#Aria is such a difficult and complex character to understand haha

[solradguy]

I’m SO glad someone else thinks about Aria’s side of the story, because even though we don’t get to see a whole lot of it.

I do believe that both Fredrick and Asuka deeply cared about Aria (and I’d wager that she cared about them a lot as well). However, a part of her story is about how the men in her life refuse to respect her choices (especially Asuka, but his Achilles savior complex is a paragraph for another day) and how that leads to their collective downfalls, but it especially hurts her.

I just wish that was elaborated on more. Assuming she wasn’t just in cryosleep the entire time, I’d kill for a short story that explored what happened with her from the end of Begin to the Black Sunrise.

One of the messages that I feel you’re supposed to get from lots of her scenes is about living for the present, but there’s also a hint of “respecting other people’s choices for themselves” in their too. I might be reading too much into things, but I think people don’t pay attention to that enough, so I hope your post reaches more of them.

No, I think you're right about the recurring message with Aria's themes being personal autonomy. A lot of her dialog supports that, especially during the scene where she argues with Frederick after he learns about her terminal TP infection diagnosis:

Like you said, this world is where I belong. I'm the hero of my own story, so you're not allowed to tell me what to do.

And this longer line in particular:

..I don't have any family, and I was always kind of a bookworm. It's not like I enjoyed studying, I was just desperate not to be left behind... I thought that if I kept to myself and didn't trust anyone, then I couldn't ever be hurt. But that made my world cold, small, and dark. I never felt alive there... I didn't even have any friends until I went to college. Can you believe that? But them I met you, and [Asuka]... I even fell in love! For the first time in my life, I found something I wanted to care about. I was happy...

This line feels extremely important. She was entirely alone until she met Fred and Asuka, and when she did, she finally found herself and what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be. Aria realized that she didn't need to be alone and she didn't need to be a people pleaser either ("It's not like I enjoyed studying, I was just desperate not to be left behind."). She discovered that she was capable of making her own choices.

For the most part, it seems like Fred and Asuka both supported her until near the end when they both tried to tell her what to do in order to protect their own feelings ("Don't be so selfish. Try and listen to someone else, for once." -- Aria to Fred) instead of respect what she felt was right for herself. Frederick wanted her to go into cryostasis until a cure was found for her disease and Asuka straight up forced her too, and then later forced her to blow up Japan (which is incredibly complex and I'm just going to gloss over that because that's a huge other thing). She didn't want any of that; she wanted to die as she was BECAUSE it was her choice to do so. She knew what was going to happen and she wanted to live her last days as much as she could surrounded by the people she loved until it ended.

In a lot of ways I think her story mirrors Sol's, but there are things about her story that they haven't revealed yet. It's possible Asuka simply convinced her to give cryostasis a chance and that she wasn't forced into it. With how adamant she was against it in her argument with Fred though I'm not very sure....

I want to know so badly how much she knew about the Gear cell research being diverted into WMDs and how that weighed on her. Did she know that Asuka was going to betray Frederick later? I wonder if maybe she agreed to the cryostasis and later being turned into a Gear herself (she was in control as Justice before the Black Sunrise broke her mind—did she accept the Scales of Juno to keep it out of the wrong hands?) in order to stay close to the research project and try her best to keep the damage under control. I think that's ultimately why Asuka betrayed Fred, so he could stay close to the Gear project in order to keep things from getting way worse than they ended up. The Black Sunrise saved all of humanity, after all. At the cost of Aria.

I was telling a friend in PMs that I hope some day we get a scene with Jack-O' and Ramlethal or Elphelt where they talk about their weird relationship with each other and we get a nice Aria flashback thing that DOESN'T revolve entirely around Frederick/Sol or Asuka. We know so little about Aria as a person outside of her relationship with them or through a lens that isn't a Sol flashback sequence...