Aria the Finale: Part Three of an Aria Retrospective

Part One of the Aria retrospective.

Part Two of the Aria retrospective.

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Anime has a tough relationship with endings. Lots of anime never actually end; they get cancelled before they can, or they just keep on going so everyone can keep making money, or the source material has no ending. When they do end, I can’t think of many that end well. Oftentimes they’re based on source material that had a terrible ending, like OreImo, so their hands were tied. The most famous example of a terrible anime ending is Evangelion, which got another chance to end in The End of Evangelion because its original ending was so bad, and now has yet another chance with the Rebuild movies.

So it’s no small thing that Aria manages to end so gracefully. It’s no small feat that it manages to end exactly as we would have expected from Episode 1, yet still surprise us. It’s no small feat that it wraps up every character arc, changes everything, splits everyone apart, yet does so in a believable way. It’s no small feat that it makes a happy, expected ending still so satisfying, and gives every character exactly the happiness she deserves. Well, not every character, but we’ll talk about that.

However, even though its ending ends the entire series, the ending is what I remember least about Aria: The Origination. That’s because it avoids a mistake a lot of terrible endings make: leaving too much story to be explored in the last episode or two. Aria: The Origination could have waited until Episode 12 to start promoting our heroines to Prima and then rushed through the aftermath in two episodes. Instead it starts all the way back at Episode 9, promoting Alice from Pair straight to Prima. This turns out to be enormous for the story: instead of 11 episodes of filler followed by an emotional height, we get to see how everyone reacts to Alice’s promotion. For Aika, Alice’s promotion is a little bittersweet. She’s happy for her friend, but she also feels a little disappointed that her junior colleague beat her to Prima, and a little insecure about her future, which starts to seep into other parts of her life. Since Alice’s promotion happens early, we get to explore Aika’s feelings over meaty parts of several episodes, especially the second half of Episode 10, where she frets over the slow progress of her relationship with Al. But after this, Aika determines to work even harder until she’s worthy to rise herself, and soon after, Akira gives her the Prima exam and promotes her to Prima as well.

While her friends are finishing up their paths to Prima, Alice begins adjusting to her new life. She has to get used to working hard every day with customers and she has to learn to respond to her Prima alias, Orange Princess, but the hardest adjustment turns out to be that she can’t spend every day with Akari and Aika anymore, and even though her customers are great, she feels lonely. Without the routine of coming together to practice every day, Alice doesn’t know how to ask to spend time with her friends. She can’t think of a pretense and she feels awkward asking to be together for no reason. But the three of them come together and acknowledge that they’ll have to work harder to spend time together now that Alice has full time work commitments, but they resolve to put in that work and find whatever time together they can, even if there’s no real reason for it.

Meanwhile, Aika is frustrated that her career isn’t progressing as fast as she wants, and she starts to transfer that anxiety onto her relationship with Al. A night of moon-watching with Akari, Alice, and Al ends with Aika and Al trapped at the bottom of a well, relying on President Maa to bring help, and Aika crying again, this time because of an astronomical phenomenon that she thinks metaphorically represents her relationship with Al never progressing. Akari, on the other hand, is sanguine as usual. She’s happy for Alice (and later for Aika when Aika also surpasses her) and copes easily with Alicia’s abrupt announcement, soon after Aika’s promotion, that her own exam is the next day. As soon as the glove is off Akari’s hand, Alicia announces that she’s retiring and getting married. Akari copes less easily with this announcement, but as good natured and unflappable as she is, she manages to get through it.

Even before Alice’s promotion, Aria: The Origination treats us to a look at Akira’s past and a glimpse of Athena’s dim-witted way of dealing with interpersonal issues, and lets us see Alice explore Alicia’s unique style of teaching. Episode 6, “That Wonderful Extracurricular Lesson…”, is one of my favorite episodes of the entire Aria series. Alice tries to covertly discover how Akari and Alicia’s mentor relationship works without scolding, which she assumes is a requisite part of being a mentor, delivering Aria’s usual gentle, silly humor. Halfway through the episode, Alicia calls Alice out and gets her to come talk straightforwardly about it. Alice had just assumed Alicia wouldn’t talk to her and that she had to spy to find out what she wanted to know, but Alicia, consistent with the philosophy she describes to Alice in this episode, doesn’t consider it at all beneath her to spend time explaining how she thinks about being a mentor to a junior colleague. There’s lots of clever dialogue and even more gentle, silly humor in their conversation, and by the end I had the sense that maybe Alice would have learned more from being mentored by Alicia than Akari did. Not that Alicia always behaves consistently with the philosophy of mentoring she describes in this episode—I can think of several times when she didn’t, including “That White, Kind City…” from The Natural—but that illustrates that Alicia too, as perfect as she appears, is only human, a consistent theme of her character development across both The Natural and The Origination.

The Origination does have a couple of clunkers. Episode 3, “Those Feelings Within…”, can’t seem to figure out what story it wants to tell about the maker of the little heart-shaped chocolates in the glass bottle, and ends up a series of scattered, poorly motivated happenings. Episode 7, "In That Gently Passing Time...", introduces a retired Aria Company Undine who’s living happily with a son and fisher-bro husband purely as an excuse for loving pans over white lace, and as a framing device for a story about Grandma and President Aria’s past. (President Aria used to be homeless. Which explains why he loves eating and sleeping so much. Also, he’s like a hundred years old.) But, unlike The Natural, in The Origination these episodes were mixed in with moving, lovely stories about the main characters, so it was easier to forgive them. Also, The Origination is superbly animated throughout, so even the episodes that don’t quite make the story land still present lots of beautiful imagery.

