As we come now to the end of our twelve-day journey, my final moment feels sort of lame. I don’t have any strange metaphors for love, attempts at optimism, or in-depth analyses for you today. I don’t really have a good reason for my enthusiasm — I just have my enthusiasm, so I guess I can explain that much.

Many of you could’ve probably guessed that my final moment, like Moments the Eleventh and Eighth, would hail from Aria the Animation. My general unbridled love for the show is no secret. Said love began, in fact, with the end of the fourth episode, which stands at the top of all the very worthy anime moments I experienced this year.

It’s an impressive episode all the way through. A cat who is also a ghost, or a ghost who is also a cat, or a rather cat-like shapeshifting thing, ask Akari the existential gondolier to deliver a very old video message, which requires that she find both technology capable of handling the message’s format and a way to reach the message’s intended recipient.

The intended recipient is, we discover, long dead — perhaps a victim of old age, but more likely a victim of flooding, a sacrifice for the cause of turning Mars into Aqua.

Akari, being Akari, delivers the message anyway. It’s a message from the man’s wife (and cat…who is also a ghost…or vice-versa).

The contents of the message aren’t of earth-shattering importance; the event that occasioned the message was a wedding anniversary. There’s an account of how things are going at home. Some reminiscence. An interruption from the cat. A profession of love.

None of which Allen Honda ever received.

Initially, Aqua seems in all regards to be an idyllic setting, wholly conducive to Akari’s almost unrealistically positive outlook on life. We learn here, however, that, like a certain more familiar planet, Aqua’s foundation is laid upon tragedy, at least in part. Nothing as grand as Aqua can come to be without sacrifice. Allen Honda and his wife find themselves forced to leave their home on Earth abruptly, by the wife’s report, only for Allen to presumably die before his first wedding anniversary. And why? Because he believed in the idea of Aqua. Because he seemed to know that something as grand as a human planet can’t exist without an Atlas (whose name, interestingly enough, also starts with A, like everyone else’s in the show).

Says the wife:

I haven’t forgotten what you told me when we came to Aqua, Allen. That one day Aqua will be a world overflowing with happiness. That’s why you dig for water, you said. I believe in those words. There are a lot of tough things to deal with right now, but I’m sure that, in our children’s time, Aqua will be filled with laughter.

Aqua isn’t perfect; it can’t be. It needs people like Allen Honda, who are willing to hold it up with literal physical labor, and to satisfy its price with their lives, if need be. It needs people like Akari Mizunashi, who can endure its tragedy with a smile, who can, through sheer force of will, finish the job its scenery only starts — and that, to Akari’s great credit, is no easy task.

This scene may not seem that fantastic. I didn’t require much page space to describe it. But, for me, all its elements — Akari, Allen, the themes of loss and sacrifice, the implications for the setting and its residents — come together to result in one of those scenes that seems to justify all the effort that goes into art. It’s one of those scenes during which the medium and the story fall away to reveal the universe hidden beneath — our universe. And, given the wild subjectivity of these things, I can almost guarantee that this scene won’t serve the same purpose for you, but you don’t need it to; after all, you have your own number one moment of 2008, whether you blogged about it or not.