Sharing My Thoughts on “Mononoke Sharing”

I was completely blindsided by Mononoke Sharing. I bought it blind from the three-page preview on Comixology, and I thought after the first volume it was just an exploitative ecchi manga. But I don't mind a good exploitative ecchi manga once in a while, and the characters were pretty likable, so I bought the second volume after a while, and then, inexplicably charmed, the third and fourth.

Mononoke Sharing follows Yata Kagami, an extremely poor high school girl who lives on her own. Searching for cheap rent, she finds a house full of classical Japanese folk creatures trying to blend in with humans as part of an experiment to see if they can live in human society. They want to take the experiment to the next level by having a human in the house with them. At first, Yata wants none of it, but she realizes that everyone in the house seems nice and that living among a bunch of supernatural creatures gives her a chance to feel less singled out and alone.

The series is by Coolkyoushinjya, the same manga-ka behind Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon, and there are a lot of similarities. Both are harem series that have a normal girl with mean eyes at the center of the harem instead of a generic loser guy. Both harems are made up of supernatural beings who either dislike humans or have a certain disregard for human life. Both have acceptance and tolerance of those different from you as major themes. And it's obvious that Coolkyoushinja likes big boobs, because both Mononoke Sharing and Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon are full of them. Mononoke Sharing takes a sharp turn into the serious in its second half; having only seen the Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon anime, I can't say if that series does the same.

The manga's first half follows the characters' daily lives in the house as Yata gets closer to them and deals with weird roommate troubles. The first chapter introduces all the characters by showing Yata get annoyed at them for their various bad behaviors with the trash. Kappa Mizuchi sheds bowls out of her head that jam up the trash compactor, while devil Momi's horns shred the bags and make them leak. Fox spirit Youko has a voracious appetite for sex and throws out huge numbers of used condoms, and rokurokubi Kuro has a bad habit of taking out the trash without going outside by holding the bag in her mouth and stretching her extremely long neck from the window over to the trash cans. Only snow woman Yuki has no problematic trash behaviors, though she has to bundle up in a winter coat and scarf to avoid freezing the trash bags with the cold air that constantly surrounds her. Subsequent chapters show how Yata first moved into the house, how she became closer to each of her housemates, and what happens when she goes with them to the pool or to a summer festival.

In the second half of the series, a high-ranking mononoke official named Chiehime, a hannya, appears and tries to disband the shared house. Chiehime insists that mononoke and humans shouldn't try to live together and is disturbed that mononoke are slowly becoming more human. She challenges the house to a contest to determine if they'll be allowed to continue living together, and uses all sorts of underhanded tricks, recruiting friends and family of the housemates to fight against them. Even though Chiehime and Yata oppose each other bitterly, they also recognize there's something similar about the two of them. In the end it's revealed that Chiehime is a mononoke with no mononoke powers; time and interbreeding with humans is making them slowly lose their unique abilities. When she's attacked by a group of mononoke who were using their shared house as a front for bad behavior when she disbanded it, Yata saves her, earning her gratitude. At Momi's behest, Chiehime starts living in the house and quickly comes to see the appeal.

The series ends rather abruptly; Yata finds out that Momi is one of the gods who created the world, and that in her loneliness while she waited millions of years for humans to appear, she created mononoke, much like Aule creating the dwarves in The Silmarillion. Yata grows up to be a liaison between humans and mononoke, and takes part in creating a mononoke district where the mononoke can be out with who they are while they slowly lose their powers and are absorbed into the larger population. The series ends with a new girl moving into the shared house and Yata showing up to greet her.

Surprisingly Good…

Mononoke Sharing is, to my surprise, a really good series. The dialogue is surprisingly clever and fun. The characters are unique and charming. The sweet and shy Yuki is the kind of character I'd usually pick as my favorite, and she definitely ranks high, but I never expected to like Youko as much as I did. Her unbridled sexuality comes off like a cheap excuse for sex scenes at first, and the series definitely takes advantage, but she's enjoying herself so much, doing exactly what she wants, just because she wants it, that she was a lot of fun to watch, and I had to admire it. And Kuro was the character who made me laugh the most, as she aspired to become a manzai comedienne with an array of terrible neck-based jokes. Kuro in particular is a weird, unique character that no other harem series could have come up with. While it would have been easy to just put the characters in the usual array of cliched harem situations, the stories take full advantage of the premise and focus on the daily challenges and oddities of mononoke living in a human world. When Yuki steps on the carpet, she freezes it, and later it melts and leaves behind little spots of water. Mizuchi usually absorbs the water, so no one notices this until she's gone on vacation for a few days and there are damp spots all over the carpet. Mizuchi's colleagues have noticed she has an odd habit of pouring water on her head to refill the dish hidden under her wig. At one point Yata walks into Kuro's room and finds her with her entire neck unraveled, which she has to do sometimes to exercise it. It's so long it fills up the entire room, and it's so strong that she can make a chair or bed for Yata, and massage Yata by vibrating it.

To my even greater surprise, Mononoke Sharing transitions to a darker tone really well. It keeps its humor, but it does so without cheapening the more dramatic parts. In Volume 3, Mizuchi's stage of the contest becomes a life-or-death swimming race with her younger sister, whom her kappa relatives have elevated above her because she has pure kappa heritage while Mizuchi is part human. When it looks like Mizuchi will win, the kappa cheat by pushing a boulder on her, but her younger sister, who was deeply shocked when she discovered that she was chosen only for her heritage, pushes her out of the way and is injured. The series follows this serious plot with a silly plot where Youko and her old friend Souko compete to see who can seduce and bed the most men, but it handles the transition and the other characters' reactions so well that what could have been horrible tone whiplash instead feels natural. Yata and Chiehime discuss serious issues of ethics, philosophy, and morality around mononoke-human relations for an entire volume, then begin the next volume with Yata accidentally molesting Chiehime in her sleep, and somehow allow both characters to retain their gravitas when they need it. A lesser series would have debased and degraded Chiehime when it did this, or when it showed her forced to pose for pictures in a micro-bikini, but Mononoke Sharing allows Chiehime to keep her grace and confidence even though she's not accustomed to erotic things.

