So with my break in full swing, tons of work to do, and crappy weather all around, I decided to finally start Aria. I thought I would include my thoughts on it here, at least until I have enough thoughts for a proper post on the subject (re: I’m writing a paper and full-length SF.c posts are kinda rough right now).
Now that I’ve challenged the heterosexuality of your pure, innocent gondoliers, let’s explore the gritty underbelly of the planet they gondolier upon. Not that the underbelly is really very gritty; normally it’s just pleasantly soft and susceptible to the application of stimuli, like that of a cat. It isn’t perfect, no, but it’d be boring if it was.
You may recall my glut of posts on Aria the Animation, some of which ended inconclusively. Now that I’ve read Aqua, the ten-chapter beginning of the Aria manga, what is there to do but grab those loose ends that dangle annoyingly before me and tie them together with the wrath of an angry god?
Let’s start with this one, both because it proved most frustrating, and because this post promises to be fun.
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.
I’m late, it seems. But I’ve been busy; I had to drive home from college, and, since I’m graduating (or, I have graduated…I’m not sure on the time frame), I had to pack all my worldly possessions and haul them all back with me. Rest assured that, as soon as this (brief) post is finished, I will head right back into the admin interface and start Moment the Seventh.
The moment in question here is the first time I heard (or, maybe, comprehended via subtitles) those fateful lyrics from Aria the Animation’s opening: “I close my eyes, and can see” (目を閉じて見えてくる/me wo tojite mietekuru). I know I’ve written at length about that line before, about how it makes me think of James Joyce and, via him, Thomas Aquinas, but I didn’t settle on it as a moment because it excited my English majorish tendencies (though I suppose that helped). Its significance to me goes deeper than that: it signaled a change in my preferences, in the way I assign personal value to stories.
Rather, while the change had been creeping up on me all along, Aria’s OP first made it clear. I realized, upon hearing those lyrics, that Aria would be like nothing I’d experienced thus far — not because it was truly different on some fundamental level, but because I’d actually be able to enjoy it for what it was worth. It occurred to me that, probably thanks in large part to my involving myself in blog-based discourse, the range of stories in which I could find value was steadily increasing, and that’s never a bad thing. So, really, though hearing Aria’s OP hammered the change home, I owe this moment to all of you. Thanks.
Now that I think about it, this doesn’t have much to do with the actual content of the lyrics in question. But I suppose that’s how these things go.
Ever the community man, lelangir is keeping stock of as many Twelve Moments blogathons as he can somewhere in the recesses of his Unlimited Blog Works, so check that out. Speaking as a member of the community whose progress it chronicles, that Anitations thing is interesting in general. We need people like lelangir to offset people like me, who can’t even comment reliably on the blogs they read.
This may be the first of my Twelve Moments™ to hail from Aria the Animation, but it isn’t the last. Oh, no indeed. Unlike majordomo CCY, I allowed myself to choose as many moments from each show or manga as suited my fancy. Gluttonous? Perhaps, but before I take us too far off track (and you may know I’m very good at that), let’s talk about Athena Glory.
I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, however occasionally (give me a break; I’m poor). Aria, of all things, is certainly worth it. And it’s a good thing I bought it, too, since viruses recently ate my Windows, forcing me to do a clean install of the OS, which rendered my CrystalNova-subbed AVIs somewhat nonexistent (and contributed to this post taking so long to write).
But this post isn’t about the tragic nature of somewhere in the ballpark of 200 gigs of music and video slaughtered upon the altar of Windows and Symantec Antivirus’s combined inability to do anything useful. It’s about romance (the lovesome kind) among the central characters of Aria the Animation. “What romance?” you ask, to which I reply, “Exactly.”
I mentioned last time, after extended namedropping of Joyce and Aquinas, that Aqua is a powerful setting. We can assume as much from the first episode of Aria (that’s the Animation, you’ll recall), and from speculative and animated settings wielding the de facto thought-provocation that they do (more on this later), but the fourth episode doesn’t let us forget it (never mind that the above screen capture is from episode twelve). The mysterious girl in the alley, the too-late video message and its contents — all elements seem bent toward drawing our attention to Aqua’s owing its existence and nature to human beings. Here, Aria provides another way of looking at both itself and the ever-ridiculous species that produced it, albeit one more obvious than the “shut your eyes and see” business of the first episode. But to what end?
Aria the Animation — just typing its name gives me a sense of peace, both because of its predominant themes, and because there exist human beings capable of producing something like this, which means there must be hope for our species after all. I wanted to sum this one up in a single post, but I realized around the end of the fourth episode that a mere one post would not be enough, could not possibly be enough by any stretch of the imagination, so consider this the first in a series of indeterminate length. And the funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have liked Aria at all a few months ago, back when I was writing off Lucky Star and Hidamari Sketch, or at least I probably wouldn’t have liked it enough to see past my dislike and run it through my infernal criticism machine.