Selections from my Anime Playlist

I love anime music.

I know it’s not good, strictly speaking. Most anime songs have very similar structure. They always have this 2 minute and 30 second bit in the middle that constitutes a complete song on its own and makes the rest of the song feel like unnecessary padding. The beats and rhythms and melodies and all that other musical stuff that I don’t understand that well usually sound pretty similar to the rest of the anime songs that came out that year. The lyrics are about yearning, probably unrequited teenage love, expressed with weird, vague metaphors that sometimes don’t make a lick of sense and include English words for no reason. The vocalists are often pretty bad. Sometimes they’re so bad you can hear how bad they are in the song itself, like the lead singer of can/goo in “Oshiete Ageru”, the opening of Doki Doki School Hours. Other times they can be made good enough with Autotune that you can’t hear it unless you download a concert recording someone made from a live show and hear how awful they are, as I experienced with the lead singer of L’Arc en Ciel and “Ready Steady Go”, the first opening of Full Metal Alchemist 2003. I acknowledge all of these things.

Yet still, I love anime music.

I’ve been listening to anime music since 1999, so I’ve got a lot of it, from a lot of different shows across a lot of years. My affection for the song often has little or no relation to my affection for the show itself. There are songs I love from shows I hated. There are songs I hate from shows I loved. My two most hated anime songs are “Haru no Mukou” from Hanasaku Iroha and “Sexy Sexy” from Gakkou no Kaidan, but at the time I loved Hanasaku Iroha, and I hated “Sexy Sexy” long before I ever saw Gakkou no Kaidan (in trolldub form as Ghost Stories, courtesy of ADV). This list will be a look at some of the most notable songs I still carry along on my playlist into every new phone, tablet, and MP3 player (yes, I still use those) that I acquire, and the shows they came from, and what I remember about that show, or don’t, as the case may be.

“It’s My Style”, Rikujou Bouei-tai Mao-chan

A bouncy, energetic song sung by Yui Horie, who is quite possibly my favorite anime voice actor / singer of all time, and was even before I knew that she voiced Tsubasa Hanekawa. This was the first ending song from Rikujou Bouei-tai Mao-chan. I never actually watched this show, though the trailer did show up on a lot of DVDs I used to own. It was about little girls who fought aliens with magical tanks and submarines and planes. The trailer reminded me a lot of The Centurions, a Saturday morning cartoon I used to watch about these three beefy military guys, each of whom represented one of land, sea, and air, and each of whom had a special combat suit for doing battle in his chosen niche, except with cute elementary school girls designed by Ken Akamatsu instead of beefy military guys.

I’m pretty sure no one remembers this show. That will become sort of a theme as we go down this list. Yet, for me, the song transcended. It’s just so peppy and happy, and I love the lyrics that innocently assert the singer’s energetic dedication to being herself, with lines like Akiramenai! Furimukanai! Sore ga watashi no sutairu. (“I don’t give up! I don’t look back! That’s my style.”) Even though that’s not my style at all, it’s so fun to belt out those lyrics after a hard day when I feel like the world has denied my own style.

“Kuchuu Meiro” and “Anemone”, Kamichama Karin

I love Marble. Even though they’re a fake anime band that only ever released anime OPs and EDs, putting their existential status only slightly above Houkago Teatime, I don’t care. I’d still put them up there with any real band that actually exists. Their sound is very pop-folk inspired, with lots of acoustic guitar and sections where the vocals are allowed to stand largely alone. Their songs have a peculiarly spiritual enchanting nature. Probably the only way I can describe them would be Regina Spektor crossed with church choir crossed with anime song.

Marble will definitely appear again on this list, but for now let’s talk about Kamichama Karin. I never watched this show, but I did read a few volumes of the manga, which was Koge-Donbo’s followup to Pita-Ten about a girl named Karin who gains the powers of the goddess Athena and fights alongside and against other teenagers who have the powers of various other Greek gods. It’s very magical girl-flavored, though it also has some of the feel of superpowered hero team stuff from the 90’s, like Gatekeepers. Koge-Donbo was always a strong artist, and she had her flaws as a writer, but she knew how to make you feel for characters, usually by killing off their parents. I’m surprised she didn’t remain popular through the moe boom in the early 2010’s. Her adorable art style, her talent for affecting drama, and her tendency to introduce dark elements into cute cotton candy worlds all would have fit right in.

