If you’re following at home, you’ll already know that I started Aria: the Animation.  And I just finished it.  I know there’s a bunch more of it, but I dunno when I’ll finish it — if I learned one thing (and I’d like to think I learned several, but still), it’s that I can’t really shotgun Aria.  You ever eat so much candy that, while still hungry, the thought of sugar makes you ill?  It doesn’t mean the candy is any worse, you just really need a steak.  That’s sorta what happened to me, though luckily each day found me ready for more.  Sleeping off the sugar crash works, it turns out.  Anyway, this post might ramble all around a bunch of different topics, but if you’re okay with that, let’s get started.

I suppose I should explain my subject line before we move on.  I first ran into a reference to undines in a Blue Oyster Cult song, “Workshop of the Telescopes.”  Check it out here, it’s great. I’ll wait.  

Now, the song’s actually from Blue Oyster Cult’s first, self-titled album, but the track is from a collection I have — this specific track is the one I listened to in high school.

Okay.  So, inevitably I had to look up what these things were in the song.  A salamander is a lizard of fire, supposedly born in conflagrations — rather, one kind of salamander is that (there were others, according to Greek natural philosophers that were so cold they could extinguish fire, but the former is the best known version).  Drakes are typically small, dragon-like creatures.  I think I knew those two already by the time I listened to the song.  An undine, on the other hand,  is a water spirit from Germanic folklore.  Well, one spirit — it was originally a name.  

This stuff should sound familiar.  Both salamanders and undines feature into Aqua’s landscape, along with gnomes and sylphs.  While not entirely removed from their mythic roles, Aria‘s versions are, ah, different from the originals.

The gnomes are pretty much out of Norse legend, and were generally mean, tricksy, and brilliant craftsmen.  Loki tricked them into building the wall surrounding Asgard, and the gods purchased from them the chains that hold Fenrir.  The gnomes on Aqua still work with fire, but are, in other wise, fairly more benevolent.

I’m not going to go through each reference.  If you’re really interested, you can dig them up yourself.  My point is that, in just about every case, the referenced creature’s enmity or capriciousness has been softened into the same work-for-the-greater-good-of-everyone atmosphere.  While it makes me grit my teeth a little bit, it’s not quite a bowdlerization; it serves to highlight the nature of the planet itself.  Constructed almost wholly by human hands, Aqua is a place where things are remade.  

Ghostlightning, commenting on my previous post, mentioned (in response to my gibbering) the theme of the terraforming itself.  I think he wanted me to talk about it, as he meant to and — I was about to make a joke about Ghostlightning being lazy, but the irony can’t overcome the sheer GAR of his self-mandated work schedule.  Moving on.

The terraforming of Mars into Aqua is covered more than I thought it would be, from my second-hand blog-post reading.  It’s interesting, though entirely on the side of the spectators.  That’s not wrong — I appreciate the “bug’s eye view” it gives us (think of it like Cloverfield, which is a “person on the ground” view of a Godzilla movie).  I am a fan of the terraforming trope, though, and have the good luck (bad luck) to have stumbled upon one of the best examples of it:  the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson.  It’s hard SF with an actual sense of how words are used to carry a story.  I recommend it.  I have only read the first book myself (yes, gasp, I know).  I took the second book to Memphis with me, only to find that, no, I had taken the third book.  So I had hoped to slip it in during the summer, but, uh, we’ll see about that.

So basically, I’d just like to see a little more of the terraforming just because I like that sort of thing.  Aria takes a novel approach, in showing us the world already completely remade, and seeding bits of its making in throughout the story.  It makes the assumption that water could be found under the surface of Mars — which isn’t all that far-fetched, though even if true I don’t think those amounts would be under there.  But hell, the latest rover found water ice on the surface, so that’s cool.  The only thing about the “science” that I would even qualify as “wrong” is that Aria is fond of dramatic sunset shots, but the sun is the same size as it is on Earth.  Mars is half an AU farther from the sun as Earth is — not as dramatic a distance as the next planet out, Jupiter, but still significant enough.

If you start to think about the social climate of Aqua, though, it’s a bit disconcerting on its own.  Literally everything appears to depend on the salamanders and the gnomes.  If I grasp the line of terraforming of the Mars trilogy correctly, the idea there is to eventually make the friendly-to-human circumstances of the terraforming self-sustaining — that is, if you do enough to change the planet, it would just be that planet.  You wouldn’t have to do much to regulate it (there is, by the way, one autoplastic group in the Mars trilogy, who change themselves to suit Mars — nothing like this seems to have happened on Aqua).  

But really, Aqua is a utopia that is one crashed hard disk away from killing millions of people who have no concept that things could go wrong — Akari’s view of what the salamanders do is to make it “comfortable” for the people on Aqua.

Of course, maybe later in the series it turns out they have altered the planet significantly enough, and their job is just to nudge things into comfortable directions.  No telling.

Now let’s turn to that idea of a utopia.  If I had to identify anything disturbing about the show itself, this would be it.  My instinct, and all the reading I’ve done recently on the topic, tells me that even in literature a utopia never really happens, at least not like this.  Andrew Gordon, in an essay I dug up for my paper on Delany’s Nova, claims that, “a story in the ‘open-system model’ must somehow deal with and transcend the fears about destructive technology [. . .] Far from being uniformly positive visions, the ‘open-system’ stories create a dialectical tension between our hopes and our fears about machinery” (193).

What he means by “open-system model” is a shorthand for a previous critic’s idea — Patricia Warrick claims that utopias use an open-system model in that they posit technology allowing a free movement back and forth through every level of society.  In contrast, a dystopia is a “closed-system model” that forces everything into a mechanistic stasis.  Aria is certainly open system, but Gordon convincingly claims that a functional open-system story holds, inside it, a closed-system story that has been circumvented — or the plot of the story itself could be the circumventing.  

