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Rise of the Dark Magical Girls


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Jose Cruz



Joined: 20 Nov 2012
Posts: 1767
Location: South America
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 5:02 pm Reply with quote
Kimiko_0 wrote:
For me the recent trend of depressing magical girl anime is just the next step up from the old moe wave. From normal women and girls to being endearingly clumsy or childish to making them too stupid or incompetent to survive in real life. Next are magical girls who get stomped into the ground emotionally if not physically as well. "oh but look how bravely they persist even though they're hurt and crying". Nonsense, it's just about guys getting off on making formerly powerful girls suffer helplessly.
PMMMadoka could be excused as a deconstruction or whatever, but it's infecting too many other anime. Best example is Black Rock Shooter. BRS the OVA preceded Madoka and was although slightly dark, overall optimistic and had a happy ending. BRS the TV came after Madoka and was just depressing all over with a sad ending as well.


That argument (moe blobs are just a way of men to take revenge on women) was also made by a sociologist who wrote a book on Manga and it's impact on Japanese society and culture back in the 90's only a few years after the archetype appeared.

In my opinion it's actually very feministic to have shows like Madoka. In Western film for each women's death we withness on average 200 male deaths. In Madoka we only withness female deaths. Its pure feminism: women have all the power and make all the decisions of the whole show.

We see men suffering all the time in fiction. Nobody complains that's for women to have a revenge on male dominated society. Depiction of female suffering and violence is rare because society is male dominated, nothing is more feministic than a show that shows lots of women suffering and dying all over the place: it removes women from a pedestal and makes them human.


Last edited by Jose Cruz on Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:32 pm; edited 1 time in total
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maximilianjenus



Joined: 29 Apr 2013
Posts: 2858
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 5:12 pm Reply with quote
Blanchimont wrote:

Magical Princess Minky Momo?


yes, If I remember correctly.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 5:36 pm Reply with quote
Vaisaga wrote:
Just wish more people would understand that Madoka popularized such things, but didn't actually invent it.


Don't think it was just Madoka's popularity that invented the plague of "adult" dark-magical-girl deconstructions--
Not sure if there were quite as many actual Madoka fans as Japan wanted to depict there were, or as the fans themselves wanted to depict to make a point about their "lifestyle".

The whole anti-Otaku movement in mainstream Japan needs an easy symbol of why all those "work-shunning NEETs" are so attracted to watching anime...And since magical-girls are otherwise seen by mainstream society as just the toy-store little-girl appeal of PreCure, the entire Magical Girl genre is an extra appealing target to cynically deconstruct with hostility aforethought.
(Just remember the flak that early-anime fans in the US took for watching "that crazy little-girl show" Sailor Moon in the early 90's, before most regular folk knew what This Anime Thing was about..."Closet pedophile fans who just want to drool over cutesy underaged girls", anyone, sound familiar to Japan's current otaku-bashing?)

Because the magical-girl genre is seen as the, quote-fingers, "cause" of otakus' interest in anime, it gets the same degree of misplaced hostility as old cartoons used to get at Cartoon Network.
And those who lived through inanely bloodthirsty and bitter "deconstructions" of Hanna-Barbera on CN during the late 90's/early 00's--trying to take out their frustration on the fans by leveling every artistic and social grievance against the shows--have some idea what magical-girl otaku are socially going through right now, even from their own industry.
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Artesox



Joined: 19 Dec 2014
Posts: 90
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:23 pm Reply with quote
The article does get the overall idea kinda right, shows with "magical girl" elements focused on an adult and typically male demographic did make a shift from comedies that played with the idea of action scenes to action/drama series.

It would have been better however if it had mentioned the demographic question. Daytime shows focused on little girls are a whole different world from the stuff that air on midnight and is focused on adults (mostly male). But still, nice article, most of the takes on the genre are big piles of Misinformation. [Even the comments are better than usual, only a handful of chaps calling stuff like Yuki Yuna a clone, only one friendo trying to put it in a "wanting to watch little girls suffer" perspective. Nice.]