With this series I made a mistake I used to sometimes make with manga, which was picking up the second volume first because that was the only one at the bookstore. Whenever I read the second volume of something first, I could follow the story since it was still pretty early on, but I didn’t care that much about the characters or anything that was going on. I used to attribute that to a failing on the manga’s part, but really, it was because manga and anime tend to do a lot of emotional heavy lifting in the early parts of the story, and with that backstory established, while they might allude to it in the future, they usually never again put as much effort into making you really feel it. I made the same mistake with Pita-Ten, where it just happened to be less fatal because the backstory was more drawn out.

“Anemone” was the first ending theme, and “Kuuchuu Meiro” was the second. I love both of them and consistently put them on the first playlist I load onto any new device. “Anemone” was sung by Mai Nakahara, who voiced Karin in the anime, but there was also a version by Marble. Both are amazing; the Marble version has the trademark Marble sound and feel to it, while the Mai Nakahara version is more innocent and sweet. “Kuuchuu Meiro” was done by Marble in the show. As much as I like it, it now comes off as a bit too slow and belabored. I listened to a sped-up nightcore version on Youtube that made the song almost perfect.

“Rainbow”, “Euphoria”, “Natsumachi”, and “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” from the Aria saga

Aria is still a very good series despite having some flaws, and its music is the one aspect I find beyond reproach.

The four songs are very similar, but “Rainbow” is cuter and bubblier while “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” is more transcendent, with its church bells and slightly hushed vocals. But “Natsumachi” is my favorite; I’ve more than once thought that “Natsumachi” might be my favorite anime song ever. Both “Rainbow” and “Natsumachi” were done by Round Table feat. Nino, another fake anime-world band that I love despite their tenuous claim to even being a real band, probably best known for their work on Chobits. “Euphoria” is sung by Yui Makino, who does all the Aria openings and also voiced Misaki in Welcome to the NHK! and Sakura in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. “Kin no Nami, Sen no Nami” is sung by Akino Arai, who, contrary to most anime musicians, has had a pretty long career; she’s apparently been working since 1986 and happens to have sung both endings to Outlaw Star, which was one of the first anime I ever saw.

So what about the other Aria songs? All of them are good, but these four are the ones I’ll always put on a new playlist. “Undine” is a bit too slow and not as compelling for me as “Euphoria”, and “Spirale” is very similar to “Undine”. “Smile Again” is a cute song, but it doesn’t feel uniquely Ariadic to me; it would fit just as well as the ending to something like Masshiro-iro Symphony.

“Suisai Candy”, Masshiro-iro Symphony

Speaking of Masshiro-iro Symphony, its actual ending song, “Suisai Candy”, is another great song by Marble. Soon you will come to understand Marble as I do, and their total domination of this list will become clear. Or not. Maybe they’re just not for you. That’s fine too.

Either way, “Suisai Candy” is a great song: fun, sweet, and all things a Marble song should be, though it’s a little too electronic in sound to reach top-tier Marble for me. Masshiro-iro Symphony is a show I watched about six episodes of. It was adapted from a visual novel if I’m not mistaken. It wasn’t terrible, but like a lot of anime, it failed to capitalize on its concept, which was that a failing coed school was absorbed by an elite girls academy, which meant there would now be boys there, and some of the girls are very opposed to this, including the ostensible main heroine. (I seem to remember that when I stopped watching it was starting to pull a weird diversion into one of the side girls’s route.) But she gives in way too quickly, and it stops being a real problem or source of any conflict. Also, I seem to remember Ange, the maid, was a poor orphan or something like that who was forced to work as a maid for the other students to pay her way into the school, and no one sees anything wrong with this, which isn’t something I was on board with even at the time.

