YMMV / Aria the Scarlet Ammo

• Americans Hate Tingle: Not to an extreme degree, but still notable. The franchise was relatively popular in Japan back at its day, even in midst of strong competition, and its light novel and manga still keep selling surprisingly well there after more than an entire decade, which is a true feat in the shifting light novel market. In the West, mainly in the Anglosphere, however, it never caught so much with either viewers or readers. Fault goes not only to the divisive reception that series that combine Tiny Tyrannical Girl and Tsundere have always had in the Anglosphere, but also to the fact that the Shakugan no Shana fad itself was already in its twilight when the Aria anime aired, which granted it far less interest than it would have attracted years before.
• Arc Fatigue: Inevitably due to the combination of Aria being a Harem Series and a Long Runner, Kinji's relationship with Aria advanced very slowly through the years. The series seemed to be reaching its conclusion in Volume 22, as the war over the Irokane was stopped, Kanae Kanzaki was finally cleared of all crimes, and Kinji freed Aria from the Scarlet Ammo explicitly through The Power of Love... but despite all of this, the Will They or Won't They? question became indefinitely postponed again with the presence of a new evil super-group screwing things up for Kinji and the appearance of yet another romantic rival to Aria. 15 entire volumes have passed since then.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: While amusing in its very Japanese wackiness, the premise of a bread-and-butter Harem Series led by a Sherlock Holmes descendant (among other famous characters) is not easy to market, especially in western countries, and this a part of its lack of charm. Part of this revolves around target audience: Holmesians often find the premise a frivolous cheapening of Holmes, while harem genre fans see it as an average product without anything interesting.
• Awesome Music: The anime's OST by Takumi Ozawa has quite a bit of this, with some of the more standout examples listed below.
  • The opening theme, "Scarlet Ballet" by May'n.
  • "Hysteria Mode," the track used when Kinji activates his HSS in Episode 1.
  • The piano- and string-centric battle music, "Reki, Fire!"
  • AA does not disappoint in this regard either, as indicated by its main battle theme.
• Bizarro Episode: The OVA. While initially a regular Hot Springs Episode, it soon turns into a weird ghost story where time and space start unraveling while the group chases a spirit that seems to be wanting to tell them something. However, none of this is clarified, as it turns out to have been All Just a Dream... only the entire gang dreamed it together, and things that they learned in the dream happen to be real things they couldn't have known before. And then it turns out the ghost is real after all and is observing them. Maybe the episode's point is that there are things that not even Sherlock Holmes could understand?
• Cliché Storm: A typical complaint among reviewers, even those who liked the concept of a Sherlock Holmes descendant, is that the series plays straight almost every trope related to the harem genre. The latter case was even openly exploited by the producers, given that the anime shares its company, director and lead voice with the original Shakugan no Shana — but this didn't exactly help, especially because Aria was one of the last SC series to receive an anime adaptation and thus didn't have its predecessors' novelty value. (To be fair, the originality is acknowledged to improve considerably through the light novel series, but as the anime adaptation stopped just after Volume 3, people who didn't follow the novels never got to witness it.)
• Critical Backlash: Kinji is often accused of being a Vanilla Protagonist as most harem protagonists usually are. Some believe those reviews are focusing only on the superficial, as a case can be made for Kinji actually being a huge improvement over the average Yuuji Clone: unlike many of those, Kinji has his own arc which predates his relationship with Aria, enjoys a powerset both intriguing by itself and unrelated to her, is neither Oblivious to Love nor an Extreme Doormat, and in later volumes his life stops orbiting fully around Aria; overall, a character who might have starred in their own solo series, something that can be seldom said about his homologues. However, the fact that all those aspects are not overtly emphasized, particularly in the early period of the series the anime adapts, can cause people to overlook them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Riko Mine Lupin IV is generally well-liked, even by people who aren't fans of the series, for her personality and implied connection to Lupin III.

