Aria the Masterpiece: Chapter 32 Discussion

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Aria the Masterpiece Chapter 32: 舟謳

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Start Date: March 9th
Previous Chapter: Chapter 31
Next Chapter: Chapter 33

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Soundtrack for this chapter, especially pages 36-37 and 53-55. I highly recommend giving it a listen, even if you’re not watching the anime yet. :slightly_smiling_face:

Unfortunately, I’ve been busy all day and haven’t had the time to read the chapter, and now it’s high time for bed…

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Ok! Chapter all read! Finally we meet main character number six! The left hand was a metaphor all along!

Sadly, the Orange Planet building doesn’t seem to exist in the real world. The dining room is really pretty, though. Gotta say, it’s odd seeing Akari wearing the Orange Planet uniform, especially in the anime where it’s in colour. Though, I notice they don’t seem to have changed Aria’s… um… scarf? In the anime, he’s not in the scene at all - pets are forbidden, so they leave him in Alice’s room. But, ah… don’t watch this episode yet if you’re avoiding spoilers, because it also introudces another character who doesn’t appear until later in this volume of the manga.

I kinda feel like the action Alice is performing in the final panel of page 43 is easier to do with the left hand anyway. Doing it with the right seems awkward. (In the anime, they skip over the fact that they have to sneak in, and instead she makes a point of opening the door to her room with her left hand - which she does in the manga anyway, but without drawing attention to it. Though, the anime also has a sequence where Athena makes a big mess of pouring herself a glass of water, but when she sits down in the next shot, she’s holding a teacup like she is here…)

So, 謳. From Jisho, it’s sometimes used as an alternate kanji for 歌う, but not for 歌, so… I guess some liberties are being taken on the third panel of page 46?

Minor rant time: So, Athena. Her introduction here makes several earlier chapters featuring Alice hanging out with Alicia and Akira quite a bit weird. You’re telling me that Amano-sensei had enough foresight to create the concept of Three Water Fairies, but not enough foresight to decide that one of them would be Alice’s mentor? Where was she during the Neverland chapter, when Alicia and Akira took Alice to the beach for a break? Where was she during the Redentore chapter, when Alice was desperate to invite Grandma, but apparently forgot to invite her immediate mentor? Where was she when the West Fold fell? No wait, wrong movie. (The anime gets around this issue by moving Athena’s introduction to be three episodes after Alice’s. The Neverland story mentions her being involved in planning but too busy to join in, while the Redentore story includes her by increasing the boat’s capacity by one. Or, actually, by two - anime-exclusive character Ai is also present.)

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Aww, I really liked this chapter. :3
Alice’s school uniform hair is freaking adorable, I love it. And that whole building is gorgeous.
I also love how アリア社長 is hugging her hand and rubbing it every time she hurts it ;_; And pg 38, with the leaves xD

Re: minor rant, based on what we see in this chapter, Athena’s absence in previous chapters doesn’t really seem that weird to me (as someone 100% new to the series)? I mean, yeah, it would have been the polite thing to do, to invite your mentor to a dinner, but Alice doesn’t seem very attached to conventions of politeness when it comes to senpai-kouhai relations xD And even if Athena is Alice’s mentor, Alice doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to her before. I don’t get the sense that either of them are really the type to say “yeah, let’s hang out and go do stuff together outside of here like bffs.” Like, they aren’t “close” that way (or at least, I get the sense that they weren’t close that way - I guess we’ll see how things change now, lol). They’re both kind of quiet and keep to themselves, and Athena has more of a “silent support” mentorship style than Alicia or Akira. I kind of love her though xD I think the Athena-Alice pair might be my favorite senpai-kouhai pair.

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All caught up! でっかい幸せです！

No? 謳 can be read うた (cf kanjipedia) and it’s a standard reading there. That being said, the word itself does not appear in the dictionary, so, kanjipedia might be a bit generous on that “standard” label.

About the minor rant:

Did I miss something? I didn’t see anywhere that Athena was her mentor, just her roommate. Plus it doesn’t look like they are interacting that much (which you would expect in a mentor/mentoree(?) situation.

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It… it doesn’t say that?

… Currently I’m questioning everything I ever thought I knew about this series. I could have sworn…

Though, fun fact: according to summplementary materials, Athena is the oldest of the six main characters, at 21…

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Re: minor rant, I don’t think it actually said that explicitly. I was thinking of it more like a by-default “mentorship,” because they’re roommates and senpai-kouhai in the same company. A mentor in the sense that all senpais are mentors to their kouhais xD I know there’s like the “ideal” mentoring relationship where you would actually be a lot more closely involved/interacting more often, but my experiences with mentorship have been with assigned “mentors” who were…not all that involved xD So that was kind of how I thought of it. xD Anyway. I think you’re right, it doesn’t say that they are mentor-mentee specifically

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I thought so too.