On the whole, I loved this series. Except for one thing.

Aika is Akira, But in a Mirror, Darkly

Cait Sith and the mystical cat god stories may have been my least favorite part of Aria, but second place surely goes to Aika.

I’ve never been a big fan of Aika, but if anything, I expected to like her more rewatching the series. I expected coming back with a little distance would bring to light some depth to her personality or some kind of character arc that would make me appreciate her more than I did back when moe points were my main measure of a character. But the more I tried to find something to like about her, the less I liked her. It all came to a head in The Origination.

In Episode 5, “That Keepsake Clover…”, the three trainees see Athena and Alicia both exhibiting their special talents—Athena her singing voice, and Alicia her dexterity with an oar. Aika realizes that Akari and Alice also have special talents—Alice is a natural at driving a boat, and Akari is Akari—and agonizes in her usual hysterical fashion over whether she herself has any special talents compared to them. She talks with Akira, who had to spend her entire career in the shadows of Alicia and Athena but still came out with a strong identity of her own as an Undine. Akira tells her that she was the last to get promoted to Prima, and after Athena’s promotion she was depressed and pitied herself a little. Thanks to baby Aika, she regained her confidence and pushed through to become the Prima she is today. Aika doesn’t remember this, but after hearing Akira’s story, she decides that her talent is persevering, being reliable, and working hard, and redoubles her efforts.

My major problem with Aika is that the evidence contradicts everything the series tries to tell us about what kind of person she is. She’s supposed to be practical, hardworking, reliable, and serious, but all we ever see her do is make eyes at Al, obsess over what Alicia thinks of her, primp, scream at Akira over minor things, yell at Akari and Alice like they’re mental defectives she’s been burdened with, fight with Alice over childish things, and burst into tears at the drop of a hat. She’s supposed to be hardworking, but all the evidence suggests Akari and Alice work equally hard—I’d even say Alice is more hardworking, because she goes to school every day and then comes home and practices on top of whatever homework she has. She’s not even a nice person: she spends a ton of time whining about things and yelling at or deriding her friends, and she and Akari are only friends because it seemed like a convenient way to get closer to Alicia. Unlike Akira, who can be mean sometimes but always thinks she’s helping, Aika behaves in a lot of petty, bullying ways from pure selfishness or from some sort of fragile, inflated egomania layered on top of her insecurity.

At the end of the day, I was never going to buy that Aika was a hardworking person who earned everything by sheer will and perseverance. Akira, who lacks the ethereal beauty and appealing personality of Alicia or the incredible singing voice of Athena, reached the top of the Undine profession through hard work and persistence. We’re meant to see Aika as the same. But Aika didn’t earn anything: her parents own Himeya. Not only are they rich, they own an Undine company. We never see her parents, so we don’t know what kind of people they are. If Aika were truly hopeless and could never have made it to Prima under Akira’s tutelage, it’s entirely possible they would have paid off a shill mentor to pass her. Even if we assume they have too much integrity for that, her parents employ one of the top three Undine in Neo-Venezia, so she had a straight shot to training under that top Undine with no effort at all. Then, instead of being grateful that she gets personalized one-on-one instruction from someone whose salary can sustain an entire company (judging by Alicia’s ability to keep Aria Company afloat on her own), Aika spends all of her time complaining that Akira is too harsh and threatening to run away to train under Alicia.

Contrast that with Akari and Alice, who were also privileged to train under top Undine. Akari was handpicked by Alicia, out of all the people, including Aika, who must have been vying to be her apprentice. She was chosen by Alicia herself based on what Alicia saw in her. We don’t see how Alice came to train under Athena, but since she’s a prodigy, the most likely scenario is that Orange Planet noticed her talent and took her in, and since she was so talented they decided to put her with their best Undine to help nurture that talent. Akari and Alice both ended up training under top Undine because their talent justified it. Aika, on the other hand, is training under Akira because her parents pay Akira. (And are her landlords, since Undine at the big companies live at their company’s dormitory.) We see no evidence in the series that Aika is anything other than mediocre. Alice’s talent is made clear many times, and aside from Akari’s obvious personal qualities, the other Undine on the traghetto in Episode 4, “Those Who Aim For Tomorrow…”, note that she’s an exceptional rower who will surely be a Prima soon. So Aika has no special talents, and her parents, the owners of Himeya, have started her out in such an advantageous position that she doesn’t need to be hardworking or persistent, though she’s convinced herself that she is since she’s able to keep going every time she has one of her borderline psychotic drama queen episodes where she breaks down in tears over some bizarre idea she’s taken into her head. (The astronomical phenomenon one is particularly hilarious.) When she makes Prima, her parents step in again and give her a position as branch manager of a Himeya office that we’ve never seen any evidence she’s at all qualified for. Then again, given that she seems more “competent” than “exceptional” when it comes to rowing and interacting with customers, maybe the manager position was the best thing for her.

