Anime Thoughts: Aria the Animation

Deciding what anime series to pick off my crowded shelves, open and watch next seems something of an intuitive process for me, but settling on a title can still leave me wondering about the impending experience. When I opened up Aria: The Animation quite a while after I'd received it in the mail, I was certain the time had come to see it, but how I'd take what I would see was still sort of an open question. I knew it had to do with "female gondoliers (all of whose names start with 'A') in a Venice in space," and I knew a lot of other people were very positive about it, but I did have an impression the show was slow-paced and more "pleasant" than anything. Perhaps, too, making the decision to order it just because a preorder from one particular online store (affiliated with the company producing the North American release) would include a set of postcards with some art from the series, and collecting three more boxed sets of follow-ups to the series before I could get around to opening the first, lent an odd sort of complexion to how I thought about it. I might even have worried that through some fault of my own, it wouldn't be for me.
( As to whether there was that fault of my own... )