Locale: en
Open Nico Nico after a long time, spot Blend S, and the first reaction is almost automatic:
“Wow. I haven’t seen this in forever.”
Then the opening theme, Bon Appétit♡S, starts and the sense of time gets even stranger.
Was this really ten years ago?
Not quite. Blend S began airing on October 7, 2017, so on October 2, 2026 it is still five days short of its ninth anniversary.[1]
But anime from 2016 really is ten years old now.
That is where the brain starts refusing the calendar.
Look back at 2016 and 2017 and the list suddenly resembles an all-star roster. Re:Zero, KONOSUBA, My Hero Academia, Mob Psycho 100, Bungo Stray Dogs, NEW GAME!, March Comes in Like a Lion, Kemono Friends, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Made in Abyss, Classroom of the Elite, Land of the Lustrous, Blend S, Girls’ Last Tour.
These are supposed to be “old anime” now?
And Blend S itself creates another funny disconnect. Maika’s official problem is that her intimidating eyes make job interviews go badly, yet to the viewer she looks completely adorable.
Then there is the café itself. The staff do not merely serve customers; they perform assigned personas such as sadist, tsundere, or little sister.
Cute in anime.
Potentially exhausting as an eight-hour real-world shift.
So this nostalgia trip somehow ends in labor psychology.
Naturally.
1. 2016–2017 really was loaded
A representative shortlist already looks absurd.
2016
- Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World
- KONOSUBA
- My Hero Academia
- Mob Psycho 100
- Bungo Stray Dogs
- NEW GAME!
- ERASED
- March Comes in Like a Lion
- Haikyu!! Karasuno High vs. Shiratorizawa
- Sound! Euphonium 2
2017
- Kemono Friends
- Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid
- KONOSUBA 2
- Saga of Tanya the Evil
- Attack on Titan Season 2
- Eromanga Sensei
- Made in Abyss
- Classroom of the Elite
- Kakegurui
- Land of the Lustrous
- Blend S
- Girls’ Last Tour
There is an obvious survivorship-bias problem here. Ten years later, people naturally remember the shows that survived culturally.
But hindsight is not the whole explanation.
Contemporary fan voting from the Tokyo Anime Award Festival already highlighted many of the big 2016 names, including Yuri!!! on ICE, Mob Psycho 100, Re:Zero, My Hero Academia, Bungo Stray Dogs, ERASED, and Sound! Euphonium 2.[4]
Late-2017 reader polls also placed shows such as Kemono Friends, Land of the Lustrous, Made in Abyss, KONOSUBA 2, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, and Girls’ Last Tour prominently.[5][6]
So yes, memory filters out the forgotten titles.
But the era was genuinely stacked even before nostalgia applied its own filter.
2. Why an old opening theme can instantly bring an era back
The Blend S opening, Bon Appétit♡S, was performed by Blend A, a unit formed by three of the main cast members.[3]
Years later, hearing it can retrieve much more than the song itself.
You may suddenly remember how you watched anime, which websites you used, what your weekly routine looked like, or what else you were watching at the time.
Music is a particularly effective cue for autobiographical memory. Research on music-evoked nostalgia has found that familiar and personally significant music can trigger memories and mixed emotional responses tied to one’s own past.[7]
That is why an old opening theme can feel less like “I remember this song” and more like “I just got dropped back into 2017.”
An anime opening is a ninety-second intro when it airs.
Nine years later, it can become a shortcut to an entire period of life.
3. Maika supposedly has intimidating eyes. The audience sees: adorable
This is not fan interpretation. It is an official part of the premise.
Maika struggles to get part-time jobs because her eyes make her look intimidating.[2]
The first-episode synopsis explicitly says she repeatedly fails interviews for that reason before being recruited by Dino.[2]
Then you look at her character design.
She looks cute.
Look again.
Still cute.
The obvious joke is to call this the “Kirara filter.”
That is not an official production term. It is just a useful fan-side shorthand for the gap between the fictional world’s reaction and the viewer’s stylized image.
Anime art is not photography. Eyes, eyebrows, faces, and expressions are highly abstracted visual signals. A face that is meant to read as “a little scary to strangers” inside the story can still remain safely within the visual grammar of a cute comedy.
If Maika were drawn with a genuinely job-interview-destroying glare every time she relaxed her face, episode one might stop looking like a café comedy and start looking like an interrogation scene.
4. The flaw becomes a talent when the context changes
At Café Stile, Maika is assigned the sadistic persona.[2]
The same facial impression that hurts her in ordinary service-job interviews suddenly becomes useful.
That is an elegant part of the premise.
The story does not “fix” Maika’s face.
It changes the context in which the trait is evaluated.
Outside the café: problem.
Inside the themed café: asset.
That is a surprisingly reusable idea. Sometimes the issue is not that a trait must be erased; it is that the current environment has no use for it.