…but a rushed ending that leaves a bad taste

While Mononoke Sharing does a lot of things really well, it's not very good at following up on all the threads it introduces. The ending leaves so many interesting and funny stories on the table, and there are so many things about the characters we never learn. We know a lot about Yata as a person by the end, but we never find out much about her past or how she got to be the way she is. There's a tiny mention that she was abandoned in an orphanage, which helps explain the loneliness that Mizuchi points out early in Volume 1, but we never find out more. We don't find out a lot about Chiehime's past or her family or how she attained her position of power in the mononoke community. We meet Yuki's and Mizuchi's estranged sisters in Volume 3, but we don't get to see them interact or slowly rebuild their relationships. We never meet anyone from Youko's or Kuro's families or find out much about their pasts. The last to take place before we skip ahead a few years to the finale concerns Yata getting permission to reveal her housemates' mononoke nature We don't get much development or any closure with Yuki's and Youko's crushes on Yata. I especially wanted to see Youko's crush develop more, because it's unexpected for her to fall in love; she has sex with both men and women constantly and never seems to fall in love, so she must see something special in Yata, but we never get to explore that feeling. The ending just implies she's been carrying a torch for Yata for years.

Speaking of the ending, it comes so abruptly that I assume the series was cancelled or Coolkyoushinja just lost interest all of a sudden, and in trying to wrap up the plot with such haste, it makes a weird point about minority populations that I don't agree with and which bears some examination. In Yata and Momi's conversation where Momi reveals that she created mononoke, Momi also mentions that mononoke are supposed to lose their powers over time and be absorbed into the human population, which she did so that the history set out by the other gods, where there were no mononoke, wouldn't go too far off course. The ending shows that Yata, working with the mononoke government, came up with a plan to reveal the existence of mononoke and establish a special cordoned district of the city where they can live freely and openly. The expectation is that the mononoke will learn to integrate with human society in the special district, slowly lose their powers, and eventually disappear from existence and be subsumed by the human population.

It's not hard to see mononoke as a metaphor for minority or immigrant populations within a larger society, and the series helpfully establishes this reading for us during Chiehime's first appearance. She asks Yata how Yata sees mononoke, and Yata replies that she sees them as like humans but different, sort of like a separate race. After this, the parallels between mononoke and minority communities abound. Throughout Volume 3, Chiehime's argument against allowing humans and mononoke to integrate is based around two points. First of all, that mononoke are dangerous, unpredictable, immoral, and deceitful by nature, and humans cannot tolerate this, so conflict is inevitable. Second, that mononoke will lose what makes them special and unique by integrating too closely with humans. She uses the first point mainly to berate Yata and the others, trying to persuade them that humans and mononoke can never live together, as many a separatist firebrand has done in real life. When the kappa try to kill Mizuchi to prevent her inferior lineage from triumphing over the eugenically superior Mamizu, Chiehime says with cruel glee that this too is part of mononoke nature.

But the second point pains Chimehime. She's proud of her mononoke heritage, but she considers the powers a fundamental part of being a mononoke. She plays up her heritage by wearing a hannya mask and very flamboyant kimono, agitating for mononoke pride, and fighting for segregation and against integration with humans. In doing so, she's attained a high rank and a lot of respect and influence in the community that she loves. But without any powers, she can't see herself as a real mononoke, and she fears other mononoke will feel the same, so she lives in terror of being outed. Her inability to fully consider herself a part of the mononoke community has driven her to fight twice as hard to preserve it while living in constant fear of losing her right to be a part of it. If mononoke symbolize a minority population within a larger society, then their powers, customs, and oddities symbolize their unique culture and history. Chiehime is like a child born to an immigrant population within the United States who never learns her parents' language, grows up celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving instead of her parents' holidays, and prays to the Holy Trinity instead of to her parents' gods, who realizes on becoming an adult that she's proud of her parents' culture and becomes an activist, fighting to preserve it despite knowing little of it herself. While she can do her best to learn their language, their customs, their religion, she'll always trip a little over the unfamiliar sounds of their language, and the words of the prayers will never quite come to her naturally. And she might live in fear of other members of the community discovering just how Americanized she actually is as she goes around berating the young people for eating burgers and pizza instead of their heritage foods.

But at the conclusion of the story, we find out that Momi made mononoke to lose their powers after a few generations and be absorbed into the human population. And the special district that Yata helps establish at the end is known, at least by some, as the last gasp of mononoke identity. In the final chapter, the building manager for the shared house tells the new girl moving in that "Mononoke are slowly trying to become human" and "In time, mononoke won't be so rare anymore…and they'll eventually just be called 'people'". The new girl responds, "That means it's the last chance in history to meet someone this mysterious, right?!" So people know that mononoke are going to soon become indistinguishable from regular humans. This is viewed as a great victory by everyone, including Chiehime, who once fought so hard to maintain what made mononoke unique.

If mononoke symbolize a minority population and their powers and quirks symbolize their culture, language, and customs, then mononoke losing their powers and becoming more like humans symbolizes cultural assimilation. This assimilation is presented as a good thing by the story and is seen as such by both Yata and Chiehime. So the message of the ending is that minority populations should assimilate and disappear into the dominant culture, possibly after a period of living in a special ward where they can mix with the dominant culture and learn how to assimilate better. That's a weird and kind of disturbing message. The way Coolkyoushinjya presents themes of tolerance and understanding both in Mononoke Sharing and in Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon makes me think that is not at all what he was trying to get across. Nonetheless, that's what this rushed ending says.

