Forum - View topicANNCast - My Pet Maughanster
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mdreura
Posts: 106 |
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9/11 and the earthquake are a bit different. One is a human act and gets into all kinds of challenging issues of race and ethnicity and religion and international politics, while the other is a natural disaster that could have happened anywhere that we all can sympathize with. Besides, members of the Japanese art community have invited fans to watch the show in wake of the disaster. This is exactly the scenario it was made to warn people about after all: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150120036379320 |
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Myaow
 Posts: 1068 |
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I know exactly what you mean; way too often dudes (or even some ladies, sadly) use "girly" or "for girls" as an indicator of inferiority. When they like a series for women, they tend to make it clear that they love it in spite of its femininity rather than because of it. (For example, when talking about the super charming new My Little Pony show, guys often say "It's girly, but it's really good!" or worse "It's for girls, but it's not stupid!") While this podcast never really stepped into that territory, I do see it depressingly often. I think it really comes down to the fact that female-oriented anything is just less valued than male-oriented stuff in this society, and there's the idea that masculine is the the "default" (eg, all genders can enjoy it) whereas feminine is more "specialized" (and so only women should enjoy it.) And I'm not a guy so I can't really speak about the stigma against watching shoujo stuff as a man. But yeah that's kind of depressing. Let us share an Internet high-five, my fellow champion of mahou shoujo and awesome girliness! |
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CG-LOVER
 Posts: 355 Location: East Lansing, MI |
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I'm not saying that the first episode needs to be spectacular or anything, but it needs to at least be interesting enough to generate interest in the rest of the series, and I'm not sure if Madoka has been able to do that or not. Regardless of whether the content in the first ep. is important or not, it still needs to be interesting enough to warrant me continuing to watch the show. |
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CG-LOVER
Posts: 355 Location: East Lansing, MI |
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I see, that's a good point too. But like it was mentioned in the podcast, is the audience ready to sit through something like that yet? |
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Ojamajo LimePie
 Posts: 766 |
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I thought that the first episode did a good job of making the viewer want to know more about the series. The most intriguing question being the identity of the mysterious Homura, and why she knows so much. Ending the first episode with a bang (quite literally) was also a nice touch. |
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Mad_Scientist
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 3011 |
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Regarding Madoka, I can see where people such as Zac and Tim are coming from regarding episode 1, but at the same time, I don't.
I mean, I fully understand why people would say that the first episode should be a good indication of what the rest of the show is like (even though for many shows this doesn't turn out to be the case). After all, the first episode is often the only part of a show a lot of people will watch to decide if they like it, so it should be designed to grab people's attention. And I fully agree that the first episode of Madoka does not give a very good indication of what the rest of the series is like, and even after seeing later episodes (particularly episode 10) and discovering why things were done that way, I see why this would be viewed as a flaw of the series by most. But at the same time, the extremely negative reactions some people had to the story/characters of the first couple episodes is something I don't understand fully. The visuals and music were definitely the best parts of the first episode, but the story and characters didn't seem really bad to me, simply a bit overused and cliche. At least they were implemented well. For example, the teacher was a huge cliche, but also the only time I ever remember getting an actual genuine chuckle from a character of that type. And there were also a few good hints that there was something more to the characters/story than just a pile of generic cliches, and that, combined with the great style, made it seem to me like it was clearly worth watching at least the second episode. And the second episode, though lacking the "Oh my God what did I just watch" factor of the third episode, did certainly ramp up the indications that there was something more to the show than just a typical magical girls series. More than enough reason to watch the third episode, which has the aforementioned factor to it. Maybe it's just that a lot of the people who dismissed Madoka aren't fans of magical girl shows in general. If you don't have at least something of an appreciation for them, then early Madoka definitely won't make a strong impression. |
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 389 Location: Florida |
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The short answer: for about 25 years now, most of the popular "male-targeted" series have been intentionally including elements with the specific intent of appealing to female readers/viewers, and no corresponding intentional targeting of male readers/viewers has been undertaken across the board in female-targeted series. This is much more noticeable in shonen properties than seinen ones on account that seinen is such a broad category with such a high amount of variation; Golgo 13 is seinen, as is Yotsuba&!. Characters like Sasuke in Naruto or Sanji in One Piece are designed from the ground up in terms of appearance, personality, and relationships with other characters to appeal to girls. It's not a happy accident on the parts of the editors and writers that these characters catch on among fans in the ways that they do. The purchasing power of the fujoshi block is not something to be ignored, but the trick creators face is to not be too overt in attempting to lure that crowd in lest they alienate the male readers in the process. (Occasionally that does happen: it's not like guys are the ones who love Prince of Tennis so much to warrant those live-action musicals.) Fortunately, the female side of anime/manga fandom doesn't actually want things to be that spelled out within the work itself. After all, part of the appeal of pairing up Edward Elric with Roy Mustang (for example) is the notion that it's somehow taboo to be doing so: "we're not supposed to be doing this, but we are." But trust me, the creators know exactly what they need to do at this point. I consider the works that are meant to target males and females alike as separate from titles of the past which only targeted the one. For lack of a better term, I generally call them "neo-shonen" for the sake of distinguishing the fundamental difference in approach. I think some Japanese cultural critics may have categorized the material prior to the late 1980s as "black" and the subsequent as "white" but I can't read those texts and may have that backwards. I don't follow shojo that closely--I kind of only like the super-melodramatic stuff from the 70s and the modern stuff inspired by those--but from what I gather, it's not like there's anything deliberately placed within shojo titles such as Nana or Ouran High School Host Club to appeal to guys the way "the one with black hair will now spend quite some time handcuffed to the one with blonde hair" is. That to me is the most suitable explanation for why it's considered more "odd" for guys to watch shojo/josei than for girls to watch shonen/seinen. It's not as juicy a topic as "reinforcement of gender roles" or whatever people want to assign as the primary attribute, but it's far more tangible and easier to demonstrate within the works themselves. External societal factors may certainly come into play, but the "expectation" you speak of is planted within the context of the works themselves more than anything else. PS: with the possible exception of Pretty Cure, the magical girl genre has been pretty much completely taken over by the otaku market for the last several years as a result of Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura. In light of this, Madoka Magica being a subversion of genre convention strikes me as a wholly unnecessary endeavor; that's basically the key thing creators have been doing with the formula for the last several years! |
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GWOtaku
 Posts: 678 |
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I don't find myself disagreeing with Justin very often, but I find the noitaminA critique near the end of the podcast off of the mark. To recap, I mean the idea that it's now trending toward "the fantasy of the anime world" in contrast to programming that was, in Justin's words, "realistic, different in how it was approached as anime, and had real style to them" (the dialogue occurs w/ about 9 minutes left on the podcast, for any who want to go back).