All three trainee Undine are a lot like their mentors, but with subtle yet important differences. Akari has the same warm presence and generous spirit as Alicia, but trades Alicia’s glamorous image, which partially disguises Alicia’s insecurities, for an easy confidence around people that lets her relate to almost anyone. Alice is just as weird as Athena, but can accomplish basic daily tasks without hurting herself. She and Athena also share a certain passivity when it comes to getting what they want, but Alice seems to have done a better job overcoming it by the end of the series. Unlike Athena, who wistfully expressed her regret that she, Alicia, and Akira spend so little time together nowadays back in Episode 11 of The Animation, Alice has gone out of her way to seize as much time with her friends as she can. Aika and Akira share their status as the “normie” of their respective peer groups; neither of them have the natural charisma or overwhelming talent of the people they’re surrounded by. But Akira, as far as we know, was a perfectly ordinary person who came into Himeya and attained her top ranked status by hard work and determination. She has the down-to-earth wisdom to prove it, too. When other Undine were gossiping about her behind her back, she shrugged it off. She knew Aika was only setting herself up for disappointment by tying her sense of self-worth so closely to Alicia. Her teaching philosophy is harsher than it needs to be, and this backfires on her a few times, but it reflects her experience and how she sees the world—as a harsh place that nonetheless taught her a lot and let her rise to the top of her field. Aika was a rich kid with no special talent who decided to be an Undine because she couldn’t stop fangirling over Alicia, got to train under Himeya’s top Prima as a matter of course, took forever to learn anything or show any gratitude for it, only made Prima before Akari because Alicia was having trouble letting go, and then was elevated into management by her parents the second the ink was dry on her Prima license. Aika is like a dark reflection of Akira, both ordinary aside from a strong desire to be Undine, both ended up at the top of the field, but one getting there by effort and determination and the other getting there by rich parents and the unearned kindness of her mentor and her friends.

I expected to like Aika more after watching the show again, but in the end it was Akira I liked a lot more. So much of the way Akira is framed in the early parts of the series is filtered through Aika’s point of view, so until around Episode 24 of The Natural, the view of her we’re given is largely negative. But if you look at what Akira does both on and off screen without filtering it through Aika’s point of view, it’s clear she’s a good person and a great Undine who’s a bit rough around the edges, and whose roughness rubs the spoiled Aika the wrong way, especially since she’s already disappointed Akira isn’t Alicia. That Akira can stand to be constantly compared unfavorably to her old friend and sometime rival by her ignoramus of an apprentice is another testament to her strength of character. Both Akari and Alice seem to like Akira, aside from the respect they have for her as an Undine: in The Natural Episode 15, Akari and Akira share a nice lunch after they run into each other by chance, and in The Natural Episode 24, Alice remarks with unusual sincerity that it must have been disappointing for some customers whose appointment was canceled to miss out on their chance to ride in Akira’s gondola, which moves Akira to pat her head fondly. Alice doesn’t have the easiest time getting to like people.

It’s a Coming of Age Story, Man

The theme of growing up and coming into your own pervades Aria: The Origination. A wistfulness which is both nostalgic and forward-looking suffuses many of the episodes. The three main heroines are coming in sight of the end of a long, significant period in their lives, and knowing that, they spend a lot of time looking forward to what waits for them just ahead, but also spare some time to look back on what they’re leaving behind. The first time I watched The Origination, in 2011, I was going through some life changes myself that meant I could identify with that feeling. Since then, I’ve gone through even more life changes, and that feeling where you’re at the end of a phase of your life, taking stock of what you’re finishing and wondering how you’re going to move forward, rings even more true.

Episodes like “That Imminent Spring Breeze…”, “That Keepsake Clover…”, and “In That Gently Passing Time…” that depend on this wistful atmosphere attain a gravity that they wouldn’t have if they were merely flashbacks, but it’s best used in Episode 4, “Those Who Aim for Tomorrow…”. Akari, feeling a bit anxious about her rowing skills, goes to work the traghetto on Alicia’s advice. The traghetto is a cheap ferry boat that Neo Venezian locals ride to get around the city. Apprentice Undine, usually Singles, row it in their time off to practice and make some extra money. Akari meets three other Undine whose path has been much different than hers: Atora and Anzu from Orange Planet, and Ayumi from Himeya. Atora and Anzu are both struggling to attain promotion to Prima, while Ayumi has decided that the Prima lifestyle isn’t for her, and she prefers the down-to-earth lifestyle of a traghetto rower. Atora and Anzu go through a lot of emotions in this episode: they lash out at their instructor, who won’t pass them up to Prima; they rage against the system; they consider quitting and becoming permanent traghetto rowers like Ayumi. But Ayumi talks them out of it, telling them she’s doing it because she wants to do it, but they really still want to be Prima, so they shouldn’t give up. The three also confirm that Akari is a great rower and that for her, becoming a Prima is practically inevitable.