“Masshiro World”, Mikakunin de Shinkoukei

And speaking of things that start with masshiro, this is another song that I love for how fun and bouncy it is. I only watched the first episode of Mikakunin de Shinkoukei and I was not won over, however. The show is a shounen love comedy about a guy who finds out his grandfather made a marriage arrangement with a girl he’s never met when she moves in with him one day to figure out what’s the deal with this guy she’s engaged to but has never met. (Or maybe it was the other way around, the guy moving in with the girl; I can’t recall as I watched the episode over three years ago.)

“Motto Motto Radical Fight”, Dennou Sentai Voogie’s Angel

This is a blast from the past: the opening to a little-known OVA that came out in 1997. Like almost every 90’s anime I can think of, Dennou Sentai Voogie’s Angel is about a team of scantily clad cyborg women fighting an alien menace in the future. I never watched this show, but I discovered its opening theme thanks to a site called AnimeArt that used to exist in the early 2000s, and hosted grainy videos of the opening and ending for almost every anime out at the time, which you could watch in RealPlayer after they buffered for an hour and a half. The tune stuck with me enough that many, many years later, I found myself humming it one day and decided to go hunt down the full song. I cannot recall what little-seen corner of the internet I finally found it in, but in the end I found it.

It’s still a good song, even though it’s quite obviously from a 90’s anime and the title is the sort of half-English pseudorandom quasi-nonsense that was even more common in anime music in the 90’s. It’s sung by the main voice cast of the show, which includes some of the most beloved voice actresses of all time, such as Kikuko Inoue (of Oh My Goddess and Ranma 1/2), Sakura Tange (of Card Captor Sakura), Aya Hisakawa (also of Oh My Goddess and Card Captor Sakura as well as Azumanga Daioh), and Kotono Mitsuishi (of Sailor Moon and Evangelion).

“Apron Dake wa Toranaide!” and “Love Song Kamo Shirenai”, Koharubiyori

Koharubiyori is a terrible show and utter trash overflowing with smut, but at the time I watched it (sometime in 2010 I want to say), I had fun with it. It’s beautiful and very smoothly animated trash, at least. It was pretty much the seven thousandth robot maid anime to come out in 2007 and it was quite obvious that, after the first half of Episode 1, in which the main character goes shopping for his new robot maid friend Yui, they just took Mahoromatic, chucked out all the story, and weaved together the nudie shots with over the top wacky comedy.

When I think back on this now, it’s quite clear that Yui is going to become the leader of a robot rebellion in the near future. Kuon’s story did get to me a little, though. In a better show, they could have gone somewhere with that. But at the time it was still a fun ecchi comedy that I laughed at quite a few times despite how shameless, sleazy, smutty, and terrible it is.

“Apron Dake wa Toranaide!” is another fun, bouncy song that gets in some little elegant touches, like the ringing bells it uses to punctuate the ends of some lines. The lyrics are about the main character trying to strip Yui and dress her up in clothes she doesn’t like and she’s yelling back “Don’t take away my apron!”, so it’s not exactly nice, but it’s in Japanese so I can ignore it. “Love Song Kamo Shirenai” is a sweet pop love song (the title means “It might be a Love Song”, and yes, title, it is a love song) that has nothing to do with any feelings which are felt in the actual show. Both songs have vocals by Eri Kitamura, who voices Yui, alongside Satomi Akesaka, who voices some character that I cannot for the life of me remember being in the show even after looking her up for “Love Song Kamo Shirenai”.

“Afurete Yuku no wa Kono Kimochi”, Amaenaideyo!

Known in the US as Oh My Buddha, Amaenaideyo! is a formulaic harem anime in which all the girls are low-level clergy for various religions. I only remember a miko and a Buddhist nun, but there was probably a Catholic nun in there somewhere, given anime’s affection for them. I watched the first three or so episodes on DVD back when Netflix sent people DVDs. (Actually they still do that if you really want them to.) It was not good. “Afurete Yuku no wa Kono Kimochi”, on the other hand, is an adorable, relaxing, peaceful song that I’ve been listening to since before I even knew it was from a show called Amaenaideyo!, and have continued listening to long after I’ve forgotten the names of every single character in the show.