There's an entirely different, also interesting thematic thread that the manga doesn't explore enough to say much about. In real life, cultural assimilation happens because of social pressures: the minority population learns the majority population's language because they need to communicate with monolingual members of the majority, and they have to send their children to public schools where the majority population's language and culture dominate. But real-life minority populations can resist assimilation to an extent. In the United States, there are Chinese schools and Hebrew schools where Chinese and Jewish children born in America can go to learn their ancestral languages. There are Mexican markets and Russian delis where they buy familiar foods and speak their languages. In many regions the local governments will publish forms in multiple languages. Mononoke, on the other hand, can't resist assimilation in the same way, because their loss of their powers was imposed on them by their creator, Momi. It's an inevitability of who they are. They were literally made by God to assimilate. This, and the entire idea that destiny in this world is an inexorable force set from the beginning of creation, mentioned during Momi's tell-all conversation with Yata, introduce questions about free will and meaning that are too quickly dropped and too scantily sketched out to impact the story much.

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.

That Nostalgic Memory I’m Ambivalent on Whether I Should Have Dug Up Again: Part One of an “Aria” Retrospective

My love for anime has been a bumpy ride, with peaks and valleys, zeniths and nadirs, apexes and azimuths, local minima and maxima, but during one of the highest heights of love for anime I’ve ever had, I considered Aria, the show about female gondola tour guides in an exact replica of Venice on Mars in the 24th Century, to be one of my favorite anime ever, second only to Bakemonogatari in my esteem.

It’s been a long time since I watched it. A few months ago, I figured, it’s fall, I’m old, what else do I have but to relive younger, happier times through media? Why not go back and watch Aria again? If it was still good, I could have the pleasure of nostalgia satisfied; and if it was terrible, I could once again feel the ache of a part of my youth crumbling into an ash of bitter disillusion inside me. What else do we live for but that feeling, after all?

In the end it was, as ever, more complicated than that. Re-watching Aria—by which I mean all the episodes, across all three series, plus the OVA—gave me a lot to think about, in every way and on every level.

When I think about art, I do so roughly on three levels. There’s the level of my personal experience with it, the emotion I felt while experiencing it. Then there’s the level of how this piece of art is constructed. How does it use the tools of its medium? Is it made skillfully or clumsily? When you read a film review and the critic gives it a rating at the end, it’s usually based on some combination of these two: whether the critic enjoyed the experience with the film, and whether it was constructed well. There’s also the more symbolic level: what’s the subtext? What are the implications? What is this trying to tell us, either implicitly or explicitly? This is how literary analysis looks at works of literature. These three levels aren’t discrete or even easily separable, of course. In practice they’re more like parts of a tree. The symbolic aspect is the root system. It’s not always easy to see and you’d be excused in some cases for thinking it doesn’t exist. Sometimes it doesn’t go very deep, and it’s not essential to the art that it go very deep, but trees with shallow root systems are prone to blowing away in storms or getting eroded out of the ground, and I’d argue the same is true for art. The construction aspect is the trunk. Without a trunk you don’t have a tree, and without the construction of art you don’t have art. The trunk is the most conventional part of the tree; there’s some room for variation, but mostly it just goes up and supports the rest of the tree. The construction is the most conventional part of a piece of art; try to get too outside the box with how it’s constructed and you end up with utter nonsense. And the emotional experience of individual people is the branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Its shape varies a lot, it’s very subjective, and it’s simultaneously the most superficial and the most important part. Giraffes love eating the leaves of the acacia tree; humans don’t, but we love eating apples, and we love looking at cherry blossoms. For a work of art, the emotions it creates are the reason people want to experience it, so they’re important, but they’ll be different for everyone. Some people might be scared of a movie, and others might laugh at the same movie.

Aria, it turns out, has enough going for it at all three tree-parts that I couldn’t write one coherent post covering all of them, so this first part covers the leaves and the branches and the trunk; to start with we’ll be going over the construction of the show’s art and narrative and the emotional journey of revisiting it. But even that produced enough material that I’m going to split it into three parts. In this part we’ll talk about Aria: The Animation. In the next part we’ll discuss Aria: The Natural, and in the final part we’ll go over Aria: The Origination and Arietta. In a future post I’ll talk about the root system. There’s a lot going on around the edges of the world of Neo-Venezia that deserves to be unpacked. But for now we have the much easier task of answering the obvious question:

Is Aria actually good?

I hesitate to say Aria is good. Not because it isn’t good. On the contrary, it takes a lot of creative risks that pay off spectacularly. It has charming characters and a beautiful world and incredible visuals. But it is flawed. So flawed that I hesitate to call it good, even though in aggregate the things it gets right are so large and the things it gets wrong are so small that it almost doesn’t seem to matter that it has flaws, it might as well just not have them.

But I didn’t watch the show in aggregate. I watched it one episode at a time, one day at a time, and at that level, I have to say, Aria has flaws. It has storytelling flaws. It has technical flaws in its art and animation. It has some flaws in its character writing that I’ve decided, after some consideration, I can’t put down to “it was accurate to the character’s personality”.

If you’ve never seen the show and you want me to tell you whether or not you should watch it, I’ll tell you yes, you should watch it. You should not expect action-packed excitement. You should not expect a laugh riot. You shouldn’t even expect moe; Aria is not, despite appearances, a “cute girls doing cute things” show, though you’re least likely to be disappointed if you go in expecting that. And you should not expect perfect storytelling or unimpeachable animation. You should not expect to enjoy every episode. You should also be prepared not to like it. Whenever a show does its own thing as confidently as this one does, it always risks some people not liking it. But you should watch it. And you should watch it now, before you read the rest of this post.

Aria: The Animation: Setting the Tone

The first Aria series came out in 2005, the same year as Tsubasa Chronicle, Strawberry 100%, and Negima!. It had one job: beat us over the head with so much suteki that we’d go punch-drunk. It did its job.