“Those Who Aim for Tomorrow…” is so successful because it goes outside our heroines’ little bubble and shows us the challenges that other Single Undine, ones who weren’t blessed with the best mentors in the world of Undine, faced on their path to being Primas. It illustrates what Undine who find themselves unhappy with the system can do. It expands the world, but it also shows us that Akari’s path isn’t the only path. While Akari may have been a natural who flourished under Alicia’s instruction, there are other trainees who struggle, fall down, and either drop off or come back to try again. It gets across the fear you feel when you’ve set yourself on a certain path, lost a lot of time and work to a goal, and now aren’t sure that goal is achievable. This isn’t a feeling any of our main heroines would have—they’re too talented, or have parents too rich, to fail like this—so the show introduced these new characters to expand on its theme of coming to the end of a major phase in your life, by showing what happens when bringing that phase to an end turns out to be more difficult than you thought.

Leaving Aria Behind…

Speaking of phases ending, I don’t know if I’m ever going to watch Aria again after this. I don’t know if I’m ever again going to feel moved to revisit this series, with its beautiful moments and its mediocre moments and its brilliantly genuine writing and its sentimentally boring writing. When I finished Aria: The Origination for the first time in June of 2011, I wrote in the notes I was keeping, “I don’t know how to go on after this without that weekly peek into a better world”. But I think I do now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those characters (except for Aika) and that world (except for Cait Sith). The peacefulness, the natural beauty, the appreciation for a simple life, those are as potent as ever, and in some ways I needed this series in 2018 even more than I did in 2011. But living in that world doesn’t fix everything. The beauty of Neo-Venezia comes as much from the charming personalities of the Undine as it does from the architecture and the canals and the trees and the roasted potato stands. But to become an Undine, young girls compete fiercely for the chance to spend years in training, only to possibly flunk out at the Prima level due to the whims of instructors. They become apprentices at young ages—Alice at 14, Akari at 15—and drop out of school, so being an Undine is the only set of skills they have, and the world of Neo-Venezia is still capitalist, so changing jobs isn’t necessarily easy. Alicia is lucky enough to get a position with the Gondola Association, but she’s one of the most celebrated Prima ever. And not all Undine are as naturally personable as Akari; being an Undine is a form of emotional labor, like being a cast member at a Disney park, where the Undine’s vibe is an essential part of the experience for the customer. For someone like Alice, who is shy and quiet, being chipper and energetic all the time must be exhausting. So a lot of hard work goes into creating the experience of Neo-Venezia, and there are winners and losers, and some people get hurt. It may be utopian, but it’s not perfect.

But more than that, I’m never sure nowadays if I’m ever going to revisit anything. There’s so much anime to watch nowadays, so many books and comics to read, so many games to play, that coming back to any one of them almost feels like a waste. On the other hand, 90% of them are crap. Aria, despite its flaws, is a masterpiece—I’m more sure of that now than I ever have been. It succeeds too well at something too risky and too original to be anything else. And perhaps, even with the incredible preponderance of stories out there today to experience, it’s worth making time to return to the masterpieces every so often. To reaffirm that they are masterpieces, if nothing else—or perhaps to return to something familiar and friendly, warm and comforting, yet at the same time challenging and deep, like a city built on another planet to preserve the history of a world that can’t be bothered to remember where it came from.

That Moving Saggy Part in the Middle: Part Two of an “Aria” Retrospective

Part One of the Aria retrospective, if you need to catch up

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In my life, I have watched the entire Aria saga through multiple times—at least three that I can remember. And every single time I did, I would burn straight through Aria: The Animation, get through the first three or four episodes of Aria: The Natural, and then just suddenly lose all will to watch the show. I would put off moving on to the next episode for weeks. I would sometimes watch other shows in the interim. I would consider ending my run early. And I had no idea why. Those first few episodes of The Natural were good, I thought. I loved them, I thought. They were just as good as anything in The Animation, I thought.

Conceptually, those first few episodes of Aria: The Natural are amazing. Carnevale, leading into a dance through a darkened city following a mysterious figure in a cloak. A treasure hunt where the real treasure is Neo-Venezia and its people. A luxurious afternoon coffee in the piazza. A night watching a meteor shower atop the roofs of the city. So I was always mystified why I had such a hard time getting past them, when the enthusiasm they created should have carried me through the next few. Watching the show again, I finally understood why it was that I always had such a hard time making it past Episode 6 or so: much more than the other two series, The Natural has episodes that are badly paced, overstretched, and boring.

The Saggy Middle of the Saggy Middle

I always used to blame Episode 5, another two-parter which I think of as “the Alicia duology” since both stories focus on Akari and Alicia spending time together. But this time, I enjoyed Episode 5. At least, I enjoyed the second story, “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…”, which follows Akari and Alicia on a picnic into the inlands, where they spend a day discovering old train tracks, an abandoned train car, and cherry trees in full bloom. It’s a nice little story that reminds me of exploring the mountains near my house when I was a kid, where there were also abandoned train tracks.

No, the first bad episode of Aria: The Natural is actually Episode 7, “To the Kingdom of Cats…”, which illustrates the biggest storytelling vice of Aria: The Natural: dragging a story out way longer than the material can actually sustain. “To the Kingdom of Cats…” is based on a manga story that was one of the earliest hints in the manga towards the magical ghost cat subplot. Aika and Akari see President Aria going somewhere by himself in his little boat, so they decide to follow him. They end up stuck in a loop in a mysterious abandoned canal where they go through a gate and come out into the same room they just left. This continues until President Aria comes out and helps them get free. That’s it. Episode 7 stretches this story out to 22 minutes. It achieves this mainly by showing Akari and Aika stuck in the loop for what feels like fifteen solid minutes. Whether it’s actually that long, it becomes so boring that it feels much longer.

