Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
All through history, civilisations have had centres from which culture and change emanate out. For the Greeks and the Romans this centre was the Mediterranean Basin, "Mare Nostrum", who's flat waters could easily be traversed to spread their culture and knowledge outwards, and to pull people and resources inwards. The further you travelled from the shores of the middle sea, the less civilised the people and the land became, in a way you would travel back in time from the scholars of Athens and the orators of Rome to the backward Persians or the barbaric Germans. And further out still were lands of myth and desolation: the giants of Britannia, or the monsters of India. The ends of the Earth were places that still abided by the rules of heroes and monsters, stuck back in time.
But our "centre" doesn't stay still. After the mediaeval period it shifted to the green fields of Western Europe, and the "Mare Nostrum" of civilisation soon became the Northern Atlantic. But there are still those places off to the side even now, where change reaches only slowly, and whose people adapt to it even slower. The Near East, the original centre of civilisation, is now off the grid. And by many predictions Europe herself is headed in the same direction: to become a decrepit land of old cities, old customs and old men. But "old" must not always mean "stale". Not all which is new is better, and there is often more to learn from backwards folk than from those who are attempting to lead society forward. To travel out to the four corners of the world is to travel back in time and to seek out the wisdom of the ancients.
In the manga "Aria", humanity has finally escaped Earth's gravity and colonised other planets, namely Mars, which has been terraformed and flooded with water, and given the new name of "Aqua". But technology and the laws of nature keep such interplanetary colonies far from the "centre", only accessible through slow and costly space transportation. And on a futuristic Earth of hyper-interconnectivity and instant communication, Aqua is the only place that can really be described as apart from the centre in this time. With no great benefit to life on Aqua, the colonies have largely been left alone: inconvenient places for backward-thinking people. And the epitome of this sentiment is the city of Neovenezia. Huddled on a manmade archipelago in the middle of a swamp, it is a reconstruction of an equally inconvenient city from our own history. No space for roads or rails, no place for industry or agriculture, annual flooding incapacitates the whole city for weeks at a time. It's somewhere you can't help but be slow and inefficient. But it is also a beautiful city, and so those who dwell there can't help but be beautiful also. And really that's what Aria is all about. The beauty of being behind the times, unconcerned with the busy engine-room of mankind and its fickle whims bickering a million miles away.
What matters to the people of Neovenezia is not progress, nor are they chasing a phantom of traditionalism: what they value is serenity. "La Serenissima", a sobriquet of old-Venice, is even more fitting of Neovenezia; it is somewhere people visit to relax and escape from the centre. And for those who live there, there is an acceptance and embracing of its inconveniences. There is no logical reason the citizens send letters rather than use email, it is not a practise anyone from Earth could accept. But yet it is universally accepted here.
And while such thought processes are always hard to explain for those who grew up surrounded with them, as is the case with most who live on Aqua, those from the outside like Akari (who grew up on Earth) are able to express them more lucidly. This is what makes Akari such an wonderful character beloved to those both inside and outside her universe: her ability to effortlessly explain vague feelings in a way that makes them instantly understandable. Why do we love the inconvenient? Because it is better.
