Aria is often seen as the essential anime within the iyashikei sub-genre, which falls under Slice of Life umbrella. Before we talk about iyashikei or "healing" anime, we have to define Slice of Life.
Firstly, the genre tag Slice of Life gets used way too often here on MAL. Both School Rumble and Kino's Journey are tagged this way, despite being fundamentally different shows on nearly every level. On MAL, Slice of Life is used to refer to virtually any series that's not heavily plot oriented and doesn't feature tons of blood and boobs. School Rumble is a slapstick romantic comedy whereas Kino is a psychological/philosophical series. A slightly more concrete definition would be "A naturalistic depiction of people going through a mundane period of real, everyday life". While half the anime considered Slice of Life here are inappropriately labeled, Aria is a true Slice of Life anime.
While the term "Slice of Life" is borrowed from the French language and many countries write these kind of plays, Iyashikei is more distinctly Japanese. An iyashikei is an anime or manga that not only lacks a central conflict, but all internal conflict as well. It's a series where everything is happy all the time and it feels like eating a bowl of cotton candy for dinner. For a Western audience, this seems like "Care Bears" kind of shit. Stories for adults and older teens are simply NOT written this way. Why does this shit exist in Japan? The answer is stress. Japan is not only one of the hardest working countries in the world in terms of number of hours, but also has extremely strict expectations. Japanese students from the time they're children go to school 6 days a week and study on average 4-5 times as much as American students. In Japan there is common phenomenon called "kuroshi" or death by overwork. It's also a country with historically one of the highest suicide rates in the world. In such a brutally difficult environment, iyashikei is a means of temporary escapism. You spend 30 minutes to an hour watching a show like Aria and your level of stress and depression is lowered enough to get back to work or studying.
By describing iyashikei, I've already described a lot about Aria. The characters don't suffer from any psychological issues and don't need to go on a character journey of redemption or improvement. There is never an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Even Seinfeld has more conflict than Aria. Problem: George, Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry are in a parking garage and can't find their car. Elaine needs to get to the car quickly in order for her newly purchased pet goldfish to survive. George has a meeting with his overbearing parents, who will scream at him if he's late. There are stakes and consequences if the gang can't find their car in time. Aria is a pure utopia where there are ZERO stakes. Akari from Aria is absolutely perfect at her job, but if she wasn't it wouldn't matter.
The plot of Aria can be summed up in a few sentences. It's the distant future and technology has solved basically all our problems. We can terraform other planets, overpopulation isn't an issue, war is a thing of the distant past, etc. Mars has become a tourism planet renamed "Aqua" that contains replicas of many of Earth's most scenic cities. Our story takes place in Neo-Venice and follows the lives of 3 girls who're training to row gondola boats and become tour guides. Each of the 3 young girls has a rowing master who trains them and lives with them. Gradually, the girls learn to become ever better tour guides and that's essentially the entire plot for all 3 seasons of Aria!
So what makes Aria good? It's all about the details. Aria has a really soothing and beautiful atmosphere that's paired together perfectly with a relaxing soundtrack. Every single episode has at least 1 moving speech. Often it's about happiness or the nature of beauty or something along those lines. Aria is a very sentimental series and I mean that in a good way. While Aria was created specifically to soothe Japanese stress, it has found a large audience outside of Japan. Other countries also have stress and depression, so Aria can give a little relief to these people as well. As of 2019, America's suicide rate managed to finally catch up to Japan's. Keep in mind that Catholic, Hispanic Americans are lowering America's numbers. The suicide rate of Non-Hispanic Whites here in America has already surpassed the Japanese average by a significant margin. Maybe America needs less partisan news media and more Aria.
I'll end by saying that Aria isn't necessarily a series for everyone. I've met a LOT of resistance from my offline buddies, who all seem to think it's boring as fuck. I can certainly see why they would think that and I don't mind when that's how people react to it. However, if you're feeling really depressed or stressed out and you want to watching something pleasant and peaceful, Aria is there for you!