Looking back at my notes, though, I still cut “To the Kingdom of Cats…” some slack at the time. I wrote that it was “Kinda boring but okay.” I became much less forgiving of this flaw as the show continued to do it. Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” has a real story but mercilessly pads itself, adding in pans and tracking shots that feel pointless even in light of the new definition of “having a point” you have to adopt when watching Aria. On the other hand, Episode 11 has one of the stronger messages of all the episodes of Aria, addressing Neo-Venezia’s own history independent of Venice on Earth that it was built as a replica of, and whether that history has value of its own. So I still cut it some slack as well.

Episodes 16, “Parting with that Gondola…”, and 17, “After That Rainy Night…”, received no such regard.

By this point the show had already started to become a bit of a slog. And Episode 16 follows on Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle…”, my personal pick for worst episode of any Aria, bar none, so my charitable feelings towards the show were running low. Then it decided to spend two entire episodes showing Akari say goodbye to her gondola, which has become old and needs to be replaced. Yes, two entire episodes devoted to bidding farewell to a hunk of floating wood.

In hindsight, it’s a little bit genius. For all its faults, which I’m going to continue enumerating at great length, Aria: The Natural masters themes and messages. It chooses more complex and more unique messages than the other two Aria shows do, and it symbolizes those themes in interesting ways that tie seamlessly into the world of Neo-Venezia. Episode 11 uses art snobs’ attitudes towards Neo-Venezian glassmaking to explore the city’s odd relationship with the city it was built as a replica of, and Episodes 16 and 17 use Akari’s old, beat up gondola as a symbol for how much she’s been through since coming to Aqua, and how much her life has been defined by it.

But as Episodes 16 and 17 illustrate, the show doesn’t always do a good job pacing those stories. They become too heavy, drive the same points in too many times; and they become too overwrought, trying to pack in too many feelings, which in the end becomes emotionally fatiguing and can even make what should be moving laughable. Through flashbacks, these two episodes adapt most of the stories from the early parts of the manga when it was called Aqua that weren’t adapted in Aria: The Animation. Putting this material so late in the series has an odd effect. It loses its original impact because Akari is experiencing all these early, awkward moments as memories that she’s now so far away from that they’ve become fond, even though they weren’t all pleasant at the time. So we as the audience experience these events as Akari does now: as bygone memories, a little wistful, things that shaped who Akari is today. Except when we don’t: having never been aware that any of these things happened, we have little context for them. We don’t know if they happened the day before Episode 1 of Aria: The Animation, or the year before. For me, some scenes survived this disconnect. Watching Akari struggle to row in front of Alicia and embarrass herself rowing backwards, I felt about it as current-day Akari did: a little nostalgic, recalling the rough beginnings that often go with new jobs and new lives. Watching her test to become a Single, I didn’t feel much at all.

By Episode 17 they’re mostly out of stuff from Aqua to adapt, so they start making up original material, and even bring in Alicia’s memories of training with that gondola herself back in the day. Then they finish on what feels like a solid ten minutes of Akari lying in the gondola while emotional music plays (a song called “Amefuribana”) and the exact same clips that we just saw in the first part of the episode repeat, this time cut up in different ways to coincide better with the music. Some of this is artfully edited—there’s a shot I like where they show Alicia cleaning off the gondola with a hose and then fade into Akari doing the same later—but it doesn’t change that it’s a clipshow of material we just saw earlier in the same episode. Not only does this seem either lazy or desperate, it also did weird things to my emotional investment in the situation. Showing a scene more than once is usually a heavy-handed way to emphasize how important that scene is. After two whole episodes of weighty sadness, melancholy, and nostalgia around this gondola, I had no more to give. I was tapped. Repeating these clips, in effect telling me “This is important, pay attention, you should feel sad about this” tipped me over from “no more feelings to feel” to annoyance. The show tried to milk that scenario for just a little bit more emotion than it was actually good for, and in the end, when they needed another five minutes of footage and decided to repeat some from earlier in the same episode, it accidentally brought everything crashing down. At that point in the show, when it had already become a bit of a slog, it couldn’t recover easily from that. And it never really did in my eyes. It started to make amends in its last three episodes, but it wasn’t until Aria: The Origination that I started to really enjoy it again.

Four boring episodes out of twenty-six shouldn’t be a big deal. But the truth is these four weren’t the only boring ones. At least half the episodes of Aria: The Natural are boring on some level. These four were the worst, because they had the most boring story content and were the most excessively dragged out. But sadly, even episodes with great story concepts were made boring, because the animation reaches new lows in this series.