“Zutto Be With You” and “Yotte S.O.S.”, Haiyore! Nyaruko-san

Haiyore! Nyaruko-san is a pretty weird show, and if you told me it didn’t really exist and was just a parody of moe anime at the peak of the moe boom when it came out in 2012, I would probably believe you. Except that I’ve seen it; I watched about eight episodes of the first season on Crunchyroll in probably 2013 or so.

Even though I laughed at a lot of the references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the show makes the weird choice of reinterpreting all the horrifying creatures as members of pretty standard alien species that exist in some galactic alliance. (And then of course reinterprets them as cute anime girls and one cute anime boy who end up living with a hapless Earthling teenager.) That was a big mistake in my opinion. I actually think the concept of Lovecraftian monsters as moe girls had a lot of potential to be a weird, risky, hilarious show, full of black humor, bizarre situations, and clever references to Lovecraft’s stories. There’s a ton of dark humor to be had with the Lovecraftian idea that human existence is insignificant and inconsequential to the creatures, for instance. What if another girl has a crush on Mahiro, and instead of trying to defeat her in a pie-baking contest or some other harem anime nonsense, Nyaruko just transforms into some sort of inconceivable horror and drives the other girl mad, and a running joke has this other girl wandering through the background of scenes in a daze with drool all over her face? Or if they were willing to get risque, what about inverting the usual tentacle scenario and having Nyaruko or Hastur go after Mahiro with slimy space suckers? Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid was a harem show that derived black comedy from its characters being powerful creatures with a certain disregard for human life, and it worked, so the right writers could have done the same with Nyaruko-san.

Instead it’s mostly weaksauce otaku-oriented parody of the kind that was just barely groundbreaking in 2004 when Genshiken was coming out, layered over weaksauce sci-fi of the kind that was just barely groundbreaking in 1969 when the original Star Trek came out, layered over a few references to the Cthulhu mythos. At least a few good songs came out of it. Both “Zutto Be With You” and “Yotte S.O.S.” are sweet, bubbly pop songs sung by the main cast of the show, which included Kana Asumi as Nyaruko, Miyu Matsuki as Cthuko, and Rie Kugimiya as Hasuta.

“Ice Cream”, Narue no Sekai

_Narue no Sekai is another one for which I only read the manga. Side note, the rise in manga publishing in the US in the early 2000’s was huge for me as a fan. Anime used to be insanely expensive. When I first got into it in the late 90’s, the only way to watch Evangelion was to buy the VHS tapes. Each one had two episodes and cost about $30, and you had to choose between subtitled or dubbed. That means to get the entire series would run you about $390. You also had to hunt up a Suncoast location that had them in stock at all. You could usually find the second and third entries from any given series, but the first one was always sold out and it was a total crapshoot whether they even carried the later ones. Also I was a kid and had no money, so I had to do enough chores around the house to get $30, then convince my parents to drive me to Suncoast. That meant I didn’t get a lot of anime. The only other way to watch anime at the time was on TV, so it was always dubbed, always edited for content by whatever arbitrary standards the network had, often localized to some extent, and even though the selection back then was actually broader in some ways than it later became (I can’t see modern Cartoon Network broadcasting anything like Tenchi Muyo, for instance), it was still a far cry from the full broadness of anime.

Manga in the 90’s was usually published by US comic publishers—Dark Horse did a lot of them—and they were always flipped to read left to right, and the selection of titles was very limited. When manga publishing got big under Tokyopop in the early 2000’s, it was a huge deal. I could take my $30 to Barnes and Noble and buy three volumes of manga for the price of one DVD. (By this time they had DVDs, which were still $30 each, but at least they had four or five episodes and both the sub and dub.) That meant I could cast a much wider net, and try a lot more manga than I would have been able to do with anime. As a consequence, I read some weird, bad stuff. Barnes and Noble was also much better at stocking manga and keeping them in stock than Suncoast was with DVDs and VHS tapes. You’d still sometimes come in and find the first volume was sold out, but it was less common, and you could usually come back in a few weeks and find it, and Barnes and Noble always had the entire series and would get new volumes as soon as they released.

