first story, focuses on Phu, a young man who closes himself off from creating "bonds" with people after losing his dog, Ryu, as a child. What quickly becomes apparent is that the story hopes to explore grief and the importance of finding new people.

Phu lives a solitary life, unwilling to let anyone into his life due to fear of losing them. He pushes Mint, his love interest away, and he closes himself off from caring for as long as he can. His mom, then, tries to get him to have people to lean on as best she can, because soon, she'll die of illness. In the end, Phu realizes what he was meant to learn, but loses Mint due to his unwillingness to open up. However, he takes the lesson to heart and seizes the opportunity the moment he finds someone else.

His dog, Ryu, I feel was more of an extension and prelude to the loss of Phu's mother within the context of the story. He's a gift from his mother that specifically symbolizes her care for him. In essence, losing Ryu and closing off, Phu experiences an earlier version of his mother's death.

A complication on a fairly straightforward story (in my opinion, one of the most thematically simple of the series) is Phu's status as being adopted. This is something that brings Phu to wishing to push his mother away again. It's a test of sorts on his growth, and he accepts his mother back into his heart because nothing has truly changed. His mother is still the same woman who has always loved him.

All in all, a story about losing a parent and preventing yourself from closing yourself off afterward.

Probably the most interesting to me, Road to Regret follows three people following a mother's death. Whereas the first story of the anthology focuses mainly on the growth before the death of a mother who cared for Phu in a healthy manner, this story focuses on the aftermath of the death of a mother who deeply scarred both of her children, Kai and Got.

Both Kai and Got have issues within their personal lives, and are more prickly than any of the other protagonists in the series. Kai, notably, has a tumultuous relationship with Bomb, her ex-husband, after the business they began tomorrow went south. Got, on the other hand, is flippant about Ton's feelings for him, unsure of whether or not to get closer to him or not.

Their mother was damaging to both of them. Kai was overlooked by her mother, more harshly criticized. She always had to do more, do better, was fucking up, not trying hard enough. Got was preferred. She would put extra fish on his plate as Kai watched on then chastise him for whining, since he's a guy, saying "I'm sorry for your future wife." She took the idea of him being homosexual (which he was) negatively, denying it.

Kai is the eldest daughter. She's under pressure, the one who has to bottle it all up and clean up her mother's house after she dies. Kai is aware her mother prefers her brother, and it's the cause of a great complicated bunch of emotions within her heart. And most importantly, she doesn't want to become like her mother.

Kai, Got, and Boom get in their mother's car and drive to deliver an unsent letter from their mother to the family she left. The car was what she drove when she ran away with their dad. Both Kai and Got believe it would have been better if she had stayed there and didn't have them. When they get to their destination, you come to realize what the story is all about. Generational trauma, and how it repeats itself.

Kai's mother went through many of the feelings that Kai was made to go through. She lived in a suffocating household, suffering under the misogyny of her family. She tried to run away from it all, only for her relationship to fall apart and to emulate how she was raised with her children. She mentions how women are "already inferior" to Kai when she's younger, and how she became a failure. And Kai is terrified of becoming like her mother one day. Her mother ran away with a boy, and so did Kai. She decides to leave Bomb before he can leave her, the way her dad did to his mom. Kai does not want to be left. What she realizes at the end, though, is that it isn't leaving or being left. The two exes reconcile by the end, and it's about trying again, to make a relationship better than that of what her parents had. Got, similarly, reaches out to Ton in the end. Both of them still have issues with trusting others, and yet they find hope to try by the end.

The story comes together at the end, when Kai reads the letter. It's a letter from their mother to her family, where she expresses never having been properly loved, and not being able to do the same for her own children as a result. She saw herself as a failure in how she ended up, but was at least happy that she had gotten away from her family. The last part of the letter is their mother's last words to her, and it's confirmation she realized how she fucked up as a parent. How she didn't understand them and how she hurt them with the misery that was inside of her, but that she did wish she could have been a better parent. And honestly, the letter made me feel emotional. It's like, cathartic in many ways to see something like this. Road to Regret is emotional, and imperfect, kind of like the characters in it.

It's a story about accepting the way the trauma of your lives are passed down from the ones from generations ago, and learning from it.

The final story of the anthology, Somewhere Only We Belong follows the story of Hey and Mai. The shopkeeper, Hey has been in the entire show as a prominent character preserving the memories of our other characters. Here, we learn about why Hey is the way he is, attached to the past. He was abandoned by both of his parents to go live with his grandpa, with fake promises of coming back for him. The last gift he gets is a video game console - the one he plays consistently throughout the show.

Hey learns about the importance of objects and appreciating things around him thanks to his grandpa, who becomes the one supportive figure in Hey's life. He ends up becoming attached to his video game console, playing the same games (Harvest Moon, actually) even when he's all grown up. His mom never comes back for him. And his dad just sends him expensive gifts instead of anything else.

The other lead, Mai, is a highschooler studying to become a doctor. Her mom pressures her to maintain a 4.0 GPA and to be someone who is useful, while complaining about her brother, who is staying with them, saying he shouldn't have been born. Mai's uncle is seen as a "useless" person, as an unsuccessful online writer who "writes what he believes." He tells Mai to enjoy her life, not to push herself too much. An academically pressured kid, she's always only studying - but she begins to go to Hey's vintage game shop, as the one thing that is just for enjoyment and not related to studying.

She begins to go to the game shop after school, eliciting suspicion from her mother. And the pressure on her starts to weigh on her until she starts breaking down. And then just as her mother finds out about Mai going to the gameshop, her uncle commits suicide. It's a turning point of the story, and the way the series shows just how expectations that separate people into worthy or unworthy based on their success are harmful.

In many households, children are pressured out of finding what they actually enjoy and wish to pursue and into studying with only the goal of top grades and getting into prestigious universities. What Somewhere Only We Belong explores, here, is when it goes too far, and how it harms everyone. Hey pushes Mai away because of what he thinks is best for her, as society sees it, preventing both of them from pursuing what was growing between them.

Mai, in the end, is able to escape from the pressure brought upon her by her family. She goes to study abroad, to follow her dreams, the way she deserves to. Mai heals from what was pushed onto her, by leaving.

And then we come back to Hey, our nostalgic memory keeper, as he loses his shop and has to learn to move on from the past. What I found the best showcase of how Hey's abandonment factored into this was how he would listlessly play the console that he got as he was truly abandoned by both of his parents, stuck in the past. And when he learned to move on, to stop keeping it in his heart, he began to play new games. And it's with this that he's able to heal from the past and go after what he was once unable to, reuniting with Mai finally, and playing mobile games with her. Hey and Mai reunite with what they both love, but it's a new form of it, as they've both grown up and changed; they can start again.