The focus on battles has been a thing since archetypes like "transforming girl" (minky momo, akko-chan, creamy mami) and "witch princess" (sally, megu-chan, minky momo) which dealt with actual magic started to be substituted by the post-Sailor Moon battle focus. The fact that nowadays Precure basically monopolized the genre also helped this shift.

maximilianjenus wrote:
one of the very first magical girsl shows had the main girl eventually run out of magic so she could not try to save the world anymore, after a self-talk on being able to try and save the world even without magic, she is killed by a toy truck, so as mentioned, the dark aspect has always been there, one way or another.


Calling Minky Momo one of the first is bit incorrect since by the time it aired the genre was already 15 years old. Though I guess now that the Genre is 50 years old, it does kinda feel like an early title.

And it was not a toy truck but an actual truck. The scene is really shocking, even shooking, if you take the urban legend that links it to earthquakes happening seriously.

Parsifal24 wrote:
There have always been dark elements in Magical Girl series Majokko Meg-chan being the first such example


I'd say Mahou no Mako-chan is the earliest case of dark stuff. I have yet to watch it fully, but the first four episodes had some unsettling stuff.

Even back to the first one, Sally the Witch, you have a lot of bittersweet moments, especially on the episodes that dealt with witchery not being able to heal, one, in particular, ending with a little girl dying.

The ending itself is very bitter, even cruel, if you take as an example Urobuchi's description of why the ending of Madoka is cruel, which makes it sound very similar to the ending of Sally. (Which is a coincidence, as he had never watched MG before making madoka)
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Jose Cruz



Joined: 20 Nov 2012
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:35 pm Reply with quote
Madoka is special though because it was certainly the first major popukar mg show to be consciously dark and consciously violent. The rest were missing several elements of the whole deal that's present in titles made after Madoka.
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Artesox



Joined: 19 Dec 2014
Posts: 90
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:49 pm Reply with quote
Touma wrote:
Thank you for the article. It was very informative but I wish that it would have identified more shows, though this thread is helping with that.

The main value to me is in learning what shows I should avoid, which I think is at least as important as knowing what shows to watch.
I love the old magical girl shows such as Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach and even My HiME and My Otome, but I have not felt that it was safe to watch a magical girl show since I heard about Madoka.

Have there been any recent examples of the old style shows where love is stronger than hate, friendship is a force multiplier, and the girls have happy endings?


Anything that airs on daytime (namely precure) is pretty much unchanged.

On the nightime side. I'd say Wish Upon the Pleiades. is the most traditional of this decade's stuff. Though it is not a show based on magical battles like Sailor Moon.

In the past, I used to also mention Yuki Yuna. Which, which despite having dark moments, is still pretty much power of friendship and most of the time the girls are quite wholesome. (Even inspiring the fans to go around and do voluntary work in the coastal town where the show takes place)

Though with the latest light novel prequel (there are two, first one is getting an anime adaptation, the one I mention here is the second) it has really added some very dark content in the franchise, not exactly rivaling the author's other work (the edgy and kinda boring Akame ga Kill) in the edge factor, but surely adding some tint of cruelty that was just not there before in the anime or first novel.


Last edited by Artesox on Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
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killjoy_the



Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 2457
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 6:55 pm Reply with quote
Artesox wrote:
not exactly rivaling the author's other work (the edgy and kinda boring Akame ga Kill) in the edgy factor, but surely adding some tint of cruelty that was just not there before in the anime or first novel.


I keep forgetting somehow Akame ga Kill and YuYuYu have the same author. Mind-blowing.
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Kougeru



Joined: 13 May 2008
Posts: 5521
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:14 pm Reply with quote
Honestly getting really tired of Dark MAgical Girl. Daybreak was outright sloppy and overall bland. Yuki Yuuna tried too hard (maybe the new stuff will fix that) and it felt more rushed than anything. Mahou Ikusei on the other hand, really shines in the story department. It's not dark just to be dark (like the others felt they were) but it's dark because it needs to be. Powers having a "downside" like in spoiler[Yuki Yuuna] just force the "darkness" onto the viewers and are usually a weak excuse. spoiler[Yuki Yuuna] never properly explained WHY they down sides exist, like Madoka did.
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Lero



Joined: 13 Aug 2010
Posts: 42
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:40 pm Reply with quote
Paul Jensen should have at least mentioned the classic dark magial girls animes mentioned here already.


Kougeru wrote:
Powers having a "downside" like in spoiler[Yuki Yuuna] just force the "darkness" onto the viewers and are usually a weak excuse. spoiler[Yuki Yuuna] never properly explained WHY they down sides exist, like Madoka did.
Did you properly watch the series?