But in that case, it indeed makes sense for Athena to not be involved in anything so far, especially since, before this chapter, Alice didn’t think much of her, it seems. Now that she realized that Athena is such a cool senpai, it also makes sense if we start seeing more of her.

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I want to catch back up to read all the spoilers… Don’t know if I feel like it though. We’ll see later in the week.

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Maybe we oughtta use more spoiler tags, then, to give you greater incentive. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m enjoying 放浪息子 so much more than Aria right now though, so it’s hard to motivate myself to read Aria. The last several chapters of Aria volume 3 were a slog.

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Hm, so far, there are just the “recap” chapter, the one introducing grandma and the beach chapter that felt kinda boring. That’s still pretty good.

That being said, yeah, 放浪息子 has me pretty much on the edge of my seat the whole time (and/or crying at times) so that’s a completely different league.

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I’m just here for the Aria book club at the moment. The rest of my “spare time” is being spent in the rather dry world of trying to remember the correct usage of N3 grammar.

p.38,41,49 entertaining antics indeed.

The whole chapter I’m reading a-teh-na instead of Athena, so that was what I didn’t 気が付く lol. I don’t know the anime or what happens in later volumes so I can’t comment on their relationship apart from what I saw in this chapter, which seemed a little cold in typical Alice style, but then if she does share a room with one of the 3 fairies (if that’s what they’re called), then it does seem a little strange there wasn’t any mention of sharing a room with one of them until now.

I kind of assumed it was an alternate version of 歌 but didn’t know if there was any nuanced difference.

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I feel that it’s linked to the use of the kanji 舟謳 for Canzone, but that’s not a word in the dictionary either. Google’s not turning up anything much for 舟謳 besides a couple of references to Aria and a blog named “funauta” which seems unrelated otherwise.

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When I read the chapter, I assumed that it was a made up word made to match Canzone. Since it sounds like the French “chanson”, and the fact that she does it on a boat, I just left it at that.

In terms of nuance, 謳う means stuff like “to extol” or to sing praises about someone. I’ve never seen 謳 (as a single word) in the wild before, I kinda thought, based on that, that it was an upbeat song about life or something. (we have seen the kanji itself in ARIA before, though, 星謳 星の謳声, I think)

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But… but “canzone” isn’t made-up. It’s Italian.

Hah, I was just about to make that correction. But yeah, 謳声 is also used in this chapter in reference to Athena…

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Yes, but maybe it carries a nuance in this context that doesn’t exist in Japanese.

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Yeah. I think I’ve been trying to work out even before we started reading here whether or not “canzone” is a thing the real gondoliers do. Near as I can tell from research, they’ll sing if you pay them to, but the idea of the singing gondolier is an invention of Hollywood. Not even sure if the word “canzone” is used in relation to this in Italian, but I really don’t think it is. I think it really is just a type of song.

I posted my research into the English and Japanese nuances of “canzone” on the vocab sheet.

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I found this chapter a bit “OK, but so what?” Maybe I need to read more between the lines, I don’t know.

I liked
p.38 Aria社長 catching leaves :maple_leaf::two_hearts:
p.47 Alice trying to get Akari’s attention at the bottom of the page :joy:
p.48 That dining hall!
p.52 bottom right panel - Aria社長 :laughing: And again on p.56

Questions
p.40 自分の左手のへたれっぷりに気が付いて - what is the っぷり?
p.42 Am I reading this right? You’re not officially allowed to have friends come over, so you can’t use the main entrance, but it’s OK to park an other-company gondola on the premises?
p.45 lower right - Is that Akari desperately trying to appear unsuspicious? (I read it as a speech bubble first and only realised it was a thought bubble the second time through).
p.54 When Akari says "左手だってなかなかにやるものだ”, is she just trying to tell Alice that her left hand is doing fine?
p.60 onward. Alice: I’ve suddenly realised after all this time that you would sing when I was unhappy. Why would you sing for someone like me? Athena: No need to worry that you didn’t realise, because actually I wasn’t singing for you, I was just singing. Me: Huh?

  • Is the moral of the story that what you don’t notice is just as important as what is obvious?
  • Is it official Orange Planet company policy to room their socially awkward but otherwise radically talented employees together?

From what we see in this chapter, Athena doesn’t seem like the type to easily socialise…

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manner, style.

They’re approaching on foot, though? I’m pretty sure they are, anyway…

I’m pretty sure it’s a speech bubble with sweat drops confusing the issue. But yeah, “I’m not a suspicious person!”

Think it’s more that it does things fine. It does its job, sort of thing.

I think it’s more something like “I was just singing cause I like singing. If you failed to notice me singing, I’m not offended by that.”

Yes. More to the point, I’m of the opinion that they’re paired together specifically because they’re Orange Planet’s radically talented employees.