It’s rare for anime to diverge too drastically from the original work they’re based on, but if a studio was ever tempted to make something over completely, to make its anime adaptation into something entirely different from the source material, they had to have been tempted with Aria: The Animation. In 2005, the popular anime were harem, fantasy adventure, harem, wacky comedy, and harem. Looking over Wikipedia’s list of anime TV series that debuted in 2005, you’ve got My-Otome, which is sci-fi harem; Negima!, which is fantasy adventure harem; Paniponi Dash!, which is surreal comedy with harem elements; Rozen Maiden: Traumend, which is harem about dolls; Shuffle!, which is harem about angels and demons; Amaenaideyo!, which is harem about Buddhist nuns; Strawberry 100%, which is harem about strawberry panties; and Best Student Council, which is madcap comedy with harem elements. (I should mention I have, of course, watched all of these shows at one point or another, because I am trash as a human.) This was the time period when harem shows were starting to transmorph into moe shows, and it was becoming acceptable to do lighthearted shows about a group of attractive girls without thrusting some generic loser guy into the center of the narrative for them to lust over. The elements were all there in the Aria manga. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take on a more jokey tone, show a little bit more skin in the bath and beach scenes, let the camera linger a little longer on boobs and butts, play up the yuri aspects of Aika’s worship for Alicia, and make something that would be a more surefire hit in 2005 in the 1 AM timeslot. But they didn’t do that. They stayed true to the unique spirit of the manga, confidently asserted themselves, and created something people still talk about with great reverence thirteen years later, unlike Shuffle! and Best Student Council, which have faded away.

Aria: The Animation introduces all the characters: our three main heroines Akari, Aika, and Alice; their mentors Alicia, Akira, and Athena; Akari’s low-key love interest Akatsuki, and Aika’s slightly higher-key love interest Al; and last but not least, the three creepy pet cats that each of our heroines keeps as the symbolic president of her Undine company. It introduces the world of Neo-Venezia, a perfect replica of the city of Venice located on Mars, now called Aqua after being terraformed and covered with water. The original Venice, on “Manhome”, as the series calls Earth, sank into the ocean sometime between today and the show’s 24th Century time period. Manhome is not explored very much in the Aria series, and is never actually seen, but we get tiny hints of what it’s like. Machines do almost everything, yet people still work so ceaselessly that one couple Akari meets later on hasn’t been able to get away for a vacation in years. No food grows there anymore. There doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for history, art, or culture. Neo-Venezia is a hugely popular tourist destination, and everyone who comes seems to love it, but then, they have highly trained Undine tour guides to row them around the city, talk to them, and personalize their experience. Reading between the lines, my guess is since all services on Manhome are provided by machines, it’s a great luxury on Aqua to have a person providing a service for you. Undine train intensely to gain skill in emotional labor so they can provide an experience unlike anything these tourists, who are used to talking to machines, have had, and that’s why everyone we see has such an intense positive reaction to Neo-Venezia. We’ll discuss this further in a later post.

In contrast to the image we get of Manhome, Aqua is beautiful, full of trees, plants, water, friendly people, fulfilling work, and the most distinguished art and architecture from throughout Earth’s history. Anime is generally very good at showing the appeal of nature, but Aria also had to reproduce 500 years of Italian architecture, and the staff did so brilliantly. Even though you can tell they were struggling with the confines of a TV animation budget in 2005. The trip to Venice they talk about in the DVD special features really paid off. Other shows have also done an admirable job recreating beautiful European architecture—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? for example–but Aria‘s special trick was incorporating that into a world that makes sense. The world of Gochiusa makes no sense and goes totally unexplained. Towards the end of series I amused myself by theorizing that it took place in the same world as Aria, on a different part of Aqua inspired by Central Europe. Which then made so much sense that it’s now my head-canon that Gochiusa’s world is another city on Aqua. Aria’s world is so strong, it can even explain other shows’ worlds.

Aria: The Animation also introduces Ai, a young girl to whom Akari writes emails at the beginning and end of most episodes, explaining what’s been going on in her life. This framing device, which was different in the manga, throws off the beginning of the story a little. To introduce Ai in the first episode, Akari had to already be somewhat established on Aqua, so the anime couldn’t adapt the early chapters of the manga where Akari first arrives. On the other hand, it allows Alice to be introduced in Episode 3, whereas in the manga she wasn’t officially introduced for four volumes, very late for one of the main characters. Episode 3 is an anime original, but it serves early on to assert the direction the show is taking. It treats Akari as a symbol of everything the show stands for—its optimism, its welcoming nature, its relaxing atmosphere, its appreciation for the beauty of nature and of art, its reverence for history and human achievement. Then it puts Alice in the place of a new viewer as she slowly discovers that Akari is sappy, corny, wide-eyed “oh gee golly willikers”, a sanguine font of happiness, “transparent” with her positive emotions as the episode title puts it. At first Alice doesn’t understand how someone could possibly be like this, but by the episode’s conclusion she’s begun to understand the charm of Akari’s smile.

It only took a few more episodes to remind me why Alice has always been my favorite character. Akari may embody the series, but Alice is the most relatable. A quiet, quirky gondola prodigy, Alice is great at sculling when the series starts, but she has a lot to learn about working with people, including her mentor, Athena, who annoys her by being clumsy and dopey. Once she does establish a relationship with the other main characters, Alice is all the more afraid of losing it because of the work she had to put in to developing it. Alice grows a lot over the course of the three shows and probably has the most satisfying arc of any of the main characters. She also gets all the best lines. In Episode 5, the mentors send the three trainees a mystery invitation promising a trip to “Neverland”. The three show up to find an empty island; when they start speculating why someone would have done this, Alice says “Maybe someone wanted to crush our dreams”.