Blend S delivers that idea while everyone is wearing cute uniforms.
Efficient.
5. When an anime list accidentally looks suspicious to an automated filter
Now for the completely different comedy.
Imagine pasting a list of famous 2017 anime into a messaging service and receiving a warning that the message contains inappropriate language.
Without access to that service’s moderation system, no one can prove which title caused it.
But some obvious candidates exist:
Saga of Tanya the Evil’s Japanese title contains a word meaning “young girl.” Eromanga Sensei literally contains “ero.” Kakegurui contains a gambling-related term in Japanese.
A human reader sees proper nouns.
A simplistic or overly aggressive filter may see isolated risk terms.
This is a general moderation problem. Automated systems can create contextual false positives when they fail to distinguish harmful use from quotation, criticism, reporting, education, or proper names. Research continues to explore more context-sensitive moderation partly for this reason.[8]
So a perfectly ordinary sentence meaning “these were popular anime in 2017” can accidentally resemble a bag of trigger words.
Anime history versus keyword filter.
An unexpectedly competitive matchup.
6. And yes, Saga of Tanya the Evil really does involve a child-looking soldier with a former salaryman inside
If someone sees the Japanese title and asks, “So a little girl fights?”
Yes.
A lot.
Official material explains that Tanya is the reincarnation of a hyper-rational elite salaryman into the body of a young girl in another world.[9]
So the premise is basically:
appearance: young girl mind: former corporate worker workplace: military
Even a human needs a sentence or two of context.
Expecting a keyword filter to understand the whole setup from the title alone is ambitious.
7. Café Stile as emotional labor
The employees at Café Stile are doing more than customer service.
They maintain a character.
Sadist. Tsundere. Little sister.
In real occupational psychology, the closest concept is emotional labor: regulating or displaying emotions to meet the expectations of a job.
A major distinction in this literature is between surface acting and deep acting.
Surface acting means displaying the expected emotion while one’s actual feeling remains different. Meta-analytic research has repeatedly linked surface acting and emotional dissonance with emotional exhaustion and poorer well-being.[10]
A 2025 meta-analysis covering multiple occupations also found positive associations between high-exhaustion forms of emotional labor and negative mental-health outcomes, while emphasizing substantial heterogeneity and the limits of causal inference.[11]
This does not mean “performing a character at work always causes burnout.”
Some people enjoy performance. Some find a role helps them switch into work mode. Deep acting and naturally felt emotion do not show the same pattern as simply faking everything on the surface.[10]
The exhausting version is more like:
“I feel awful today, but I must perform the opposite personality for hours.” “This customer is unpleasant, but I cannot leave character.” “My break ended, so the persona must reboot immediately.”
In anime, that is cute workplace comedy.
In real life, after eight hours, it starts sounding like an HR research project.
8. Rewatching old anime also means rewatching your own past
That may be the best part of returning to a show like Blend S.
You list 2016 and 2017 anime and laugh at how absurdly strong the years look.
You hear the opening and feel an entire period come back.
You look at Maika and say, “Those eyes are not intimidating at all.”
You discover that a list of anime titles can confuse a moderation system.
Then you end up wondering whether themed café workers would be emotionally exhausted from performing personas all day.
The show has not changed.
The viewer has.
That is why rewatching is not only revisiting an old work. It is also comparing the person who watched it then with the person watching it now.
And yes, 2016 really was ten years ago.
Your brain is allowed to reject the update for a little longer.
Sources
- Blend S official site, broadcast information: https://blend-s.jp/news/?article_id=44768
- Blend S official STORY / CHARACTER: https://blend-s.jp/story/01.html https://blend-s.jp/character/
- Blend S official MUSIC / opening-theme information: https://blend-s.jp/music/ https://blend-s.jp/news/?article_id=44836
- Tokyo Anime Award Festival, TAAF2017 fan-selected Best 100: https://animefestival.jp/ja/post/4695/
- Anime! Anime! 2017 reader poll: https://animeanime.jp/article/2017/12/31/36402_2.html
- Famitsu, 2017 online anime poll: https://www.famitsu.com/news/201712/29149208.html
- Barrett F. et al. Music-evoked nostalgia: affect, memory, and personality. Emotion. 2010. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20515227/
- Paudel P. et al. Enabling Contextual Soft Moderation on Social Media through Contrastive Textual Deviation. 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20910
- Saga of Tanya the Evil official site, BOOKS: https://youjo-senki.jp/tv/books/comics.html
- Hülsheger UR, Schewe AF. On the costs and benefits of emotional labor: a meta-analysis of three decades of research. J Occup Health Psychol. 2011. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21728441/
- Zhao Y, Gao L, Gao J. The impact of emotional labor on mental health. Acta Psychologica. 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41207128/