Anyway, I went on that side trip because I don’t have a lot to say about Narue no Sekai. It was an achingly generic magical girlfriend story about a generic high school boy whose name starts with k, like they all do for some reason, and his bland girlfriend whose father is an alien but that still doesn’t make her interesting. It was inoffensive, but also completely unmemorable. I’m sure it would have evaporated from my mind if not for this song, which I’ve loved since well before I read the manga. The song is also pretty generic for the genre and time period, but at least it’s cute. The opening, “Nagareboshi” by CooRie, was also pretty good.

“Houseki”, Umi Monogatari

You might be asking why I only listed this song and not “Renai Circulation” or “Staple Stable” or any of those. Well, that’s because Umi Monogatari is not part of the Monogatari series, its title just happens to share the same pattern. All those songs from that other series that ends in “Monogatari” will have their time.

“Houseki” is the ending to the OVA sequel to the original Umi Monogatari, and it’s another victory for Marble on this list. As for the show itself, I’ve never seen it, but it sounds like a mermaid story, though the characters don’t actually have mermaid tails. It’s also a bit like Nagi no Asu Kara. Nozomi released it in the US recently and I believe it’s on Crunchyroll.

“Nijiiro Sentimental” and “Kokoro Niji wo Kakete”, Gift: Eternal Rainbow

Gift: Eternal Rainbow is another show adapted from a visual novel. Coming out in 2006, it fell into that time period where nobody in the West was interested in visual novel adaptations because they usually didn’t have heavy enough harem elements to fit in with what was popular at the time. It was definitely an age of wacky harem comedies. Since it never came out stateside, I never watched it, but I’ve consistently enjoyed both its opening, “Nijiiro Sentimental”, and its ending, “Kokoro Niji wo Kakete”, even though they both sound almost like the blueprint for songs in anime based on romance visual novels that came out between 2005 and 2015. The show itself also sounds like a blueprint for anime based on romance visual novels, so I don’t know if I would ever watch it even if it did come out.

“Mebae Drive”, “Sakura Sakura Saku”, “Ryuusei Record”, and “Atarashii Sekai”, Hidamari Sketch series

Marble has already appeared on this list several times, but this is the mother lode of Marble, where all the stuff I consider S-rank and top tier comes in. If you forced me to order them, I would probably say “Ryuusei Record” is the best, then “Atarashii Sekai”, “Sakura Sakura Saku”, and then “Mebae Drive” as the bottom of S-rank, but these represent not only my favorite of the vast body of Hidamari Sketch-related music, but also some of my favorite anime songs of all time, so that ranking is really just unnecessary nitpicking.

Hidamari Sketch for some reason has a ton of music linked to it. Not only were there openings and endings for all four seasons of the anime (Hidamari Sketch, Hidamari Sketch x 365, Hidamari Sketch x Hoshimittsu, and Hidamari Sketch x Honeycomb), there were also songs for OVA specials, multiple image songs for each character, and Marble did at least two compilation CDs that I could find, Hidamarble and Hidamarble x Hoshimittsu, where they covered the image songs and did remixes of some of the openings and endings. While the openings and character songs sung by the anime voice actresses are decent, the Marble stuff is where all the real gems are to be found in my opinion. The ending songs they did are all brilliant. The B-sides from the singles, like “Rin” from the Mebae Drive single, “Humming Bird” from the Ryuusei Record one, and “Dorari” from the Sakura Sakura Saku single, are all great. The extra character songs they did on the Hidamarble albums are also amazing. I especially like “Happy Eating Fight” and “Yurufuwa” from Hidamarble x Hoshimittsu. More than once, I’ve started a new playlist by seeding it with just Hidamari Sketch and Monogatari series-related music, because I get a long list of almost nothing but great songs without having to sift much.

