Your Name (Kimi no Na wa) is perhaps the best anime film and one of the best animated features I've seen (if you haven't seen it yet, go watch it right now. Leave this page and go watch it. Go. Seriously. It's really good). It's even secured a place on my top films in general (live action, animated, or otherwise), and it's perhaps the only "short" feature (compared to TV shows that have multiple dozens of episodes) where I've become so helplessly attached to the characters. I won't go too much into the actual premise; you can read what I've written on my website (located in my profile). I will say this much, though: I dislike the ending. Not because it's a bad ending; no, as a way to end a story it works very well, because it ties in to the themes of searching for a soulmate, dreaming, and the bittersweet sting of love and loss. I dislike the ending for a similar reason why I dislike the Artemis Fowl ending: it's emotionally devastating. Elsewhere, I've commented on how I hate memory loss endings because they make the rest of the story feel like a waste of time at worst, and a sad reminiscence at best. This ending falls into the latter category, with it almost invalidating the adventures that Taki and Mitsuha had together while simultaneously proving their connection through musubi. This, combined with my restlessness towards the ending and my preference to see everything resolve to a happy ending, led to my writing of this fic (in general, this is how I cope with endings: writing my own to help bring closure to my own mind and heart). Part of the problem is the lack of really substantial, good fics out there for me to read, so go out and write some!

About this fic:

This fic is an unashamedly happy, soppy reunification story. It follows immediately after the ending of the film, and is quintessentially just fluff. I originally planned to write this in the third person, but a few factors changed that. First and foremost, the film focuses on two specific characters. In fact, I don't think there's a single scene without significant screen time with one or both of the two protagonists, and we often hear them voicing their thoughts (to the audience, of course, and not in their world). As such, it made more sense to write in a first person perspective. That, and I'm more creative when pretending to be another person than I am when describing from a narrator's perspective.

Of course, the question comes to how to split up the storytelling. Originally, I had an idea of having the perspectives split between the two like how the film handled it, but it very quickly became messy without the ease of storytelling that comes with the film medium. Besides, I ended up favoring one character over the other in terms of time spent in their perspective, so that idea was quickly dropped. Instead, I decided to write a single story written from both perspectives. Though Taki's part is some thousand words longer than Mitsuha's, I feel like in terms of character both were given ample opportunity to explore and develop into themselves without overshadowing the other, and it feels more complete coming from a dual-protagonist story.

At any rate, this is my fanfiction about Your Name. It was written to assuage the feels I developed from the ending of the film, and hopefully I'll be able to reconcile with the emotions it left me with now that I've finished this.

Updates:

November 17, 2016: Changed some awkwardly phrased places. After careful consideration, decided to remove most uses of Japanese words. Expanded a little bit in certain places.

November 18, 2016: Found on Reddit a very plausible theory about ages. Originally had Mitsuha and Taki both of same age, Mitsuha having pursued a master's. Theory puts Mitsuha some two, three years older than Taki. Made Mitsuha a professional woman to reflect this.

January 5, 2017: Changes in diction, edited grammar. Adjusted flow.