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Posts tagged Aria
My Show Is Better Than Your Show, March Madness Edition
Mar 5th
There seems to be cries every season about how the cropping of shows is worse than the last, and while this may or may not be true depending on your taste in shows, I’ve always found it hard to be lacking in stuff to put up on the screen every night. This is because while there may not be many standout, my-God-I-need-to-watch-this-now shows in every season there are always plentiful bounties of sleeper hits, things worth trying because someone said it was good, or just plain old shows, enough to ensure that I get continually buried deeper and deeper in a pile of anime I need to catch up on.
Perhaps a large part of it is due to the fact that I enjoy being very easily influenced and thanks to that I can pick up random shows if two or three people say it’s actually pretty good – doubly so if they can nail a weak spot of mine – combined with the fact that I really haven’t seen much, having only been in the anime-watching business for just over a year.
To prove that anime Is Out There – cue the X-Files theme – I’m going to spend a little time tonight going over the majority of my watchlist, instead of the huge specialty posts on a single anime which have been written recently. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s mostly code for “I want to talk about True Tears, Clannad, and Shana II but am too lazy to unify it in an easy way” with some bonus laughing at other shows added in.
Since it’s March and all and I like to pretend to be hip and knowledgable about sports (Protip: Motorsports yes, sportssports no.), it’s a super special sweet sixteen – ow, my manliness – March Madness-type organization with, you guessed it, sixteen shows on the list. There are in reality a few more but the majority of the extra would consist of “I saw this once, and would kind of keep watching it if there were nothing else to watch,” which explains itself well enough.
To be fair it doesn’t have the mass-voting aspect or the actual sports-related references of the other March Madness anime posts, but, hey, 16 anime, that’s a lot. Read the rest of this entry »
The Old New: ARIA the Animation
Nov 9th
As has been done in the past with the Da Capo series, there’s no better time to get into a long-running franchise than when another season of it is on the way, and with a third season of Aria announced, I figured it was time to get on the bandgondola.
To be honest, Aria is another one of those shows with a very weird lead-in to it; I’ve watched shows before based on other blogger’s ravings, on forumite ravings, on the random shouting of “Gao~” and “Uguu~” in forums, but Aria got onto the ‘to-watch’ list simply because the one anime-related clan in a non-anime-related game I play (BATRacer, if that means anything to you.) was called, yup, the “Aria Company Team”.
Knowing very little about this quite successful slice-of-life anime, I decided to pick it up for myself.
The first thing that’s apparent about Aria, that sticks out to anyone who watches it for the first time, is that it’s very much an anime where Nothing Happens.
I mean, there’s slow.
There’s “Syaoran confessing to Sakura” slow.
There’s “Moe Mizukoshi talking” slow.
There’s “Akiha Tohno’s breasts growing” slow.
And then there’s Aria.
Perhaps that sounds a bit mean but that little exaggeration is mean to exemplify the fact that if you’re watching Aria with the intent of actually seeing something ‘exciting’ happen, you’re in the wrong place.
All slice-of-life shows can be termed ’slow’ in a sense, since none of them really have a lasting plot that drives the characters and the show. But Aria is different in that it doesn’t have a large focus, like other shows, on making jokes, per se.
Its music is fairly constant without aural gags, with mellow violin music rather than upbeat “hey look, we’re talking” or “character’s theme” riffs. There isn’t really any buildup in the show, the ‘hey look a gag is coming’, nor any time period for jokes to sink in.
Aria is very much a show that’s ‘there’, for better and for worse.
Read the rest of this entry »