Aria: The Animation focuses on exploring the world of Neo-Venezia more than on the characters, aside from a couple of Alice episodes (mainly Episode 3 and Episode 6) and some moments in the spotlight for other characters (Athena also in Episode 6, Akira in Episode 7, President Aria in Episode 8, and the three mentors in Episode 11). But the characters are all introduced well enough that we understand who they are, and they stand out as one of the bright spots of this first series in hindsight. Another major bright spot: the art. Every episode is of full of imagery that makes Aqua look warm, pleasant, and friendly, beautiful in an approachable way. Neo-Venezia is not some static shrine full of priceless artifacts that can never be touched (even though, in a literal sense, it kind of is); it feels like somewhere people live, where their lives are improved by the beauty they’re surrounded with every day. Watching the characters harvest chestnuts at a rustic mountain cabin in Episode 9 or take a swim through a ruined mansion in the middle of the ocean in Episode 10 is enjoyable even though there’s not a lot of story involved, and we still see the characters react to the situations in ways that feel appropriate to their personalities, such as Aika’s misplaced competitiveness in Episode 9. There’s a lot more to the art than just faithfully reproducing Venice. The animators love to show images reflected on water, either the ocean or a puddle, and manage to perfectly capture the faded, yet clear quality of such reflections. There’s also a scene at the start of Episode 11 where Akari, Aika, and Alice are coming home from a day of bad weather that uses color more effectively than any other anime scene I can think of. The grey-green color of the sky and ocean communicate the loneliness, melancholy, and oppressiveness of being out in bad weather near nightfall with incredible skill, without a single word of dialogue. When the characters make it inside to the orange glow of a warm fire, there’s such catharsis, such relief, far more emotion than anyone would expect from the first five minutes of an episode, and without a single tear or any yelling. The festival in Episode 13 also wouldn’t be nearly as inviting without the cozy earth tones that make a night in Piazza San Marco with friends look so appealing.

The Groundwork for a Flawed Run

This first series is a microcosm of everything that’s great and not so great about Aria. The charming characters, unique worldview, and amazing art are all there; the bad animation, strained storylines, and some worldbuilding elements that I now don’t appreciate also begin here. I’ll save the discussion of the animation for The Natural, where it got so bad it interfered with the story.

Aria: The Animation’s storytelling is uneven, notably more so than the other two series since the show was still finding its footing at this point. Episode 5, for example, is about the girls having fun at the beach. Later episodes, even within The Animation, contented themselves with showing us the fun and the beautiful imagery and maybe slipping in a tiny, obvious message at the end. Episode 5 tries to have a complex message about remembrance that takes up the last two minutes of its running time and doesn’t flow at all from what we’ve seen so far, which has been the girls having fun on the beach. The analogy between the beach island and Peter Pan’s Neverland is strained and adds nothing to the story. Does this ruin the episode? No, we still get a fun segment of the girls doing intense training and then enjoying the beach in the middle. But it makes it feel choppy, as if we have three separate things going on that don’t actually belong together but they’ve been shoehorned into one episode just because. This episode is an anomaly in the show. I can’t think of another one that’s choppy and lumpy in the same way this one is.

Episode 7 fails in a way that Aria episodes more typically do. It’s adapted from a manga story that was only one chapter, so there wasn’t enough material to fill an entire episode. Thus the story was padded with original material about Akari, Aika, and Alice each using their unique talents to save a gondola ride for some customers of Akira’s. It’s clumsy, feels like the filler it is, and does nothing to develop the characters. It reminds me of an episode of the old Superfriends cartoon. You would always have scenarios where Hawkman, Apache Chief, and Aquaman end up in an aquarium that’s crumbling in an earthquake and have to save people. Apache Chief grows to a large size and holds up the building to help people escape. Aquaman talks to the fish and gets them to jump out of their tanks and let people ride them to safety. Hawkman uses his hawk-like laser eye beams to blast a path free. If you’re curious, the hawk-like laser eye beams in this episode is Alice’s ability to pick locks. It’s never explained why she learned it and it’s never mentioned again. (I have written in my notes for this episode, “Alice, you crafty little bitch! Where did you learn to pick locks?”)

Episode 8, which also fails in a way that would become characteristic of later duds, is two half-episodes starring President Aria. Both are pretty boring. Have you ever watched one of those Nick Jr. cartoons for young children who can’t talk yet? The animation is always very static because it’s trying to avoid overstimulating them before naptime. They can’t talk yet, so there’s barely any dialogue aside from narration, and they can’t really understand what’s going on, so the plot is always about some cute animal trying to find his balloon or something. That’s basically these President Aria episodes. The second one is a little better because we get to see what all the characters are doing with their free time. Junichi Sato, the director of the Aria series, has said in interviews that he had a hard time pacing the first series given such a big world, so many characters, and only thirteen episodes, and he titled the second series “The Natural” because it was allowed to proceed at a more natural pace. Given that, it’s exceedingly strange he would choose to spend an entire thirteenth of a series that was far from guaranteed a sequel, one precious episode from the few he had to tell this unique and beautiful story, following around the doings of a cat who loves food. I do hail the idea of making two-part mini-episodes, though. It’s a great way to avoid what happened with Episode 7 where the story was stretched out too thin. Unfortunately I can’t think of a time in the series where it really worked out.