Last edited by Lero on Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:11 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Mew Berry



Joined: 02 Apr 2016
Posts: 186
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:47 pm Reply with quote
Another classic show with a more serious/melancholy tone was Nurse Angel Ririka SOS. It seems to be all but forgotten now which is really a shame.
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SaneSavantElla



Joined: 25 Jan 2013
Posts: 216
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 7:55 pm Reply with quote
gabuhaha wrote:
DRosencraft wrote:
I think that a lot of people forget about the rise of the "dark magical girl" genre is that it isn't unique to the magical girl genre. There has been a trend in anime in general for the last decade and a half or more for anime to become darker overall, with less glossing over the violent aspects that naturally already exist but went unexplored. Most anime always had violence, but it was generally "cartoon" violence - violence but with no one really bleeding, no one losing limbs, and certainly no one dying. You had people getting into grievous fights and the like, but the motives were always simplified, there was a lack of the sort of crude language that is more common nowadays.

I have to disagree with this. Part of the appeal of anime has always been that it's not just "cartoon" violence. Just to name a few dark shows/ova's/movies off the top of my head that were in the late 90's which would be before the start of your decade and a half cut-off: Perfect Blue, Serial Experiments Lain, Kite, Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal. Some of these are more psychologically dark but the point is similar. We just see more now since there's more anime in general.


Ditto above. DRosencraft got my attention at "no bleeding and no losing limbs" because I recall a lot of the first animes I've seen (which aired decades ago) have plenty of blood and flying limbs. In general I find older anime much grittier in both content and style. Granted most of these violent shows I've seen are relegated as OVAs, so they probably did not have a wider audience among non-Japanese fans at the time.
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TnAdct1



Joined: 30 Jun 2002
Posts: 117
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 8:44 pm Reply with quote
Kimiko_0 wrote:
PMMMadoka could be excused as a deconstruction or whatever, but it's infecting too many other anime. Best example is Black Rock Shooter. BRS the OVA preceded Madoka and was although slightly dark, overall optimistic and had a happy ending. BRS the TV came after Madoka and was just depressing all over with a sad ending as well.
Quoted for truth. IMO, Madoka Magica has ruined the mahou shoujo genre, with a lot of recent titles being "dark" in hopes of being the next Madoka.

I'm not saying being "dark" is bad, as I do like Sailor Moon and Utena. However, there's a big difference between those shows (they have dark elements, but they have plenty of light-hearted elements as well) and Madoka and the shows influenced by it (which is basically "let's be dark just because we can").
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Sakagami Tomoyo



Joined: 06 Dec 2008
Posts: 940
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:00 pm Reply with quote
Touma wrote:
The main value to me is in learning what shows I should avoid, which I think is at least as important as knowing what shows to watch.
I love the old magical girl shows such as Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach and even My HiME and My Otome, but I have not felt that it was safe to watch a magical girl show since I heard about Madoka.

I'm a little curious why My-HiME, which is an out and out battle royale with magical girls, is okay but others aren't. Not saying it's wrong of you to like that but not others, just seems a little odd.
kotomikun wrote:
And calling [Madoka] "dark" is kind of weird, because while it does go to some dark places, the overall message is hopeful--and not just in the ending, the message of perseverance and humanity's inherent goodness despite their potential for evil is always there, even in the most tragic scenes. That's important, because without that it really would be the showcase of sadism that most one-liner descriptions make it sound like. Most of its imitators (other than Yuki Yuna) didn't really get that part and just went for a "Magical Girls: Brutal Tear-Jerker Edition" concept.

It is still fitting to call Madoka dark, as opposed to the mostly fairly happy and positive that most magical girl shows tend to be. It does contrast with the likes of Magical Girl Raising project because it takes a glass-half-full approach compared to the glass-half-empty the arguably less imaginative imitators have, but there's still a lot less in the glass than, say, Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura.
Artesox wrote:
And it was not a toy truck but an actual truck.

Truck that was carrying toys is what he meant, not truck that is a toy. The way I hear it, there was a bit of reality subtext there when the toy company sponsoring the series pulled support thus potentially ending the series, so the show's makers put that little bit of not-so-subtle symbolism in.
TnAdct1 wrote:
IMO, Madoka Magica has ruined the mahou shoujo genre, with a lot of recent titles being "dark" in hopes of being the next Madoka.