Aria depends heavily on its art and music to convey emotions. There’s also emotion to be had from the characters’ stories, but neither Aria: The Animation nor Aria: The Natural do a great job of getting at it; they both have a ton of episodes that rely on art, music, and story concept with a few episodes that rely on character sprinkled in. The character-based episodes are consistently the best, and this is partially because the staff manipulated things to be that way. The terrible animation, at its worst, is too obvious to miss. There are large sections of some episodes that feel like picture dramas, where we see a still image with a lens flare on it to try and make it look more dynamic and the characters talk over it, but don’t appear anywhere in the shot. When the characters do appear, they don’t move, not even their mouths, they just stand in one pose while the camera slowly pans over them, while the dialogue is delivered in voiceovers. I can’t recall a single time in the character-based episodes—like Episode 6, “The Smile Reflected in That Mirror…”; Episode 13, “Those Really Self-Imposed Rules…”; or Episode 18, “That New Me…”—where the animation degenerated to this extent. But terrible animation completely destroyed Episode 2, “Chasing That Treasure…”, whose finale hinges on the beauty of Neo-Venezia being the real treasure. Episode 23, “That Sea, Love, and Heart…”, which has some nice things to say about how society perceives love and relationships, also made me start looking at my watch towards the end because the bad animation made its pivotal scene feel so drawn out.

In this episode, Akari meets an older man and his wife who’ve come to Neo-Venezia on vacation after years of the husband being unable to get away from work long enough for the trip. He wants to do a ceremony called the Marriage to the Sea to reaffirm his love for his wife. He’s rebuffed, but Akari levies her group of friends and acquaintances to put together a ceremony for him so he can tell his wife that he still loves her. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another anime do a serious story about an older couple’s love like this. It ends with Akari writing Ai a line I really liked, arguing against the ideas of true love and soul mates: “Maybe every encounter is a miracle, and love is really something you have to nurture.” The final scene, which should be a beautiful affirmation of an older couple’s continuing love against the backdrop of a beautiful orange sunset on the ocean, becomes a bunch of drowse-inducing pans over still images in which none of the characters are visible. Voices come out of nowhere and talk over these still images, but we don’t see the people they belong to, or if we do it’s from far away and they don’t move or change expressions at all. The episode, despite its unique message, is all but ruined by this. It especially hurts the squad of minor characters that the main six Undine recruit to fill out the celebration; we never see them, so they don’t add any visual weight, and we only hear their voices as disembodied speech from the ether.

Better animation would probably improve a huge number of the episodes I didn’t enjoy in Aria: The Natural. Some would still have story problems, but the series wouldn’t have felt like such a slog for so long if some of these plot-heavy, character-light episodes that proliferated at least had some pretty stuff to look at.

Aika Is a Borderline Psychotic Drama Queen and Other Odd Discoveries

Throughout Aria: The Animation and into the first 17 episodes of Aria: The Natural, the only one among our three heroines who really has a character arc is Alice. Almost every episode I think of as “character-focused” is about Alice, oftentimes with Athena as a strong supporting character. We’ll talk more about her arc when we discuss Aria: The Origination, but it’s by far the most full and interesting arc of any character in the series.

Akari never has a character arc, because she follows what this video about characters without arcs calls the “Flat Arc”. Akari starts the series with certain fundamental beliefs, and never changes those beliefs throughout the series. Instead, she changes other people by exposing them to her beliefs and the unique abilities those convictions give her. In Episode 10, “That Heartwarming Town and Its People…”, Akari inspires Aika and Alice to avoid judging others by their appearances, and shows them how powerful her ability to make friends with everyone is. She helps mend fences between a child and his teacher who quit her job to get married in Episode 4, “That Neo-Venezia Colored Heart…”, and helps a glassmaker heal the chip on his shoulder in Episode 11, “That Precious Sparkle…” Throughout the entire series, Akari helps Akatsuki become a better person. He starts out as the biggest jerk in the whole show and slowly becomes a decent human with each time he meets Akari. Though she and Alicia are compared and portrayed as similar throughout the series, Akari seems to inspire others to be better people, whereas Alicia only seems to inspire others in their pants. Everyone who admires Alicia talks about their admiration in physical terms: Alicia is beautiful, Alicia is graceful, Alicia is an untouchable ideal. When people appreciate Akari at all, they appreciate her because she made them kinder or more open or showed them a new way of looking at the world that made it seem brighter and friendlier. That’s also why only Akari could be Alicia’s apprentice. Akari is humble, but not obsequious. She treats everyone like a close friend. While she admires Alicia’s skill and respects her as a veteran Undine, Alicia is a person to Akari, not a physical embodiment of an untouchable ideal. Aika could never have been Alicia’s apprentice, because she would have been so blinded by her admiration of Alicia that she wouldn’t have been able to learn. She would have constantly been chasing the picture in her head of what Alicia is, an impossible image of what an Undine should be, and ignoring the reality that she can never be that, nor does she have to be to be good at what she does.

Unfortunately, the other parts of Aika’s character arc, which really doesn’t begin until the later parts of Aria: The Natural, don’t quite work. Everything the writers try to say about her character is contradicted by evidence in the show, so none of her character beats come off the way they’re supposed to. In the first story of Episode 19, “That Crybaby…”, Aika has come down with a fever, so she misses practice and leaves Akari and Alice on their own. She expects this to be a huge problem, because she thinks Akari and Alice are complete idiots who can’t find their own feet without her. After a few days in bed, she’s feeling better and getting bored, so she sneaks out to go shopping, eat ice cream, and spy on her friends, who are doing just fine without her. Seeing this, Aika has what appears to be a full-blown existential crisis, runs back to her room, and hides under the covers crying because she thinks her existence is meaningless since her friends don’t need her to boss them around. When Akari and Alice come by to tell her they miss her and bring pudding, Aika remembers that life is worth living and immediately rebounds, and the crisis is over.

