Forum - View topicRise of the Dark Magical Girls
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yurigasaki
Posts: 192 |
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i'm not really sure you could class either of those as magical girl stories persay -- they're similar to Madoka in that they're less an actual magical girl narrative and more a horror/supernatural story that uses a magical girl aesthetic to contrast with the darkness of its subject matter. like i said, it definitely spawned imitators but in the context of the magical girl genre and the amount of shows it covers, i don't think Madoka really made all that many waves, even if you do get people insisting that it 'saved' or 'revitalized' it. |
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harminia
 Posts: 1995 Location: australia |
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Honestly, I'm so sick of people acting like Madoka invented dark magical girl stories. 99% of magical girl stories have been dark in some way. I mean, in Sailor Moon most of the cast die every season.
Personally, one of my earliest experiences with a magical girl series that's dark is Pretear. Most of it seems happy, but the primary villain became that way out of despair (similar to Madoka), it deals with a character that is semi suicidal and who becomes a second villain in a way, one of the main cast betrays the heroine.... I mean, when you take a proper look at magical girl shows, you'll see that basically none of them are completely happy. They're pretty much all pretty dark at points. They just didn't end up beating you in the head with the fact like Madoka and its followers have. (That said, I do enjoy DMG stories, but every one that comes out is going to face a "rip off of madoka" view from a lot of people. Whether it's true or not is another matter...) |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Yes, but Madoka was the first to pioneer the new artistic-statement idea of making their "secret" audience intentionally feel like dirt for watching them. Other series followed after. |
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DRosencraft
Posts: 665 |
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This is in part what I was trying to get at earlier. Yes, there have been dark shows before, and yes, but the depiction of violence was more nuanced and suggested than implicitly depicted. The Sailor Scouts died constantly, but you hardly saw them bleeding, they didn't scream out in agony for some extended period of time, and they weren't shown with their heads being lopped off of limbs being severed. To the extent that it did happen in anime back 15 - 30 years ago, it was only a brief scene, or only in select few series that thought to push that envelope that far, and gained fame or infamy for it. Nowadays, most series hardly bat an eye at showing that sort of thing, or have pushed the envelope in terms of how much more they will show. Reading all these comments, I think there is a disconnect between what each person sees and values as precedent. Madoka's success is held up as evidence of its impact. But I tend to agree with others who deem its success to have little to do with relative impact. There are many examples cited here of series from which Madoka borrows its themes, some that predate Madoka by decades. Madoka exists in a vastly different landscape, with a plethora of factors contributed to its sales success. That is something completely different from a dissection of its impact on the genre itself and a debate on it changing the genre. To put it in a different perspective, you can look at the Marvel series. They have all been huge box office hits. But can any one of them be said to have brought anything new to movies or the superhero genre? No, they're merely successfully, skillfully, completed iterations of stories we've already seen or read decades earlier. That doesn't discount the success of the movie franchise, but that doesn't automatically win it acclaim as having changed movies or its genre in any way. Other movies will be compared to it simply based on its popularity and sales numbers, but that doesn't mean anything about whether it changed the genre in any way save inspiring projects that exist along similar lines. That doesn't mean any superhero movie that comes along is a copy of Marvel, just that a project that exists in a similar vein gets the benefit of the doubt that leads to a show being produced in the first place. That is what the real effect of Madoka has been. It existed as a story before it became an anime, and borrowed on themes that existed long before it existed and tried to use them. Other series that have come along after it also had their own stories and took to similar themes. The sole fact that they came along after Madoka became successful and failed to outdo Madoka does not automatically make them copies, only similar stories that someone was willing to produce thanks to the apparent success of one. But it isn't that they weren't being produced before. Madoka did bring attention to the genre, but it didn't really change anything about it that wasn't already there. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4374 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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and of course there's goals for some of those girls. especially when it comes to yuuzuki who's storyline and love interest would NEVER be used at all in any magical girl series pre nanoha and madoka outside of 18+ ero fanart doujins from comiket market. its more than surprising that the TCG for wixross have become ridiculously popular considering how dark their anime counterparts are, with the majority of them girls. while it wont ever eclipse the juggernauts that are magic the gathering and YGO, at least their anime versions are TEN TIMES better than YGO which unfortunately have become a major crapshoot and a butt joke of infamous proportions. |
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