For that matter, I’d also watch the alternate-universe Aria in which Alice was the main character.
I guess there’s Amanchu!, but Futaba Ooki is nautical miles more positive than Alice. I’m more interested in the character who second-guesses herself from general awkwardness into crippling anxiety—the character who thinks too much. For that character, learning to deal with unfamiliar people isn’t a matter of brute-force desensitization so much as it’s learning how to act, in the theatrical sense.
Giving tours all day would absolutely wear me out, is all.
I had somehow never seen this episode before, which means that I got to see “new” Aria today, which means that today was awesome.
I’d watch a show about these three.
If—as a bearded gentleman suggested to me recently—slice of life is contingent upon the everyman-ity of the central characters, what does that make Aria when Aria’s point of view looks out from the cultural apex of Martian tourism? (And the only thing keeping the POV away from the financial apex is Aika’s not being old enough yet.)
So, yeah, the personal journeys of the Water Fairies’ apprentices are interesting, but people whose failure threshold falls somewhat below being the absolute best are interesting, too.
I complained yesterday, it’s true—I did so because the amount of trivia present in Origination (newspapers! construction work!) makes me wish there’d been more previously.
I don’t want to harp on this mundane details thing, but, for some reason that I can’t articulate yet, that’s what I need right now. Not in a formal sense, which I did articulate, but in a personal sense.
When first I watched Aria, the literal magic of unashamed sappiness helped pull me out of a negative place. I needed the time travel and ghosts and Cait Sith stuff. I still like that stuff, but it isn’t as useful to me as it was. I no longer need lessons in when to stop digging for irony and cynicism and take things as they are. Now I suppose I need something like belief, though I doubt that’s the right word.
I wish the undines actually worked more. They do, some, but they also spend a lot of time slacking off and being seduced by fairies and stuff. Per the manga, Akari is more or less the office manager. I want to see her keeping the books! I want to know how she’d apply her optimism to filing old Gondola Association forms.
Menial grind interests me insofar as it comprises most of a person’s waking life. “Wonderful encounters” are fine, but if you are everything you’ve experienced, most of you, volume-wise, isn’t made of wonderful encounters.
And yes, maybe Akari enjoys menial grind, to an extent—but I sure would enjoy tedious technical editing more if I could do it outside with upwards of two friends.
I want to encounter the Akari who, once, for half a second, considers telling Alicia to do her own Cait-Sith-damned taxes, and, furthermore, that the labyrinthine Neo-Venezian tax code can go straight to hell. Even if she didn’t go through with it, that Akari would make the other Akari more impressive.