Aika’s character traits are supposed to be “serious, diligent, hardworking, and reliable”, but we repeatedly see her lose her mind over tiny incidents. In Episode 18, “That New Me…”, she runs away from a barbecue crying because her hair got burnt and now she looks ugly in front of Alicia, and then screams at Akira that she hates her because Akira isn’t sympathetic to her reaction. In the second half of Episode 19, “That Young Girl’s Heart…”, she’s so depressed that she can’t function in her day to day life, because Al, her crush, hasn’t seen the new short hairstyle she adopted after her long hair burned in Episode 18. This doesn’t make her come off as serious or reliable. She’s more concerned about her hair, Alicia thinking she’s pretty, and showing off for the guy she has a crush on than building up her skills as an Undine. Her perception of Akari’s and Alice’s incompetence that we see at the start of “That Young Girl’s Heart…” is completely skewed, to the point where I’d call Aika an unreliable narrator. There’s another episode during The Origination that further erodes Aika’s image as “serious, hardworking, and reliable” that we’ll discuss when we get to it.

The Natural also adds some weird and ultimately meaningless coincidences to Akira’s and Alicia’s pasts in what I consider the worst episode of any Aria series, Episode 15, “At the Center of That Squared Circle”. In this episode, Akari is enjoying a day off when she happens to run into Akira. There’s a scene between them that I liked a lot, but soon Akatsuki, Al, and Woody show up and the whole thing somehow turns into them all reminiscing about a time when they were children. It turns out that Akira and Alicia were on a field trip to Ukijima when they were young and happened to run into Akatsuki and Woody, who Al was babysitting at the park. Akira and Akatsuki competed at a bunch of challenges and Akira came out on top, leading Akatsuki to spend years thinking he’d been bested by the manliest boy ever. At the end he discovers that it was Akira and that she was a girl. Akari muses how wonderful and mysterious it is that they all met before.

While there are plenty of episodes, especially of The Natural, which are boring or oddly structured, this is the only one I’ll call genuinely terrible. It stomps on its own message: discovering that, by some insane coincidence, Akatsuki, Woody, Al, Akira, and Alicia all spent an afternoon together when they were children doesn’t make the world seem wide and wondrous, it makes it seem small and incestuous. The mere fact that Akatsuki, Al, and Woody all knew each other as children already felt like a huge coincidence since Akari meets them all by chance and then discovers later that they know each other. I also didn’t like the reveal that Alicia and Akira knew each other as children, for the same reason: two childhood friends happening to become two of the greatest Undine of their age makes the world feel narrower and poorer. Are there really so few people in Neo-Venezia that it can just so turn out that all of these people Akari randomly met happened to already know each other from the past? And these existing relationships don’t add anything to any of these characters. Akira and Alicia’s relationship was already well established (and already felt uncomfortably coincidental) by their time as trainees together. Akatsuki, Woody, and Al have no relationships. Even when we see them all together, usually in the festival episodes, we don’t see them interact in any meaningful way. It feels like it was just a convenience so there didn’t need to be a scene where they meet each other—but there already didn’t need to be a scene like that, because they never really talk.

The Cat God

I mentioned last time how much I ended up disliking the supernatural material. The Natural doubles down on ghost cat material and even crafts an odd sort of story arc around Akari’s encounters with Cait Sith, a seven-foot-tall cat god who seems to take a liking to her early on. He first appears in Episode 1, hidden under a robe and mask and playing the part of Casanova for Carnevale. The finale of this episode is a self indulgent-feeling five-minute sequence of Akari and Ai following Cait Sith and his entourage while singing, dancing, and clicking canastas. At the end, he takes off his mask and reveals who he is, fleetingly, from a distance. The entire sequence sums up my feelings about the Cait Sith material in The Natural: it’s artistically beautiful, and it’s well animated, it’s atmospheric, and it adds variety to the show by letting us see things we’d never see in regular old Neo-Venezia, and it breaks the world and it adds nothing to the story and I hate it and I hate that I don’t completely hate it.

The show never attempts to explain what Cait Sith is, beyond Alicia quickly explaining the myth to Akari that he’s a cat god from Manhome. I’ve seen theories that he’s a genetically engineered supercat, which fits into the world, since the Martian cats like President Aria can understand human language, meaning they must be genetically engineered. But late in the series, he saves Akari from a vengeful ghost. In the very next episode he’s seen conducting a magical sky train. And even back in Episode 4 of Aria: The Animation, a ghost cat taking human form handed Akari a letter. Attempts to explain these phenomena within a hard sci-fi, no-magic world get more and more strained, to the point where it’s meaningless to pretend anymore that Aria is a no-magic world. Given that, why overcomplicate things? Cait Sith is a magical cat god, and that’s the end of it.

