The rest of these entries weren’t ordered. But this was the best moment in anime of the year. By far. No competition. This is, in fact, the only reason I didn’t just do twelve days of Valvrave.

The moment is from AKB0048. Makoto is an endless failure who whines all the time (hence her nickname, Grumbly).

She calls herself trash.

Later, she meets one of her fans.

Best idol fan ever.

At the episode’s climax, Makoto needs to bungee jump into the reactor and hit a switch to power it off and escape from the enemy base. She’s deathly afraid of heights, as has been previously established.

Holy shit this is awesome.

And she does, making a glorious swipe at the switch.

Of course, being Makoto, she misses.

But she bounces back up, tries again, and succeeds.

One theme of many anime is “ganbare!” or “work hard!”. If you just keep working hard everything will work out. Frankly this is a load of feel-good BS. You’ll sometimes fail no matter how hard you try. AKB0048 expresses a similar theme, but a bit differently: “I’ll turn towards tomorrow and fail with all my might.” Then the theme becomes something beautiful and sublime. It’s okay to fail. But do it with all your might.

FYI Makoto is a boss but Takamina is still Best Girl.