Ghost Cat: Way of the Gondolier

I had the most problems with Episodes 5, 7, and 8, but the other episodes weren’t perfect either. Episode 4 caused me the most turmoil. The basic story is quite good. Akari receives a long obsolete data disk and a request to deliver it to another island far out in the Neo-Adriatic Sea. She asks her friend Woody, a Sylph who delivers packages on a flying motorbike, to take her out there, where they discover that the island is empty save for a graveyard from the early days of Aqua’s colonization. They find a reader that can play back the disk and discover it’s a letter to one of the early settlers, now long dead. I like this concept a lot: Akari, and the viewers, get to learn something about Aqua’s past and the early days of human settlement, which helps fill in the world a little more and drive home early on that they really are on Mars. On the other hand, the one who gives the disk to Akari for delivery is some kind of ghost cat who transformed into a human form and appeared to her in order to make a request that would allow it to rest in peace. If I recall correctly, it’s implied the ghost cat was the cat of the person in the grave Akari delivers the letter to. This sets off a whole recurring mystic ghost cat subplot that keeps coming back into play all the way up to the end of Aria: The Natural, where it comes much more sharply to the forefront.

Watching the show again, I discovered that I don’t like the supernatural ghost cat material. It’s done with the same mastery of art, color, and atmosphere that characterizes the rest of the show, and it helps put Akari in situations that would have been difficult to create otherwise, but it adds a supernatural element into a world that I don’t think needed it.

The world of Aria is somewhat hard sci-fi. It’s harder than Star Wars by a long way. Its terraforming technology is only vaguely explained, but the show does address how Mars became Aqua and how it’s kept that way. Aqua has its own calendar, based around each Aqua year being two Manhome years; in real life, a year on Mars is 687 days, or about 1.88 Earth years. Since people throughout the series treat coming from to Aqua from Manhome as a regular vacation, something that requires time off from work but not something that requires quitting your job and leaving your life behind, we can assume a trip from Manhome to Aqua takes between ten and forty hours. The spaceship we see Akari ride from Manhome to Aqua in the Aqua manga resembles a modern airliner, with no evidence of sleeping bays or stasis pods, which also backs that up. Mars is, on average, about 140 million miles from Earth, so you could reach it in about forty hours if you could travel around 3.5 million miles per hour, which is much faster than any spacecraft we have today, but still far, far slower than the speed of light (roughly 671 million miles per hour). My point is that Aqua may be on Mars in the 24th Century, but as science fiction visions of Mars in the 24th Century go, it’s pretty conservative and sticks fairly close to what might be possible with our current scientific understanding. Then it throws in a recurring subplot about magical ghost cats. Which, as we’ll see, barely affects the main story at all, but at the same time is framed as not a dream or a delusion, so it taints the straight sci-fi world with supernatural elements. That might have been okay if it had added something more valuable than what it subtracted. But as we’ll talk about next time, for me, it didn’t.

Rewatching the X-Men Reboots

After X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the studio recognized that something wasn’t working with the X-Men movies, and went back and did a soft reboot / prequel trilogy, casting James McAvoy as young Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender as young Erik Lehnsherr, alongside Jennifer Lawrence as young Raven Darkholme, a.k.a. Mystique.

I had seen and enjoyed the first two movies, X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, but this time around was my first watch of X-Men: Apocalypse, widely regarded as a disaster. It was interesting to compare the prequel trilogy with the original three movies; on the whole, I think they were better, but they definitely have some of the same bad habits as the originals, especially the second two, which were directed by a returning Brian Singer. First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman, did copy some of those bad habits, but I noticed them less in that movie, and it also set up the really strong relationships between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique that carry through the entire prequel trilogy and provide most of the emotional core.

X-Men: First Class

This was my favorite of the three movies and definitely better than any other mainline X-Men movie. I’m even putting it above X2. It’s close, but First Class has brighter, more vibrant visuals and a sense of fun. It plays around with its 1962 setting, using the history, the visual appearance, and the music to subtly place itself in that time without getting too cheesy. The story conceit that mutants were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis is the best kind of comic book alternate history; it effectively establishes the stakes for the final battle and makes sense within the world.

First Class also had my favorite character writing of the prequel trilogy. It does a great job setting up the relationships between Mystique, Xavier, and Magneto, making us understand where they’re coming from and why they do what they do. Nicholas Hoult’s Beast was also great, and the subplot between him and Mystique was so well executed. Mystique is tired of having to hide who she is, her natural blue form and her identity as a mutant, behind a fake beautiful Jennifer Lawrence face. She yearns to be herself all the time and for people to find her natural form as beautiful as they do her Jennifer Lawrence form. When she meets Beast and sees his weird feet, she thinks at first that she’s found someone who will understand her and accept her, but she finds out that unlike her, Beast is ashamed of his physical appearance and wants to hide or change it. Magneto is the first person she’s ever met who encourages her to be her blue self all the time, and she’s drawn to him for that reason, even though she still loves Charles as a brother, and part of her seems to know Magneto is bad news. The friendship between Xavier and Magneto feels organic and real, but you can also see how their upbringings made them into very different people, and gave them both good traits and bad traits. Xavier’s childhood as part of a rich family made him kind, trusting, willing to see the good in people, but also sometimes naive and overly trusting. Magneto’s time in a Nazi concentration camp and the trauma he suffered there gave him a strong will to survive and a keen sense of justice, but also made him hard and ruthless, quick to blame and slow to forgive. Charles can see the good in him, and always tries to guide him towards his better nature, but sometimes he succumbs to his demons, and there are times where he’s right and Charles is just too naive to see it. My one complaint about the Xavier / Magneto dynamic, which we see a lot more in the next two movies than in First Class, is that since the movies are still popcorn blockbusters, they often vindicate Charles too easily, and don’t focus enough on the times when Magneto was right and Charles should have listened to him.

I’ve seen a few complaints online that the movies blow Mystique’s part way out of proportion to her importance in the comics and introduce a lot of changes in her character, like being Charles’s adoptive sister, but it really didn’t bother me. The writers saw an interesting story they could tell with this character, so they told it, even though it meant changing things from the comics. At their best, I think that’s what a movie adaptation should do. The comics aren’t constant about stuff like this anyway; when Emma Frost was introduced, she was a minor villain whose purpose was mostly T&A. As time when on, she became a much more developed character who was sometimes good and sometimes not.