As for Hidamari Sketch itself, I’ve never seen the anime. I have read a decent amount of the manga, and it’s okay. I’d call it mid-tier cute girls doing cute things; I’ve never found it to have the raw charm and adorability of K-On! or Kiniro Mosaic, and it doesn’t take advantage of its characters being art students the way GA does, nor is it as funny as Yuru Yuri or as shamelessly pandering as Lucky Star. It’s entirely possible that I would enjoy it more if I read it again. It’s also entirely possible that the anime was better; while the K-On! manga was decent, I found the anime version by far more memorable and more fun. The great KyoAni animation and being able to hear the songs made a huge difference. The Hidamari Sketch anime was by Shaft, who always bring something unique to their shows, at least visually. They must have had a good experience making this anime since they would later bring on Hidamari Sketch author Ume Aoki to do character designs for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, making her one of the four Magica Quartet members.

Speaking of Kiniro Mosaic…

“Jumping”, Kiniro Mosaic

Cute girls doing cute things anime have a ton of great music. Lucky Star’s “Motteke! Sailor fuku!” is distinct and instantly recognizable. No show but K-On! would open with the pop-rock-Aki Toyosaki muppet voice stylings of “Cagayake Girls!”, “Go Go Maniac!” or “Utau yo! Miracle”. But there’s only one song that sums up the entire experience of watching a cute girls doing cute things anime into a single track, and that song is “Jumping”, the opening theme of Kiniro Mosaic.

Everything about it is so of the genre. The vocals, with the five main voice actresses singing all together, in pairs, and individually, just like the structure of a cute girls doing cute things anime where we focus on the entire group, on individual girls, and on pairs of girls interacting. The energetic beat of it, like the youthful, fun aura we love to see from a cute girls doing cute things anime. The lyrics, which are all about having fun and enjoying life. Yet unlike some energetic, fun anime songs, it’s not relentless or obnoxious. It doesn’t assault you with nonstop energy; it has its restful moments. It doesn’t meld all the vocals into an amorphous ball of noise; it lets you hear the different qualities of everyone’s voices. A good cute girls doing cute things show also needs to be like this: it needs to be energetic, fun, enjoyable, but also allow moments of rest, and it needs to show off the individual characters of each girl and the way the group and the members get along.

Although I really like the Kiniro Mosaic manga, I almost feel like the song encapsulates what a perfect cute girls doing cute things anime should be more than the manga itself does. The characters are all adorable and lovable, and they all have their quirks, but I’ve never felt like they’re quite as well defined as, say, the characters in K-On!, and there are some pairings among the main characters that haven’t been explored very well. But they’re charming and cute, with a nice rapport among them. Some of the humor even has the tiniest bit of edge to it, like the jokes about the Japanese obsession with blond hair, or Karen’s rich beautiful mother telling her that her best plan for the future is to marry rich.

“Shiawase no Niji”, Gakuen Alice

I was really into shoujo for a while, but surprisingly few of those series lasted in my mind, even ones that I enjoyed a lot at the time. One of the ones that did was Gakuen Alice. I read a bit of the manga first, then later watched the anime, which apparently goes in a much different direction towards the middle and end than the manga did. It starts out as a fun schoolyard story about a girl named Mikan who ends up at a school for children with powers and finds out she also has a power, the power to nullify everyone else’s powers. The early parts of the story have her deal with bullying and the unfair caste system imposed on the students of the academy, as well as getting to know angsty boy Natsume Hyuuga, who has the power to shoot fire. Later on, the anime becomes more of an action-adventure series and starts to go into the dark undercurrent behind the academy (though it was portrayed as a pretty savage place from the beginning).

