As to the last post (I’ll go ahead and respond here): I tried to include as much Joyce as one would need to know in the post. I suppose comprehensive knowledge of Ulysses would make the post more useful, but I don’t think it’s necessary. And I can back up Aria’s serving as a lesson on how to enjoy slice of life with the fact that I enjoy slice of life far more now than I did before I watched Aria. It may not work for everyone, I guess, but it did work for me.

I’m not familiar with Robinson, but if his work can be tied into Aria, and can serve to fill in some background details, I’m all for reading it. I’ll add that to my daunting reading list.

Sorry about that, comrade. I’ve sort of used these 2 posts of yours as touchstones for my own growth as an anime enthusiast.

This series is so good that it deserves posts like the previous one. I will make my own, and I’m lucky to be a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Chronicles (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Aqua is way past the Blue Mars era of the narrative, but reading those books will give you an appreciation of what went behind the scened in the exodus from Man-home to Aqua. If I read them again they will read like the history of Aqua. It’s almost a point-for-point fit, though of course with the books being hard science fiction it will deliver far less blissful moments of tranquility and beauty.

If you do read them, I do believe they will add value to your appreciation of Aria, albeit in an indirect fashion. In any case, those books will address the core questions of this post without a doubt in my mind.

We’ll be watching more of it over the next few days. It really helps that the wife is getting into it – without whose interest there will be far less anime viewing for me.

Oh, and let me know how you like it along the way, too. Maybe criticism is supposed to disregard personal preference, but personal preference can at least hang out alongside criticism, and I’m not at all convinced that it’s possible to keep one’s level of affection for the work in question out of criticism anyway.

The naming alone already does some violence to Aqua, which has become more watery than Earth – a significant detail I think. Calling Earth Man-home may be an innocent enough reminder to all people wherever they end up, but it also imposes an unstated ‘the’. It occurs to me, if read in a way, as ‘The’ Man-home. It signifies the lack of fitness of a world like Aqua for humans.

I don’t know if this would lead to a hegemonic discourse later on, but I like it. Not so much as a pursuit of political conflict, but since plots require conflict, even something as quiet as this anime, I like the subtle promise. And if it is indeed fulfilled, it would be in understated ways such as the hint that meteorological control employees may be underpaid.