Speaking of Emma Frost, the villain in this movie is the Hellfire Club, and Emma Frost is in it. The actress who plays her looks the part, but doesn’t do a great job delivering lines. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, though, is a pretty good villain. He’s not a lot like his comics counterpart, which is a bit of waste since the Hellfire Club could make great villains in the current zeitgeist. (They’re a bunch of ultra rich guys who think ultra rich guys don’t get enough appreciation in the modern world and want to return to an earlier time when ultra rich guys were more appreciated. It’s like they were made to be villains in 2018.) But Bacon gives a suitably villainous performance and definitely comes off as a real threat to the heroes.

The other bad parts of this movie: there are some weird looking effects, and the younger mutants don’t get a ton of development. The original trilogy was guilty of that as well: it would introduce characters and then take no time to develop them at all. Havok gets a little bit of development, but the rest are pretty blank. I also don’t think there was any reason to make the CIA agent Moira MacTaggert. She’s nothing at all like her comics counterpart, so it didn’t add any depth to the story; it was an “in name only” version of her. These are all minor complaints, though.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Brian Singer came back for this one, the only time I can think of when a comic book movie used the same kind of convoluted timeline reboot that the comics themselves use all the time. We see a horrific dystopian future where mutants have been hunted to extinction in a holocaust, and then, like the comics story of the same name, someone’s consciousness gets sent back in time to change the future and prevent it from coming to pass. In the comics, Rachael Summers sent Kitty Pryde into the past; in this movie, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine into the past, because Brian Singer doesn’t know how to make an X-Men movie where Wolverine isn’t the main character. (Though it turns out to be kind of a bait and switch here; Wolverine actually has a fairly minor role, and the main story is propelled by the young versions of Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique.)

I liked this movie a lot, but it’s not as good as First Class. For one thing, they timeskip ahead eleven years, from 1962 to 1973, but no one looks eleven years older than they were in First Class. It starts throwing in pointless little callbacks to the previous movies, like the presence of Stryker; in this movie they’re just little things, but they develop into problems in Apocalypse. Every character from First Class except for Xavier, Beast, Mystique, Magneto, and Havok is killed offscreen. It continues to pretend like this timeline will somehow lead to the timeline of the original movies, even though there are a lot of details that don’t connect. The biggest one is Mystique. In the original movies, she was just a sexpot spy who spent her free time fawning over Magneto. There was no indication that she knew Charles. In the prequel movies, her relationship with Magneto is much more complicated and Charles is probably the most important person in the world to her, despite their disagreements. Speaking of which, I thought Rebecca Romijn was better at playing that sexpot spy version of Mystique; when Jennifer Lawrence tries to do it in this movie, it’s somehow unconvincing. Jennifer Lawrence is great as the younger, more conflicted, wounded Mystique that we saw in First Class and see in a good portion of this movie. This movie also contains the only time in the series where Xavier admits that Magneto was right: in the dystopian future, with Patrick Stewart Xavier and Ian McKellen Magneto. Of course, the movie goes on to still vindicate Charles when the government kills off the Sentinel program after Mystique saves Richard Nixon (which is morally problematic in other ways, but whatever, the characters had no way of knowing that).

There’s still a lot to like about this movie, though. Xavier and Mystique both have great character arcs. The 70’s setting is used just as well as the 60’s setting of First Class: it infuses a bit of style and helps get us grounded in the time period, without being obnoxious. The Quicksilver scene is awesome. Bolivar Trask is a surprisingly good villain. He has kind of an Ozymandias thing where he thinks that uniting humanity against mutants will end war and suffering in the world, and him being a little person adds an interesting dimension to his belief that it’s all right to persecute a minority group for the greater good. The action scenes in the dystopian future are great; they have a scale and intensity that we never got in any of the previous movies, where the heroes weren’t allowed to kill anything and there were always civilians and property around to be careful of.

Also, it erases The Last Stand from the timeline. So that’s good. When I saw this the first time, it had been so long since I saw The Last Stand that I didn’t really think about how its ending would have led into the dystopian mutant holocaust future, but now it’s pretty obvious how it happened. Magneto attacking Alcatraz and causing a giant battle between mutants and the army seems like a pretty obvious trigger for that sort of thing. It still doesn’t jive with how the 1973 timeline led into The Last Stand, though. For one thing, Mystique is still alive and running around menacing humanity in The Last Stand, whereas in Days of Future Past they tell us that in the timeline which led to the mutant holocaust, Mystique was captured and experimented on to create the morphing Sentinels. After watching this and even more so after Apocalypse, I pretty much decided that this trilogy was a reboot, not a prequel trilogy. It just incidentally ends with Patrick Stewart playing Xavier and Ian McKellen playing Magneto. I don’t think we can assume the original three movies as we saw them happened at all in this timeline, though we do know that Logan still had to kill Jean for some reason since Xavier sees the scenes from The Last Stand in his mind.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Definitely the worst of the three reboot movies, but I enjoyed it more than The Last Stand, though it shares that movie’s main issue: it’s crazily overstuffed. There are some good ideas and a lot of good actors here, but there’s so much material to cover that even if they’d focused, they never would have been able to do it all well, and the movie distracts itself with all kinds of pointless fandering that doesn’t advance the main story.

Here is a list of all the new characters that are introduced to the reboot timeline in this movie: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Angel, Storm, Psylocke, Jubilee, and Apocalypse. That’s eight major characters, each of which has a backstory and needs screentime to be developed. They also have to share the movie with Xavier, Magneto, Mystique, and Quicksilver, as well as Moira MacTaggert, William Stryker, and Wolverine, who shows up during a pointless middle section that tries to establish why he’s in love with Jean. I’m amazed at how well the movie actually does balancing all these characters, but it’s still not good enough; while we do get enough of all of them to get some sense of what they’re like, we don’t hear about anyone’s history in any depth and none of them gets a real character arc in this movie. In fact, the only characters I’d say do kind of get arcs in this movie are Magneto, who realizes by the end that he actually does care for Xavier, and Mystique, who realizes she could do some good with her newfound fame and help teach younger mutants what she wishes someone would have taught her when she was young. No one else develops. There just isn’t enough time, with all these new characters.