Much like there were plenty of anime that tried to do what Evangelion did without really understanding what Evangelion did or why it did it. And like that situation, some will try to copy it, most will do their own thing but take a couple of cues here and there. Those that copy it will mostly fail and be forgotten, one or two might get it more-or-less right but still be overshadowed by what they're copying.
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Artesox



Joined: 19 Dec 2014
Posts: 90
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 9:14 pm Reply with quote
TnAdct1 wrote:
Kimiko_0 wrote:
PMMMadoka could be excused as a deconstruction or whatever, but it's infecting too many other anime. Best example is Black Rock Shooter. BRS the OVA preceded Madoka and was although slightly dark, overall optimistic and had a happy ending. BRS the TV came after Madoka and was just depressing all over with a sad ending as well.
Quoted for truth. IMO, Madoka Magica has ruined the mahou shoujo genre, with a lot of recent titles being "dark" in hopes of being the next Madoka.

I'm not saying being "dark" is bad, as I do like Sailor Moon and Utena. However, there's a big difference between those shows (they have dark elements, but they have plenty of light-hearted elements as well) and Madoka and the shows influenced by it (which is basically "let's be dark just because we can").


Not only you are wrong, but you still go and say "quote for truth". Talk about adding insult to injury.

First thing first. You overestimate the influence of Madoka. It was a late night show aimed at adult otaku, it had no impact in the beating heart of the genre that is the daytime young girl focused stuff. Confusing such things really makes your whole argument weak.

And otaku MG stuff in the 2000s had been mostly parody and spin-off stuff. With exceptions like Nanoha (which was still based on a VN character, but outgrew it). All we saw recently was a shift to more serious plots and less comedy. What a tragedy.

Finally, why the hell would any producer try to make the "next Madoka" when most late night MG stuff flops terribly with sub 1k BD averages all the time, especially if it is too similar to Madoka? For example, the stuff with shy protagonists like Madoka has mostly done poorly while the more outgoing and/or tomboyish MCs have done far better (Vividred (6k), Yuki Yuna (9k), Symphogear (16k as of the latest season).

It did happen to some extent in 2012-3. But by the end of 2013 there was already the completely opposite reaction. YuYuYu for examples had final designs dating from 2012 but it was only produced in late 2014, which isn't very usual.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Fri Dec 16, 2016 10:10 pm Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
TnAdct1 wrote:
IMO, Madoka Magica has ruined the mahou shoujo genre, with a lot of recent titles being "dark" in hopes of being the next Madoka.

Much like there were plenty of anime that tried to do what Evangelion did without really understanding what Evangelion did or why it did it. And like that situation, some will try to copy it, most will do their own thing but take a couple of cues here and there. Those that copy it will mostly fail and be forgotten, one or two might get it more-or-less right but still be overshadowed by what they're copying.


The good thing about the Sailor Moon S series is that it becomes a "dark" arc at the end--with Hotaru and Mistress 9--to ramp up the tension compared to the first two seasons, and let Uranus and Neptune bring in the self-examining question of "sacrifice", but it's not a dark SHOW.
It's not out to deconstruct its own genre, or throw artistically meaningful unhappiness and violence to point out the artificiality of a "happy" little-girls' genre, or look down on the cliche'd trope characterizations and meaningfully shame what the audience expects of it. Usagi and the others are still the same friends they were at the end of the R series, just that the odds for the story arc have been raised.

Madoka and its imitators are NOT interested in doing a good story with darkness, they're trying to use the darkness to make some Important (ie. recriminatingly self-loathing) Point about the genre, or its marketing, or who's "really" watching in the audience and why.
In Japan, to be over the age of twelve, let alone male, and watch magical-girl shows is to try and "escape from reality", so the big idea is to try and burst the balloon by bringing in as much harsh reality to de-trope the series as possible, as comment on the whole industry and mindset that's been created. That may be punishing the fans for the crimes of the genre, but given that most Japanese blame the genre FOR the fans (conjuring up easy-target images of closed-window hikkikomori who drool over 2-D cliche'-trope moe-blob girls, presumably because they're deathly afraid of the real flesh-and-blood articles), it's not a distinction that bothers them too much.
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