Forum - View topicThe Enduring History of Magical Girls
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Goto page Previous 1, 2 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
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nargun
Posts: 925 |
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Genre isn't actually defined by content. (Genre is a manifestation of "tradition" in the artistic sense: chains of influence, shared audience. Culturally contingent in all sorts of interesting ways. I can prove this, but it's more hassle than I'm willing to go to at nearly 2am local time. Just trust me, or do some self-study.) Anyway, because genre is about tradition and influence a checklist approach focussing on the text without looking at the context isn't going to work. As it happens nanoha takes influence from magical girl shows but wasn't in dialogue with the existing magical-girl audience, so its claim to magical-girl-ness is... not 100%. Madoka worked within an audience expanded by nanoha so... yeah. Again. Trends, threads, traditions. Not checklists. (Foundation genre works are not created in the genre! Think a bit) |
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Swissman
Posts: 768 Location: Switzerland |
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I recently got a spin-off manga in french called "Dans l'ombre de Creamy" (in the shadow of Creamy", featuring a rival of Creamy who's popularity is on the decline and being overshadowed by Creamy Mami's rise to stardom. |
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zrdb
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I like Nanoha as much or more than the next person but come on now.......!!
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Rodem
Posts: 26 |
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Apologies , but I cannot take this article seriously/read the rest because of the beginning. If you claim Princess Knight was the groundwork for magical girls then the real groundwork would be Matusomoto Katsuji’s The Mysterious Clover (1934). And also the Takarazuka Revue, which was a major inspiration for Princess Knight. I suggest you read the blog posts of Rachel Matt Thorn, or perhaps do research on prewar shoujo writers or artists like Nobuko Yoshiya and Junichi Nakahara because the history of shoujo is so rich beyond Tezuka....
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Heishi
 Posts: 1319 |
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After all these years we still don’t have a Magical Girl with an explicit and canonical lesbian couple.
Don’t give me Nanoha, either. That show has no hope doing anything with Nanoha at this point beyond some pointless filler crap and an unfinished manga. |
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Jonny Mendes
 Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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You have explicit lesbian kisses in Fate/kaleid Liner Prisma Illya but... well... not really 
On Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka spoiler[The War Nurse and Rapture and also Barber Scissors Abby and The Queen. There's a lesbian sex scene in the last episode between Barber Scissors Abby and The Queen.] |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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The responses to the article in this thread have been quite mixed in their satisfaction of how the topic was handled. I think some negative comments could have been avoided with a bit more research, as "history" of anything is difficult in that you can't mention every detail throughout history but the criteria by which what and what doesn't get mentioned is very subjective. For the reader it's important to realize that the article never claimed it was meant to chronicle the entire history of Magical Girls, it actually says "The Enduring History of.." meaning the genre persists in entertaining fans. Personally, I think the article hit the mark in supporting that opinion, and did it by relating it all back to Osamu's Tezuka's huge influence.
I think Tezuka's success as an innovative figurehead of the early days of anime came from his ability to anticipate changes in the demands of audiences. He was as skilled in his storytelling as he was a businessman sensing the market. That may be why as a manga artist for an industry that thought it only needed to cater to young men, he could capitalize on the sudden need for a show like Princess Knight which filled the void for girls looking for more role models in their entertainment. The rest, as they say, was history. |
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Maidenoftheredhand
 Posts: 2633 |
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No mention of Princess Tutu makes me pretty sad
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Rodem
Posts: 26 |
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Forgive me if I mis-understood what you said, but entering the shoujo market wasnt Tezuka’s idea, it was a request from editors of an already existing shoujo magazine... (this info is available on pk’s wikipedia page) The problem I personally had with the intro was that, from how I interpreted it, it acts like princess knight was created from the ground up. Just adding one sentence like “Princess Knight itself was inspired by the all-female Takarazuka Revue, which was located in Tezuka’s hometown.” or perhaps a mention of The Mysterious Clover (which was the first manga to star an action heroine.) and then using the same thesis would be fine. But instead it erases the existence of all such influences and acts like Princess Knight was entirely an original idea. at least that’s how I understood it. |
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Kazemon15
 Posts: 400 |
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Same...nor My-Hime. Im sorry but whenever they talk about Madoka being sooo revolutionary, I just shake my head because everything in there had been done before. Alot of elements were also taken from My-Hime, from hiding the real reason for the girls being there, the age old ceremony that takes place and has happened for years, and right down to the manipulative helping mascot. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2116 |
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I've always found the point about the show up to that scene odd, because there was nothing typical about those first 2.75 episodes. The opening nightmare, the surreal environments and the witch labyrinths, everything about both Homura and Kyubey, the fact that it was in no hurry to actually have the heroine make the contract, the Faust allusions, the whole context of Shinbo/Urobuchi/Aoki/Kajiura working on an original late-night magical girl series together that informed how viewers approached it? If you look at what people were actually saying when those first episodes aired, everyone knew they were watching something very unusual, and that there was ugliness hidden. (IIRC, a fair number of people suspected Mami herself of villainous intent.)
That said, without denying the significance of Nanoha to otaku magical girl fandom in general (though its origins suggest it was in turn drawing on Pretty Sammy) or its very obvious influence on Shinbo's later series specifically (seriously, the friggin' ribbons!); I continue to maintain that everything it did with Fate either had been done better with Kraehe or would be done better with Homura.
I've always thought it felt a little weird to call Mai-HiME a magical girl show. Even the pre-HiMElander arc deviates from the template a lot more than the likes of Nanoha S1; it's almost more a general supernatural action show where all the magic-users are girls. |
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3652 |
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Mai-HIME isn't a magical girl show, but it does approach storytelling in what has since become the standard "Dark Magical Girl Story" of introducing magical powers whose immediate benefits quickly give way to nightmarish consequences (and emotional torture porn), which is why it so often comes up in discussions of the genre. The absence of magical girls is literally the only thing that separates it from the group, as the themes, tropes, patterns, etc. are all identical.
I don't know if it can really be called the first show of its type, these storytelling ideas go way back (e.g. the monkey paw), but it did tie them together in a popular, accessible package. |
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