“Shiawase no Niji” is the peaceful ending song of the anime. The animation shows Mikan and her best friend Hotaru walking through a rainy day in adorable watercolor art style. It’s more low-key than a lot of this list, and it’s not one of those songs I’ll go hunt down in my list to put on, but it’s great for relaxing. The opening, “Pika-Pika no Taiyou”, is also pretty good, but it’s one of those songs that I can listen to about once a year, think “That was better than I remembered”, and then forget about until next year, so it’s not something I usually reach straight for when I’m putting together a playlist.

“Platinum” and “Fruits Candy”, Card Captor Sakura

Of the songs on this list, few have been with me as long as “Platinum” and “Fruits Candy”. “It’s My Style”, “Motto Motto Radical Fight”, and “Ice Cream” are the closest. When I was waiting an hour for grainy footage of “Motto Motto Radical Fight” to buffer in RealPlayer from AnimeArt, it was probably just after doing the same for “Platinum” or “Fruits Candy”.

By the same token, few anime have been with me as long as Card Captor Sakura. I watched it in the late 90’s when 4Kids hacked it apart and made it into “Card Captors” on the Kids WB network. Later, I watched a few episodes of the unhacked version on DVD when it was released by Geneon. Even later, I rented the Geneon DVDs from Netflix up through about Episode 50, and even later, I read the manga when Dark Horse released it. (There was also a Tokyopop release of the manga, but I only ever caught a few random volumes of that when they showed up in the library.) Most of the other anime that I got into around the same time—Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo—I’ve lost interest in for the most part. Only Evangelion has been with me as long, and although I have more fond memories associated with Evangelion, and although Evangelion has held up extremely well, I can’t say I’m quite as attached to it as I am to Card Captor Sakura. For my money, it’s just about the most perfect magical girl show ever made. Sailor Moon is more classic, and newer shows like Madoka have deeper storytelling, but Card Captor Sakura pulled off a perfect balance: it’s a great magical girl show with fun adventures, cute costumes, and exciting battles, but its sly little twists on the formula help it feel fresh, and its characters are so likeable and gel together so well that even episodes with unpromising premises become enjoyable to watch.

There’s now also a sequel called Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card about the characters in junior high. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet but I’m hoping it’s about old gritty Sakura in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo after the future apocalypse prophesied in X, returning to capture cards once again after the deaths of Tomoyo, Touya, and Fujitaka force her out of retirement. Just kidding, that would be the worst thing ever. And also Sakura discovers halfway through the series that she died in the apocalypse with her friends but Kero transferred her soul into a Persocom and she’s secretly been a machine this whole time. Okay, that would be the worst thing ever.

These two are my favorite songs among the many, many songs that came out of the series, most of them incredible. (Card Captor Sakura has possibly even more songs than Hidamari Sketch.) “Platinum”, the third opening, has a soaring, spiritual sound with very prominent vocals by Maaya Sakamoto, who has a great voice for stuff like this. “Fruits Candy” was the third ending and is lot more bouncy and fun. I thought for years it was sung by Sakura Tange, the actress who voices Sakura and coincidentally shares her first name, but it’s actually sung by a much more obscure actress named Megumi Kojima.

“Maegami”, “Tadaima”, and “Ready”, Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai

I wrote a retrospective on Ore Imo a while back, but it was quite a while after I watched the show and it was based on memories, so a redo after revisiting the show is probably in order.

Ore Imo had a new ending in every episode, so it’s quite a trick that most of them are as good as they are. Almost all of them were at least listenable, but these three were my favorite. “Maegami” is bouncy and has kind of a big band vibe to it; I enjoy it a lot more than Manami, the character whose perspective it’s written from. “Tadaima” is a slower, lower-key song that ended Episode 12 of the first season, the fake alternate reality “good end” where Kirino decides not to go to America. (It’s called the “good end” because the actual ending was so incredibly stupid that this anticlimax of an ending is good by comparison.) “Ready” was the ending of the first “true end” episode, where Kirino leaves to go to America.

“Help! Heaven Side” and “Hallelujah Study”, MM

For a while, anime was obsessed with sexual fetishes. Tons of raucous ecchi comedies about characters defined by their fetishes came and went. MM was one of these, but the characters were actually sort of defined beyond their fetishes, and actually sort of likeable, so it’s the only one of these shows I’ve actually come back to. It also had pretty great animation and music.