I tried to justify the magical cat god material as part of Akari’s character arc, since she’s the only one who ever sees him. (Everyone else just accepts that he exists without question, even though I know I’d have some questions if my friend told me she’d seen a magical cat god, let alone been saved from a ghost by him.) But Akari doesn’t really have a character arc. She changes the people around her; she herself does not change. The Cait Sith episodes don’t provide her with one, either. She seems entirely unchanged by her encounters with the giant magical cat, other than the odd quasi-romantic attraction to him she develops in the last couple episodes of the storyline. If we wanted to we could interpret Cait Sith as some kind of out-there symbolism—as Akari’s childhood, as Akari’s sexual awakening, as a sign of Akari’s incipient mental illness, as Jesus, as Satan tempting Akari who symbolizes Jesus—but no matter which symbolic interpretation I tried on, it didn’t add anything to the story that connected to anything else in Aria at all. No matter how I interpreted Cait Sith as part of Akari’s character arc, he was either redundant or completely from left field. In the end, nothing about his presence in the show hangs together. He adds very little, and he subtracts a sense of realism.

Moving into The Origination

The Natural finally started to capture my interest again in the last few episodes. Once we moved past the cat god material we finally got back to stories about the characters and their lives. Three of my top episodes of Aria: The Natural are “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”, “The Fruits of That Encounter…”, and “That White, Kind City…”, which all come in here at the very end of the series. All three show how the main trio are advancing as Undine, setting up what’s to come in The Origination, but “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” and “That White, Kind City…” both do it under the simplest auspices. “Those Undine of Tomorrow…” just shows the main trio sitting around speculating about the future, punctuated by Akira getting mad at Aika for trying to inherit Alicia’s special Undine alias instead of creating her own identity. Even though “That New Me…” does this conflict more explosively, it’s handled with a lot more symbolic potency in “Those Undine of Tomorrow…”. An Undine’s alias is custom-made for her by her mentor, and characterizes her style and the experience a customer will have with her. It’s closely linked to her identity as an Undine. For the main trio, being an Undine is a core part of their personal identities, so the aliases they choose clearly express their personal identities and how they see themselves. So when Akira criticizes Aika for trying to take on Alicia’s alias, she’s much more pointedly advising Aika not to couple her own identity to Alicia; otherwise Aika is setting herself up for constant self-loathing and dissatisfaction when she fails to live up to her vision of Alicia.

“That White, Kind City…” is, in some ways, a tempest in a teapot. Alicia pulls off a classic mentor maneuver, answering Akari’s straightforward question about what she values in her job and what motivates her with a long, meandering stunt and a Zen koan. On the other hand, with a show that wears its themes on its sleeve like Aria, a little subtlety can be very refreshing. Ending the series on such a low-key story, where characters other than Akari and Alicia appear only briefly, seems a bit odd, but it works. It’s a fun, sweet episode, the beautiful imagery and focus on the Akari / Alicia relationship of “The Discoveries on That Spring Day…” improved by a strong plot thread and theme.

As we’ll discuss next time, Aria: The Origination is much more subtle, low-key, and focused on character and relationships than The Natural, and these last few episodes start moving us in that direction. They are all the better for it.

My Biggest Compliment for The Natural

Aria: The Natural is inferior to the other shows in story, character, and animation, but it manages to have my favorite soundtrack of all three shows. Since the soundtracks of all three shows are brilliant, this doesn’t quite absolve it of its failings, but it’s a definite point in its favor.

The Natural has the most varied and interesting background music, but it also racks up huge points because one of its endings, “Natsumachi”, is quite possibly my favorite anime song of all time. I have no ear for music, so it’s hard to really explain why, but over the years this song has almost never failed to make me think nostalgically of summer evenings by the beach and lavender sunset skies over the ocean with the stars just becoming visible. Oddly, the only real memories I have of a scenario like that have some unpleasant aspect to them, so the song is making me feel nostalgic for some synthesized thing that’s never actually happened to me. That’s pretty powerful.

The three Aria openings, “Undine”, “Euforia”, and “Spirale”, are almost identical songs in a lot of ways, but “Euforia”, the opening for The Natural, succeeds most at being that song. The Natural does, however, have my least favorite ending theme, “Smile Again”, for its second half. “Smile Again” is far from bad, but to my ears it’s merely pleasant, where the other endings, “Rainbow”, “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami”, and the aforementioned “Natsumachi”, achieve something more stirring. If you translate the lyrics, all four endings are pretty much the usual anime song pablum about romantic yearning and the blue sky, so it’s hard for me to describe what separates them for me. This is where words fail me, and I have to throw up my hands and admit that that’s how I felt about it, but it really is just a feeling.

Conclusion

Aria: The Natural has some of the best material in the Aria series, along with most of the worst material. There are times when it’s boring, and times when it goes in directions that undermine its own world. There are also times when it’s beautiful, and times when it nails a feeling or a theme perfectly. I understand now why I always felt so conflicted about it in the past. It has good ideas and executes some of them very well, and all of them competently, but it feels like it’s spinning its wheels and filling up space a lot of the time, which grew frustrating at times. It may have been better served by a thirteen-episode run, doing away with the cat god story and some of the other filler, to concentrate the good parts and leave behind the less good parts. But in the end it’s part of the Aria saga, and its length, as much as it burned me out towards the end, served some purpose: it bridged the gap from Aria: The Animation, where our three heroines have just gotten into the swing of things and still have a lot of growing and maturing to do, to Aria: The Origination, where they’ve matured a lot, and are now well on the way to becoming Primas.