Let's look at the current context. Since the stellar House of Five Leaves/Tatami Galaxy lineup a year ago there's been Shiki, sure, and there's been Fractale. But there's also been Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime) and Wandering Son, which really aren't of the same type--for heaven's sake, Wandering Son might have a niche audience by default, but surely a show purporting to address transsexuality in kids just starting to hit puberty sure isn't treading in old & safe territory! This season we have C, which I'm honestly unsure about so far as whether it goes for that realistic-with-style approach or trends more toward the fantastical. Then there's AnoHana, seemingly a down-to-Earth program about one fellow getting an old gang of friends back together. What's coming this summer? Bunny Drop and this No. 6, which like C seems like it could maybe go either way. My point is simply that, at worst, of late noitaminA seems to be fitting Justin's critique only half of the time. "Anime fantasy" has never quite been a stranger to the block either--see Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales and Jyu-Oh-Sei. So the merits of Fractale aside (I'm far off from finishing), I think the evidence shows that it doesn't make a trend. Moreover, part of why I like noitaminA programming so much is that the block seems willing to put a pretty good range of material on the air. Sometimes, that happens to include fantasy. That's as far as it goes though, it seems to me. Oh, also, Princess Jellyfish was the one anime airing on noitaminA in Fall 2010. So you guys weren't forgetting anything. 
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Eastren_Drawings
Posts: 5 |
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For anyone interested in the hilarity that was Upper Deck vs. Konami
http://www.iptrademarkattorney.com/reply-konami-undisputed-facts.pdf comedy gold. |
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Baltimoron
 Posts: 43 Location: Charm City |
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Re: Yu-Gi-Oh! being a cursed franchise and the extremely limited release of the most recent movie
The couple that does my favorite comics podcast (www.awesomedbycomics.com - check out the episode from 6 March 2011) went to one of the few NYC screenings and had the joy of witnessing a mass walkout. The projectionist screwed up and started the movie with the first reel of Drive Angry. Ten minutes of the phrase "bad-ass motherfuckers" and gratuitous, explicit, live-action violence was enough to basically clear the theater except for the ABCP crew and a group of snarky teens who said "everyone, c'mon, sit down; they're gonna duel soon!" More evidence of the Yu-Gi-Oh! curse. |
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grooven
Posts: 1424 Location: Canada |
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Thanks so much! It sounded super hilarious the way Justin was describing it  !
As for Madoka I really enjoy it ^-^ So how much of it did Justin watch? I kind of wasn't clear on how much of it he saw. Just interested. |
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Dorcas_Aurelia
 Posts: 5344 Location: Philly |
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What about Shugo Chara? |
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fire_
Posts: 41 |
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Thanks Eastren_Drawings
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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Brand
 Posts: 1028 |
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I have to say I'm with Tim on Mononoke that is one of my all time favorite series and it's director (Kenji Nakamura) is my new favorite director. I also liked Kuuchuu Buranko (Trapeze) a lot (though not as much as Mononoke), so I will totally being checking out C this season as that is from him also. This is the kind of stuff I think we need to be seeing more of smart, well directed, and very original.
I also got to say I'm pretty tired of watching 14 girls talk about boys and such. As I've gotten older, I feel farther removed from that time of my life. I still like stuff aimed for females just an older demographic of females. I'm past the, I can tell this boy I have a crush on him, to stories about more adult relationships. Or I like stories about women making it with their career. It's not that those high school stories are invalid they just are not for me any more. I have been watching Madoka but for the first chunk of episodes I was watching it for the animation and art. I do think part way into it they story does get a lot more interesting. If it had never veered of that path though it just would have been a boring if pretty show. Fortunately it turns out that it gets much more interesting. |
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And, no, Madoka isn't aimed primarily at girls.
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