I believe that anger is the more powerful, as it is one of the more base emotions that we have-- not a mixture or the product-- but purely rage and purely within each of us from the moment we are born.

Take Inside Out, the most kid-friendly metaphor we have for the development of children. In a given child and adult's control room, Anger, Joy, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, are the primary overseers of a human's interactions. They are base emotions and match up with the psychological concept of primary facial expressions which are universal and visible via our body language.

Anger, in the film and so proven in real life, appears as early as babyhood. When the child will throw tantrums or throw their food, refusing to eat what they judge is unpleasant-- thank you Disgust-- but also when denied immediate pleasures. Of course, many humans grow past the need and fixation toward immediate gratification and on all levels develop a manner of patience for greater rewards. They are able to temper and resist their anger, it does not consume them. That is not where anger's power comes from.

Anger comes from the fact that it is so old, so primal and programmed to be necessary to human survival. Anger is what powers aggressive mating rituals among males, anger is in part what drives a mother to claw and fight to protect her children.

Anger is the programming in all of us that if removed runs the risk of damaging the individual in all things.

Anger, even colors our nostalgia.

Nostalgia, is an odd abstract idea. When defined it is the longing or fondness a person has for the past. Whether the past in chronological sense as the years and its trends or for their own personal past which is a bit more distinct, and much more riddled with emotionally fueled memories that the former does not posses to the same degree.

So you see, nostalgia cannot solely be-- an emotion, or if it is is more accurate to call a mixture of emotions that combines into a wholly new feeling. Perhaps, is what was felt by Riley to remember Minnesota, her childhood so sadly at the beginning and realizing that time has gone and past, where she must make due with San Francisco. Perhaps it is what colored the memory at the end both blue and yellow-- happy and sad as she was finally relieved of and allowed to verbalize what she longed for. What she missed of her home and what she missed. What she... nostalgized about.

And perhaps, that ending to the first film is why nostalgia-- explicitly and exclusively an old woman among definitively younger emotions-- makes appearances in the second film. Since soon after the first she had been born but for a young person would be for the most part displaced. Notably no other adults present even signs of nostalgia or the same type of blended, bittersweet memories that Riley does.

Nostalgia as a concept, is surrounded and associated with memory. Memory and what powers and other emotions those memories hold for us, which is what shapes the experience as we indulge in "nostalgia."

Riley's memories had been colored blue, so as she was fond of them, they nevertheless brought her sadness. And much in the same vein could red color our memories.

A bitter love turned foul or ended abruptly that we were left in bewildered heartbreak, the missed opportunity or failed exams, the toys that turned out to be a scam, or the people throughout sepia colored childhood that should have been our protectors utterly fail in their role.

Coloring our whole lives, the bases of who we are in blood red.

Nostalgia: Is the longing or fondness we have for memories of the past and a desire to return and experience the wonders of our past that have been imprinted in our memory. And simply that, fleeting, impermanent memories.

And yet that fondness doesn't necessarily have to be present, and we still call it nostalgia. Even when our memories are bitter, even when they are tragic, we look back on them. To soothe the ache and the twist of sad or angry blades. Of the twist in our hearts for those lost or those who have forgotten us.

or, the want of what could have been, from those who had never valued us at all. When there was hope, despite the absence and despite the failures when in death or distance we are now all on our own. That hope irreversibly extinguished. Struck dead as the hollows of tree branches in the cold fall season.

Anger, is the emotion.

Nostalgia is the remnants and what we may put into tangible proofs when we feel.

Nostalgia lies in the place within our emotions.