Had to look up “DITW.” I agree here as well. My use of the phrase “traditional, colonialist breakdown” was meant to indicate that I don’t really subscribe to the breakdown much, myself. Short version: while there are differences in culture, I don’t think they are as pronounced or east/west delineated, as a lot of people like to think.

The small child conceit is a good one. I hadn’t thought of considering Ai-chan as a surrogate for the audience, but it makes perfect sense. I think you’re right there.

I’m very glad you can bring “Blue Mars” into this discussion. I too enjoyed YKK immensely.

That interpretation actually makes a lot of sense to me. One thing that always nagged me about watching ARIA was “why bother setting it on Mars? All the locations and highlights are essentially a reconstruction of Venice anyway, so why not set the story in Venice?” to which the answer is that it allows the author to take the romantic elements of Venice but present them in a fictional way that is accessible to the target audience – modern Japanese people.

“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.” And yet so many DITW Westerners like myself like it for exactly that reason. I migrated to Aria from Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou – one of the most passive and self-effacing manga ever. Stuff is addictive, I swear it.

A good way to represent a Utopic world like Aria is to take the view of a small child – willing to believe, curious but unsuspicious, etc. Which Aria has in the form of Ai-chan, who seldom appears but is the ‘audience’ for whom the stories are told.

BTW, great piece altogether. I musto go lurk in your archives -

Constructed almost wholly by human hands, Aqua is a place where things are remade.

I saw the hand-craftedness as an existential thing, an example of we being the crafters of our own fates, or something like that. But there you go, taking it to the limit! Now I’ll be on the lookout for transformative experiences in future episodes. Aqua’s two volumes are actually pretty dense with them, now that I think about it, at least relative to the first season of the show.