Everyone who is a fan of the series assures me that Aria the Natural is a better series than Aria the Animation. Yet what I'm feeling now isn't as good.

The first series was gentle, unforced, comfortable. The pace was almost languid, yet I didn't feel bored because it felt so nice to visit Akari and spend time with her.

The second series feels like someone started adding tobasco sauce to it, a little pepper, a little spice. And a lot of grime.

There's more angst, for one thing. The happy warm comfortable city I grew to love in the first series now is revealed as being full of dark mysterious dangerous forgotten places, and it's peopled by ghosts and fairies and the odd kami, who may or may not really be friendly. Aika, whose only real apparent fault in the first series was that she was a bit headstrong, turns out to be the primary source of angst in the series. (And I'm getting seriously tired of her ongoing campaign to humble Alice.) Akatsuki, who was something of a source of comic relief in the first series, a bit clumsy but fundamentally decent, is revealed in the second series as being a manipulative, arrogant jackass.

Alice started the first series glum, dejected, and withdrawn, but as she spent time with Akari (and Aika, but it was Akari that mattered) she seemed to be loosening up, learning how to let herself be happy. And now in this series it's revealed that, well, it wasn't really all that good a thing after all that she's been spending so much time with Akari and Aika. It's just another room she's shut herself up in, to keep away from all the strangers around her that make her feel uncomfortable.

I only saw Al once in the first series. (He appears in the Aria Superhero ep, but I skipped that part.) For the period that he did show up he seemed mature and level-headed. He is now revealed as being a major-league nerd, enough so that he makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.

Woody was a really good guy in the first series. He took Akari out to that island, for example, and he always greets her when he flies overhead. He seems to work hard, and cares about his business as a sylph. I don't like the fact that Akatsuki seems to take advantage of him. I don't like it at all.

And Akari? In the first series she was warm, spiritually strong. She was a source of strength to the other people who knew her. In the second series she's coming over as a ditz. And so is Alicia, stunningly enough.

President Aria? In the first series he was an animated plush doll, funny but not very important. In this series he's beginning to scare me, and not in a good way.

Every character in the series has become less attractive to me. Except Athena, strangely enough. I liked the Athena I saw in ep 7. She was deeper, more sophisticated, stronger and more mature than the Athena I had come to know in the first series. Athena and the mailman are pretty much the only adults in the series. The rest of the characters? These are not the people I thought I was going to be seeing.

So when I was watching the first series, and reached the end of a DVD, my thought was, "Where's the next one! I gotta watch it now!" I received it on October 13 and started watching it immediately, and posted my review on October 18.

With this series, I've left it alone a couple of times now, and eventually said, "Well, I may as well watch some more of it, since there isn't anything else new around here." It's just not the same kind of thing happening to me. I won't be finishing these 13 episodes (the first half of the series) anything like as fast as I did the 13 episodes of the first season.

Three of the first four episodes of this series were really excellent, or so it seemed when I first watched them. Yet they also contributed to adding dark shadows and grime to the place, and starting to degrade the comfortable feeling I had when I watched the first series.

I don't need Aika's puppy-love angst. (And at age 18, she's never had a crush on a boy before?) I don't need Akatsuki at all! What a loser. What a creep. What a cad. ore-sama my ass. I don't need Al to be such a nerd. Dammit, he's supposed to be an adult. Why isn't he more mature?

And the worst surprise of all: I don't like this Ai as much. She was great in the first episode, but her voice-over letters to Akari are a lot less interesting this time than they were in the first series. She really had something to say in the first series. This time all she says is "Yeah, you're right, Akari!"

I'm not going so far as to say that I don't like this one. I do like it, but I don't like it as much as the first one -- and that will, I think, harvest howls of rage from fanbois of the series. I don't look forward to the response to this post, but I have to be honest about how it's affecting me.

Wonderduck asked me how I would go up from the 4 stars I rated the first series. If I were to rate this series based on the 9 episodes I've seen, I'd only give it 3 stars.

I probably should watch ep 10 tonight, but I feel more like rewatching DBZ.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:04 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 962 words, total size 5 kb.