• Funny Moments: In Episode 6, Kinji opens a drawer brought in by Shirayuki when she moved in with Kinji and Aria.
  Kinji: Shirayuki brought these drawers here. There won't be any hazardous objects lying—
  [Kinji opens a drawer and gasps in shock as he discovers Shirayuki's massive collection of black and white underwear before immediately closing it]
  Kinji: There are... and they're hazardous to me.
• Genius Bonus: The dialogue bit in which Kinji and Riko mention Aria's fighting style by name is Adapted Out of the anime, but the viewer can reach the same conclusion as them judging by the judo throw she scores on Kinji during their scuffle at the first episode. It is Bartitsu, the real-life hybrid martial art of judo, jujutsu, boxing and savate used by the original Sherlock Holmes in his fight against Moriarty (though named Baritsu in Doyle's books).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The plot of Volume 1 of the light novel/the first five episodes of the anime — Kinji and Aria's dealings with the Butei Killer, a serial bomber willing to endanger innocent civilians while targeting the students of Butei High — somehow predicted the events of the Boston Marathon bombings two years later in 2013, with both events coincidentally happening in April.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Riko Mine is the great-granddaughter of Arsène Lupin and her family name is a nod to Fujiko Mine of Lupin III fame, leading to plenty of speculation as to whether or not Riko is meant to also be the child of Lupin and Fujiko. (Fujiko being depicted with blonde hair every now and then would help explain Riko's hair color...) Fast-forward to 2018 and Lupin III: Part 5, dedicating a large portion of its run to exploring the relationship between Lupin and Fujiko, reveals that the pair actually wed (and divorced) in the interim between Part IV and Part 5. Furthermore, the series ends with the possibility of the pair having rekindled their romance, in stark contrast to how frosty the two were towards each other early on, and their relationship is shown to still be going strong in the next series. For added hilarity, note that Part IV itself dealt with Lupin's attempts to annul his marriage to series newcomer (and rival thief) Rebecca Rossellini.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The I-U arc was solved rather quickly in the novel series, with the Professor being defeated only six volumes in (which in terms of adaptation means that, had the anime been 24 episodes long, this battle would have been its finale). Although many other storylines branch away from it due to the in-story collapse of the I-U, there are fans who believe the organization, or at least its founder, should not have been defeated so soon.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Aria. She may have treated Kinji too harshly, but her mother's been stuck in prison for Butei killings she didn't commit. It's no wonder the poor girl gets hot under the collar.
  • Riko Mine. From losing her parents, to spending years as Vlad's undernourished prisoner, to being used as one of his pawns, to having her rosary (the only keepsake she has left of her mother) stolen by Vlad (who knew perfectly well how much it meant to her), to ending up being tortured by him after she tries to get it back, her life is quite the Trauma Conga Line. You can't help but feel sorry for her, despite her psycho side and initial desire to kill Aria to prove herself.
• Narm: The gurgling, growling, laughing noises that Vampire!Werewolf!Vlad makes in the final episode of the anime make him difficult to take seriously.
• Never Live It Down: The fact that the lead Aria is a Tsundere voiced by Rie Kugimiya is pretty much the most known thing about the series.
• Nightmare Fuel: Riko Mine's evil laugh in Episode 4, after she "defeats" Aria.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The series is not the first Tiny Tyrannical Girl and Tsundere light novel to feature a Holmesian female lead and a Japanese male lead with military training. That would be Gosick, which started being published in 2003 (it was the earliest major SC, in fact) and whose anime adaptation premiered mere months before Aria's.
  • In 2010, only one year before the Aria anime aired, J.C. Staff also produced Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, another anime about a female Holmes in a modern setting that features superhuman abilities (as well as a Arsène Lupin character). The same year also saw the premiere of Sherlock, a TV series about a modern day Holmes getting entangled with terrorism. Interestingly, given that the Aria light novel was published in 2008, the trope also works in reverse towards those works; in fact, although Milky Holmes was canonically inspired by Case Closed and Galaxy Angel, the novel's popularity might have still contributed to its success.
• Sequelitis: Spin-off example, though not completely unrelated. Aria the Scarlet Ammo AA was much less successful than the main series due to a myriad of reasons: its characters were substantially less colourful, its plot was more a Slice of Life compared to the central Aria arcs, it came a significant four whole years after the main show, and ultimately — to put it simply — it was not what the fandom wanted. When a new Aria anime project was announced in 2015, people were excited that they were finally continuing the series, only to find out it was actually an adaptation of a less known spin-off without any weight in the central storyline.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • A series about an ordinary guy with a hyper-competent counter-terrorist Split Personality, gained thanks to his family line, who gets involved (in more than one way) with a twin-tailed, pinkish-haired Japanese prodigy agent around his own age, who keeps a persistent Betty and Veronica situation with another female friend of the main character, all while they work for an organization of juvenile agents? With all those premises, Aria could be perfectly considered the light novel adaptation of Peter David's comic book series SpyBoy. Even if the latter is relatively obscure, the similarities are so strong that it would be shocking that Chugaku Akamatsu didn't know about it.
  • Aria itself later gained its own successor in Strike the Blood, another light novel about a high school student with bloodline powers awakened by sexual arousal who fights along an armed Tsundere with abusive tendencies and attends a school located at an artificial island in Japan, where vampires and superhuman maidens live.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Professor (Sherlock Holmes) and I-U are defeated as early as the sixth volume. Given the Professor's relation to Aria's personal arc and how he was in many senses the entire series' ultimate antagonist, it is pretty easy to think he could have been saved for more action.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Many reviews point out that a series about a Sherlock Holmes female descendant paired with a male student with a badass Split Personality, in a juvenile police-mercenary school and among descendants of some other famous characters, sounds pretty awesome on paper. In this case, sadly, said premise was mostly spent in trite harem shenanigans led by a questionable light novel stereotype, all of which admittedly has its own audience, but is nowhere near how good it could have been.
  • Kinji's own descent from a legendary character (in this case, Kinshiro Tohyama) is evident yet at the same time never stated, unlike everybody else's lineage. It is unknown whether this will change in the series' future.
  • The Hysteria Savant Syndrome itself is an interesting idea, so much that some people believe it might have been a good premise for even an entire anime series. However, it is never explored too much. Later volumes of the light novel series delve deeper on it, but still not to a great extent.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: By Volume 4, we get introduced to a girl named Kana... who is actually Kinji's long dead brother, who crossdresses so he can activate Hysteria Mode at will.

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