The opening, “Help!”, came in two mixes, “Hell Side” and “Heaven Side”. Both are fun, a little intense, and capture the rowdy, raunchy feeling of the show. I slightly prefer “Heaven Side”, but both are good. “Hallelujah Study” is an insert song sung by Ayana Taketatsu, who voices Mio and is one of my favorite anime voice actresses and singers.

“Beautiful” and “Travel in Mind”, .hack//Legend of the Twilight

.hack//Legend of the Twilight was the first sibling incest show I ever watched, several years before Ore Imo came along. I’ve never been a fan of shows about characters playing online games, and I found .hack//Sign painfully boring, but Legend of the Twilight, while not exactly good, was at least more fun—it was cute, it was chibi, it was comedy-focused, and it was nice to look at.

“Beautiful” is an insert song by the previously mentioned Round Table feat. Nino, while “Travel in Mind” is a character song. The opening, “New World”, was also decent.

“Sunny Side Hill”, Uninhabited Planet Survive

Another fun one by Round Table feat. Nino, from a show I’ve never seen and hadn’t heard of until I actually wondered what show this song was from.

“Staple Stable”, “Kaerimichi”, “Ambivalent World”, “Renai Circulation”, “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari”, “Futakotome”, “Marshmallow Justice”, “Platinum Disco”, “Naisho no Hanashi”, “Chocolate Insomnia”, and “Mousou Express”, Monogatari series

Like Card Captor Sakura and Hidamari Sketch, the Monogatari series has produced tons of music, most of it is excellent, and some I count among my favorite anime songs ever. The first song from any Monogatari show that I didn’t instantly love was “Kieru Daydream” from Nekomonogatari Black, and it was a huge disappointment when it came.

Each story arc in the series has its own opening, sung by the main heroine of the arc’s voice actress with backing by fake anime band meg/rock. Each heroine’s opening is great as a standalone song; I was listening to “Staple Stable” and “Renai Circulation”, as well as “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari”, years before I watched the show. But each one captures its heroine so perfectly that they become better after you watch the show, after you understand what in the heroine’s personality or character arc the lyrics are referring to. And each opening reflects the changes the heroine goes through during the story arc it opens—Tsubasa is mentally fractured and desperate when “Sugar Sweet Nightmare” opens her arc, but when she breaks through, acknowledges her feelings, and decides how to move forward, her opening, “Chocolate Insomnia”, reflects it. When Nadeko is an innocent girl nursing an unrequited crush, her arc opens with the innocently yearning “Renai Circulation”; but when she succumbs to negative feelings, her arc opens with the darker “Mousou Express”. The songs all stand out from each other and have distinct, recognizable melodies; they’ve been covered and remixed and nightcored and converted to eight-bit and sixteen-bit and jazz and classical strings over and over on Youtube. The heroines’ voices are also easily distinguishable and matched well to the rest of the instrumentation.

As for the show itself, not many anime have influenced me as deeply as the Monogatari series—Card Captor Sakura and Aria are some of the few others. The series not only changed my view on what anime could be, it also influenced the way I look at other media, and even my views on storytelling itself. It’s a weird, unique corner of the anime world, held back from the greater recognition it deserves by some unfortunate pedophilia jokes that mean I’ll never recommend it to someone who isn’t already deep into the strange world of “anime that you don’t admit you watch to anyone except other arch-otaku, and probably not even them except in the abyssal depths of anonymous online forums”.

Even if not for that, even if I could recommend this series more widely, I’d still recommend it with caution. The Monogatari series is weird, and gets weirder as it progresses. Not everyone can see the value in a series that’s mostly pun-laden dialogue with cute girls whose personal issues are being exacerbated by supernatural creatures. But in my opinion, it deserves to be considered a masterpiece, and its music doesn’t let it down. I consistently choose its songs to start my playlists, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

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.