[Read the previous moment here or start at the beginning]

Today’s post isn’t as…revelatory as 2008′s Moment the Second, I’m afraid. It is, rather, a humble post about a humble character from the humble show that changed everything (for me, anyway).

That’s right — Aria. You knew it’d show up somewhere among my chosen twelve of 2009. Last year, Aria the Animation occupied no less than three spots, specifically eleven, eight, and one. This post is related to last year’s eleventh, actually, though I didn’t plan it that way.

I had planned to write about the ending of Aria the Origination — the ending of the whole series, in other words. But as I considered what I might say here, one particular episode from Aria the Natural kept imposing upon my thoughts.

Therein, Alice puts on her dekkai srs bsns face…

…and resolves to walk home from school stepping only on shadows. You can’t help but love how seriously she takes things like this.

But alas, she fails practically within sight of the Orange Planet building. Her disappointment is tangible.

Fortunately Athena rows by at this point, and, noticing her subordinate’s gloom, does that thing she’s so good at.

Let’s talk about Athena for a minute. Last year I characterized her as the Silent Bob of the Aria crew, her lines scant but powerful. That’s probably less true after the Animation, or at least she gets more lines in the subsequent seasons, but nevertheless she remains the stalwart support upon which Alice leans, reliable but unseen — most of the time.

The remarkable thing here is her persistence. It’s a thankless job, but she keeps at it. It really doesn’t seem to matter to her whether Alice even notices her concern. She does what she does simply because she’d rather see Alice happy.

There’s a name for that kind of devotion to another human being, that state of being motivated purely by another person’s happiness. It’s…

…love, I think.

Athena follows along as Alice undertakes her strange self-imposed challenge, simply because Alice seems to be enjoying herself. She even tries to help, when she can.

But Alice, always one to fight her own battles, isn’t having it.

Perhaps unique to this episode — well, probably not, but other instances slip my mind — is our getting to see that Alice’s insistence on refusing help really does upset Athena. She is by no means oblivious or emotionally impervious. And it’s almost unsettling to see this, as Athena isn’t unhappy very often — after all, she’s the one who can usually be relied on to maintain her game face.

But she doesn’t mope around for very long, either. Remember, persistence is the operative term here.

I really couldn’t tell you exactly why these simple and entirely predictable scenes affect me as profoundly as they do — and I am by no means highly susceptible to emotional manipulation, mind you. Aria more or less lets you know within the first five minutes of each episode how the episode will end, and yet you find yourself struggling to keep it together as the credits roll anyway. I suppose that’s just how Aria works, but goddamn is it frustrating. And awesome.

It’s probably related to what I said in my first Bokurano post. Sure it’s manipulative, but that’s what fiction (being rhetoric) does, and Aria earns my complicity in the manipulation process.

In this case, I have to admire Athena’s dauntless love for her friend and apprentice. I’m not talking about yuri goggles here — I’m talking about the love of one friend for another. It’s such a common thing, perhaps, that we forget how amazing it can be. Athena reminds us of this just as she reminds us that the least obvious characters can be the most potent.

[Read the next moment here]

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Aria (Anime). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.