Aria doesn’t usually hint at a circumvented dystopia, so often it can feel a little false, more fantasy than SF — why is Aqua so happy?  Because it is.  Now, given that ghosts (or cats, or something) show up with magical requests and time travel, viewing Aqua as a fantasy — or a science-fantasy — may not be so far off the mark as all that.  I would argue for that, in fact.  Of course, things back on “Man-Home” don’t sound so great, but it’s so forcedly distant — as of now — I can’t really see it.  And anyway, Aqua hasn’t served to fix anything about Man-Home; it’s simply a tourist attraction to help people forget their apparently terrible lives back on the home planet.

My only other problem with the series is deeply personal, and not really a fault of the show’s at all.  It is full of happy people being happy; even the sarcastic character isn’t very sarcastic  I am what one might call a mean person.  I’m not cruel, but I make very mean jokes, and so do most of the people I spend a lot of time with.   People so blindly cheerful actively agitate me — it doesn’t help that, in my region, they’re usually blind religious zealots who have achieved their total, blank happiness by giving up all control of their lives.

Actually, I just wrote myself into a realization.  Thekittymeister and Ghostlightning frequently talk about Sartre and Kierkegaard, or at least, their concepts of self-destiny, control over one’s own life.  That’s one of the secrets to why I love TTGL so much, and it rattles me to watch a show so much about just shrugging and moving on.  In the traditional, colonialist breakdown, it’s enormously western of me.

The episodes of Aria, however, where the characters actively strive to better themselves, well, that works for me pretty well.  And holding the shape of the entire show in my head, I see it all as a tendency toward this.  The driving force of the undine’s job, it turns out, is to enjoy it.  A lot.  They are, after all, supposed to make people happy, and doing that when you’re not happy about it is a terrible struggle that doesn’t really work.  Pretty much ever.  So loving, or learning to love, every little thing about their job is what our undines-in-training are working at doing.  The show is essentially a bildungs-roman (that is, traditionally, the education of a young man — you might see how old the trope is from the gendered phrasing).  Except, they all know how to row, how to sing, so on (maybe they’re not great at these things, but still).  They haven’t yet connected what they’re doing to being strictly happy on their own terms.  Hence the advice “Grandma” gave to them about how Alicia enjoys everything about being an undine.

I did something with this show I rarely do:  I looked (a little, admittedly, not a lot) into the cultural background of the production of the show itself.  I’ll just go ahead and link you to the Wikipedia page I’m using.  The manga of Aria was specifically praised as a great thing for “elementary school girls.”  It’s not as though slippage in anime fanbases is new, but at one point in an episode I watched, a notice came up that the next week, the episode would air at 2:00 a.m.  This is not exactly the time elementary schoolgirls would be watching anime.

So the anime shifted audience focus; the original slippage probably came with the manga.  I suspect cultural insecurity is part of the reason for its spread of popularity.  Like much of the early American SF that preceded it, Aria assumes the nationality of the writer/readers will fill the stars.  One of the questions leveled at defensive SF authors is, if your future is so egalitarian, why are all the characters white/American/what-have-you.  Aria does fairly similar things — Athena looks Indian (I’m basing this off the depiction of other Indian characters in anime, not any relation to actual Indian people),  and I guess many of the Himeya group may be Chinese (based on the dresses they sometimes wear when off-duty), but everyone lives in a culture which is a romanticized mish-mash of Italian and Japanese culture.  There is, inexplicably, an onsen on Mars, which one would think couldn’t spare the geothermal energy for such a thing.  The mailman drinks genmacha to combat the cold, and guests are naturally seated on cushions on the floor, with nary a joke about how seiza hurts after a while (hurts?  Oof, I can barely get up at all after about five minutes or so, though it’s great for the back).  

This cultural appropriation does something very important for its audience:  it’s enormously reassuring.  In the face of what appears to be a looming threat of cultural hybridization, Aria provides a vision of a world that goes into the stars, but is still essentially Japanese.  There is a delight, then, within this insecurity, when watching characters poling gondolas through space-Venice get off work and eat watermelon on the beach in the traditional manner.

This isn’t a criticism — if it were, I would necessarily implicate decades of SF writing in America and elsewhere.  And while perhaps they are guilty of some colonial simplification, it was mostly naivety.  That, I suspect, would be the most Aria is guilty of, and I’m not too worried about even that minor issue.

If you’ve been waiting for a judgment, or need one because I’ve led you to believe I hate this show, let me set you straight:  I enjoyed it.  It’s not my favorite thing ever, in the history of ever, but then, what is?  I haven’t talked much about the obvious care and attention the show received in production, but others have probably done that better than I could.  It was certainly very educational for me — I wouldn’t normally watch a show like this.  Hmm…  I would have sworn someone did a post recently about how blogging has changed the contours of their watching habits, but I can’t find it.  If that’s you, or you know it, link it up in the comments.  

It’s certainly true of me:  I’m very glad I watched the first thirteen episodes of Aria.  The next set of twenty-six await me, though I may catch up on Mazinger first.  And, uh, finish my paper, and this terrible book I’m reading for class.  You know, the stuff I’ve been putting off.

Work Cited:

Gordon, Andrew. “Human, More or Less: Man-Machine Communion in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Other Science Fiction Stories.” The Mechanical God: Machines in Science Fiction. Thomas P. Dunn, Richard D. Erlich, and Brian W. Aldiss, eds. Greenwood: Westport, CT. 1982. 193-202.

Tags: aria, blue oyster cult, kim stanley robinson, mars, science fiction, sf, terraforming fiction

Thus spake Cuchlann on Saturday, 6 June 2009 at 4:10 pm, and Anime, Art and Culture expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.