Well, for several other people it actually is, it's very highly acclaimed & liked series in general, but to me it's in fact one of the worst slice-of-life anime I've ever, genuinely one of the most excruciatingly boring experiences I've ever had whilst watching anime and I truly regret spending all the time I spend finishing this whole series.
To elaborate my reasons on why I hate the seriesso muchI'd just wanna copy paste my post regarding this from another thread:
Excruciatingly boring and dull to me in every way possible. Most of the girls possess a very similar personality compared to each other to other without much of a difference notable between them, like basically displaying the very archetypical pretty & cute type of personality, which makes the characters dynamics painfully shallow, monotonous and lacking in any kind of variety. I mean a cast comprising of characters with differing/various personalities in comparison to each other, where each character compliments the different personalities of the others around helps in creating a tight-knit, varied and interesting group dynamic....which the Aria series severely lacked in every way as pretty much all the girls just act in a similar way and display the very same type of personality all the time, giving a sense of blatant monotonous-ness within their character dynamics which genuinely felt VERY boring & uninteresting. Alongside that, we have the ugly comedic deformed face-gags that feel so distracting because they just don't seem like naturally fitting with the personalities of the girls; I mean the usage of comedic gags does work out in many cases to provide nice comic relief moments, but for Aria the girls were portrayed in a way that it seemed like the primary appeal of their character were in way that they are supposed to be pretty & endearing, they hardly displayed much comedic traits in the personalities otherwise which is why those comedic gag momemts genuinely felt so forced. Add to this all those individual catchphrases of the girls which they continue to repeat & recycle throughout the entire over & over, that too very frequently as well, as a result of which those catchphrases come off very repititive, grating & annoying progressively throughput the course of the series. All of these issues combine to an utterly dull, boring & uninteresting display of slice-of-life that just fails to be captivating and immersive in any way. I'm in generally quite a fan of the slice-of-life genre and have enjoyed several acclaimed titles from the genre a lot as well, but the Aria series as a whole was genuinely one of the most tediously boring & disappointing experiences I've ever had watching anime.
Rated the entire series 1/10 and I doubt I'll change my mind on that.
No hard feelings to anyone who enjoyed the series though, I do respect the series for the influence it has had on its fans. But it's because of my dry, tedious experience with the whole series, alongside the fact that I found so many aspects that I actively disliked about it as aforementioned, that I bear such a strong personal dislike towards the series. |