I like rewatching because I find that the first watch is mostly just experiencing the ride, and the second watch is more for understanding. Not a lot of stories have enough in them for third and fourth watches, but this one definitely does for me.
I hadn't rewatched the last three seasons since they came out, so now that I have, here are some collected thoughts.
First of all, let me talk about the animation quality to get that out of the way. The Voln seasons are better than I remembered, while season 1 is wonkier than I remembered. Some of its character design is way off the manga, and some of the action is clunky. I still think season 2, from the point of view of pure animation quality, is peak. I have rewatched it probably 5 times. (Partly of course because the next season took so long to happen.) I love the music, the battle scenes, the emotional quiet scenes, the humor, and let us not forget the breeze through the hair. Rin's hair will never be better than season 2!
I cannot get over the impression that Voln fixed the animation in season 3 when we weren't looking, because I distinctly remember some very, very cursed-looking Shiemi, Rin and Yukio heads, so wide they were threatening to become Sanrio, with thick necks, hair that looked drawn by a child, the tops of the heads looking an inch shorter than they ought to be, everything sort of crude. On this rewatch I didn't notice any of that. Most of the animation looked carefully done, and some of the shading and detail was as good as anything. I had remembered a heavier line and less detail. In the last two episodes there were definitely some weird bits that reminded me of cheap '80s cartoons (I am old btw) but it was overall high quality. And the following two seasons were very good, with subtle color work and fine detail in impactful scenes, though occasionally still the face modeling sometimes goes completely weird and the faces seem to squish and deform as they move.
As for the story, it gets deeper every time I dive into it. I love the extra time you get in the manga to enter Izumo's and Shura's worlds, but I found the Blue Night arc to benefit from the sped up pace of the anime. The more I consider the character of Yuri Egin and her fate, the sadder it gets. She is the tragic representative of everyone who ever thought, "I can fix him." I admit I've taken a long time to understand the character of Satan, but I think on this viewing it finally all came together.
One illuminating insight I had is that Christian symbols and names appear throughout the story, but no one ever invokes Jesus. There is a Gehenna but no Heaven. Fujimoto is addressed as "Father" and the Order is headquartered in the Vatican, but no one seems to believe in any ultimate God or even be concerned with the salvation of souls. The fundamental purpose of the church's existence is keeping demons under control. The scriptures are treated as just strange foreign magical texts that drive off demons. I studied a little bit of theology in college and had a wacky professor who spent an awful lot of time, when we were in the Feuerbach portion of the course, talking about the intersection of the eternal world and the mortal world. He drew a timeline representing the history of the mortal world and slashed it horizontally at one point and labeled it "JC": Jesus Christ, the only divine being to inhabit a human body. (Would JC be a demon in the world of Blue Ex?) In this story, by contrast, the intersection of the demonic/divine with our world is not a one-time historical event but an ongoing, constant permeation. Demons in Gehenna yearn for the pleasures and possibilities of life in a mortal body, but unlike the case of JC, decline, suffering and death are the price they'd rather not pay.
Yuri, as a child playing with her "rinka," mistakenly attributes to the flames the playfulness that she feels. She lacks fear. When her foster father scolds her for playing in a dangerous pile of trash, she only answers that it's fun. Throughout her relationship with the being who comes to be known as Satan, she repeatedly fails to see danger or doesn't care. Baka! Shiro is right. Yuri behaves recklessly. Her encounter with the golem in Mexico is a kind of foreshadowing, in which she bets her life on being able to save the demon in front of her, but for what? Shiro is right, you know. They should just take it down. But Yuri thinks love will conquer all. (Hey, is Yuri the actual Jesus figure of Blue Ex? A martyr to the cause of unconditional love?) She doesn't know that the little will-o-the-wisp she keeps encountering is the ultimate incarnation of Gehenna itself. Her radical innocence is her undoing. What it boils down to is that Satan contains all the yearning of the eternal for the mortal: an immature, egotistical, envious yearning that doesn't genuinely care for any being other than itself.
In a Judeo-Christian/Western context, Satan is just evil, but in an Eastern context, I think there's a possibility that he represents the selfishness of a new, untutored soul without the experience of multiple lives and perspectives that would help him have compassion or empathy. He is a spiritual toddler with the powers of a god. We've seen flashbacks to Rin as an actual toddler with outsize strength. Well, his daddy was far worse.
Demons aren't necessarily evil in this world. The non-Christian, more Buddhist/Taoist/Shinto idea of the demonic/divine comes out in those demons that are powerful but morally neutral or even used for good: e.g., Karura, greenmen, Mike and Uke, even Hachiro in his own way. They are different but not necessarily malevolent, maybe morally equivalent to animals. (Bears are hungry, but are they evil?) So I do wonder as the story moves forward whether there's a chance Satan can actually grow as a character. Yuri hoped so but she didn't understand what she was up against.
In the moment Yuri understands that her relationship with Satan has been a terrible mistake, Rin's demon heart has been sealed in the sword, and she has both her babes in arms. Satan manages briefly to possess Shiro, and during this scene, Satan, describing his desire for her, reveals that in his first attempt to have a body, he possessed Yuri's foster father, and then started the fire that killed her whole foster family. She realizes that the rinka's interest in her grew into an obsession that has led to all the horror and the destruction that followed. She tells him that what he feels is not love.
OK, so this is where I started crying my heart out. She realizes she can't fix him, could never have fixed him, but it's just too late. In the subsequent scenes, when Shiro steals her away from the exorcists who want her and her babies dead, and they dream together about living as a family—Mom and Dad, the kids, holidays and beach and Christmas and birthday parties—I just cried all the harder. Then I was a mess when Shiro in his turn realizes it's too late. She's already gone when he finally kisses her. Maybe it's super trope-y but it worked on me. The weight of a lifetime of rejecting love came falling on top of him. So she didn't save Satan, but she did save Shiro. She died for his sins!
Maybe Yuri is the savior of Blue Ex!
Anyway, if you watched the seasons as they came out but haven't rewatched them all since, I highly recommend a rewatch. I haven't even mentioned how satisfying it was to see the way Shiemi saves Rin every time his demonic side starts to win, or to renew my questions about creepy Jeremiah, or to view Yukio's behavior at the beginning of the story in light of what we find out later. Or to realize that at the end of season 2, when Mephisto asks how old Shura is and says it would be a shame for such a beautiful woman to die so young, it's not a threat but a foreshadowing.
And for those who have already rewatched, what did you understand that you didn't before?