There are also way too many subplots going on in this movie. Magneto, who has escaped after his attempt to kill Richard Nixon and gone into hiding, is working at a foundry in his native Poland and has a wife and daughter whom he loves. They exist only to get killed, when a group of scared police officers accidentally fire a bow at them somehow. (It seems pretty hard to accidentally discharge a bow the way the guy does in the movie. Like, he has the string pulled back and then somehow accidentally releases it. It’s not like a gun where your finger can slip or whatever; it takes a lot of strength to hold a bowstring pulled back. You will be aware that you’re doing it.) Apocalypse, an ancient Egyptian mutant played by a squandered Oscar Isaac, is gathering his Four Horsemen, launching nukes into space, and creating pyramids for some reason. Scott and Jean are meeting for the first time and hanging out with Nightcrawler and Jubilee. Quicksilver is trying to tell Magneto that he’s his son. As I mentioned, there’s an entirely pointless scene in the middle where Stryker captures Mystique, Beast, and Quicksilver and locks them up for no reason, so Scott, Jean, and Nightcrawler have to come rescue them and free Wolverine in the process. The movie is two and a half hours long, just like the Marvel movies, and there still isn’t enough time to cover everything satisfactorily, because there’s enough material here for three movies.

Apocalypse skips ahead to 1983, and at this point the timeskips just become ridiculous. Nobody who was in First Class looks over twenty years older than they did in that movie. Havok, especially, was young and should have aged a lot, but he didn’t. Quicksilver too; not only did he not age, he’s still living in his mom’s basement after 10 years. (They lamely cover this by having him say “Yep, I still live in my mom’s basement. I’m a loser.” at one point.) I also don’t understand why they didn’t just make Xavier bald in this movie and imply that he lost his hair naturally. It would have made him look older, and it would have let them have a comics-accurate bald Xavier without the pointless fan-pandering scene at the end where a psychic struggle against Apocalypse somehow makes him bald.

Unlike The Last Stand, though, there are some good ideas here. I like the idea of Magneto trying to live a quiet life and find peace with a family. But that’s too big a change from what we saw last time to be covered in ten minutes of a movie with four other plots going on. I like Mystique’s character arc, where she realizes she can do some good by embracing her fame and the admiration young mutants feel for her. I like the idea of Magneto realizing he cares about Charles too much to directly attack him, even if they’ll never see eye to eye on other things. I like a lot of the actors: Alexandra Shipp is a good Storm, much better than Halle Berry, and Kodi Smit-McPhee is a great young Nightcrawler. Sophie Turner (a.k.a. Sansa Stark) is a decent young Jean Grey. Tye Sheridan is okay but not very exciting as Cyclops. I also don’t like how they wrote Cyclops. He does at least have a personality this time, but it’s almost the exact opposite of his comics counterpart—he’s rebellious and sneers at authority, instead of being upstanding and authoritative himself.

Funnily enough, I think X-Men: Apocalypse would have worked better if they’d cut out Apocalypse. His story was the second most pointless after the Stryker scene, and took up a lot of time. The whole movie probably would have worked better if Magneto were just the villain again, and only the young X-Men subplot, Mystique subplot, and Magneto subplot were covered. Mystique could have just recruited Storm to the young X-Men team, or Charles could have like he does in the comics. With how many characters there are, a smaller, more character-centered story would have been a better fit than the overly ambitious attempt at a giant, world-ending battle that we get.

Still, Apocalypse did have some aspects I liked a lot, and compared to The Last Stand there was nowhere near as much stuff that just felt stupid (“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch”, “I don’t respond to my slave name”, stuff like that). The main one is the scene where the young X-Men walk out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it is; fricking nobody in 1983 was walking out of Return of the Jedi complaining about how bad it was. (Okay, someone probably was, but not four random teenagers. I don’t buy it.) So it’s my second least-favorite of the six main series movies, but it’s a lot closer to X-Men for me than it is to The Last Stand, despite the similar problems it has.

Conclusion

I liked the reboot trilogy a lot more than the originals. They had fun, color, music, comics-accurate costumes (except in Apocalypse when their costumes were just random flight suits they picked up at a military base, that was dumb). They had great actors (to be fair, so did the originals) and great character writing. They actually tried to focus on characters other than Wolverine. I’m still slowly working my way through the Claremont run of Uncanny X-Men comics, and these reboot movies did a pretty good job capturing the spirit of those comics. There’s fun and color and weirdness and jokes, but there’s also a serious core to it, with more complex themes than you’d typically see from characters like Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four.

It does concern me a little that they’re already trying to redo the Dark Phoenix story from the comics in the next movie. A huge part of that story’s power came from years of following the ups and downs of Jean Grey’s life, ever since Uncanny X-Men #1 in the 60’s. We barely know Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey yet; she got the most development of the young X-Men in Apocalypse, but it still wasn’t a lot. I don’t understand why movie studios develop these fixations on specific comics storylines. Yes, the Dark Phoenix saga was great, but it’s not the only good X-Men story ever told, and the other stories that came before it provided much needed buildup that helped make it so good. Let’s see a movie about Proteus. Let’s see a movie about Genosha. Even if an exact adaptation requires too much continuity to work as a movie, it’s still possible to take elements of these stories and make them into something that works for a movie. It’s the same with The Killing Joke, and The Dark Knight Returns, and Year One: those are all good stories, but they’re not the only Batman stories ever told, and the other stories provided buildup that made them as good as they were.