Librarianon

Librarianon

@Librarianon

Your local Librarianon

  • He/Him

Writer, TF Finatic, Recohoster, and Game dev. Wasnt able to post here as much as I liked, but I'll miss it and all of yall. Till we meet again, friends!

log in
Librarianon
@Librarianon
Inumo
@Inumo
leakedexperience
@leakedexperience

Why You Don’t See New Magical Girl IPs the Way There Used to Be (It’s Not Because of Madoka)

In today's post, H.C., having heard the fallacy "Madoka killed the magical girl genre and made everything into ironic parodies or nostalgia milking" one too many times, goes into the actual reasons you don't really see as many new magical girl IPs nowadays and discusses how people who often claim to be "defending" the genre are actually just as guilty of underestimating it.

(Click to read more!)

Inumo
@Inumo

Excellent article! Highly recommend reading for folks interested in magical girl as a genre. Two takeaways I had:

  1. I'm reminded a lot of how mecha anime fans will often call Evangelion a "deconstruction" of the genre, and treat things differently depending on if they were pre- or post-NGE. Of course, if you watch older mainstays like the original Gundam series, NGE doesn't stand out NEAR as much, and Japanese opinions reflect that; in Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saitō summarizes the show as "pretty by-the-books monster fights, though fans think Anno let his own mental health struggles show through too much in the back half." I know in mecha's case the issue may be exposure order; as I understand it Gundam Wing was the first Gundam series localized to the US. For magical girl, I think the fact that PreCure is the only long-running magical girl franchise—and unlike Gundam, it doesn't have a huge US viewerbase, not to mention its generally lighter tone/formula—means casual fans just can't incidentally discover HeartCatch PreCure, Lyrical Girl Nanoha, or really any other magical girl anime that set up or followed through on Madoka's serious tone. Also, let's be real, it's hard to get casual viewers to couch any media in a historical context if they aren't directly living through it. It's hard to couch things in a historical context in general, that's why there are professional historians! Best we can do is dispel the mythos of NGE & Madoka as Uniquely Special Shows whenever it comes up.
  2. This was more of a tangent in the article, but I appreciate the touch on media mix franchise structures! It explains why I feel I got something v different out of reading the Sailor Moon manga compared to people who watched the anime; I'm prolly gonna try going back and watching the show too now.

Glad my bookmarked #magical girl tag is paying off.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @leakedexperience's post:

ravenblooded
@ravenblooded

Excellent writeup! I felt like I learned a lot about the material factors behind the so-called "death" of magical girl anime. I had no idea all the shows being rebooted were published by the same magazine! I feel really silly that I'd never even thought about it.

Pretty Cure being ignored as a "culprit" by the western anime sphere in favor of Madoka betrays some pretty myopic tendencies on western fandom's part. I've enjoyed some Precure, but it also feels kind of stiffing that it's such a monopoly... it's just such a kodomo series. Also, I tend to like it when series "twist" the magical warrior formula by mixing in other genres (and other magical girl subgenres), whether it's a shoujo series like Cardcaptor Sakura or a seinen series like Madoka, and that feels like something easier to do with a fresh IP than a precure iteration.

Sadly this article does completely dash my idle dreams of a certain non-Nakayoshi, anime-original, distinctly-untoyetic series getting a new iteration. Cough. I'm not even a reboot lover; I just like it when a story is told differently. The "media mix" shows having different continuities between their mangas and anime is something I actively enjoy.

login to reply
leakedexperience
@leakedexperience

Thank you for reading! I will say that there are actually some benefits to PreCure having such a huge presence and consistent structure; one of my greatest joys every week is going on the #nitiasa tag on Twitter and seeing people compare and contrast what happened that week between it, Rider, and Sentai (which also change things up every year, so the chemistry between the three can change a lot) in a way that seems to completely transcend age and gender demographic expectations. Seeing an anime for young girls be treated like it deserves just as much gravity and respect as a "hero show" as two historically significant IPs that should be seen as diametrically opposite (live-action, predominantly aimed at boys, etc.) is something I still find to be refreshing even after all these years I've been following.

PreCure "playing it safe" in certain ways comes from the fact that Toei's lineage since the original Sailor Moon anime (and one especially pushed for by Seki Hiromi, producer for Digimon and Ojamajo Doremi) has a strong focus on accurately capturing what an average kid will be going through in daily life and what social conditions they'll be affected by, and its staff has shown awareness that they're dealing with an IP that's become a household name and that they have a responsibility to make use of it to reach out to kids in a way other IPs often can't. I even get the impression sometimes that certain people working on it really, really want to make sure that young girls will have inspirations to look up to every year.

But indeed, the trade-off is that it becoming a household name means everyone just accepts it as a fact of life and the demand for more variety in concepts goes down. 😭 Even with the toy monopoly in play, I don't think it's impossible to penetrate into the market, but it would definitely require a strong and daring concept to differentiate itself that I don't feel a lot of things have been up to lately. (But I can dream...?) (H.C.)

login to reply
leakedexperience
@leakedexperience

It only lasted four chapters and was never translated to English, so most people haven't! I've read it myself and I don't think it's as bad as the Amazon (JP) reviews made it sound, but even putting the controversial circumstances behind its creation aside, I can see why it made a bad impression out of the gate: it started off with the premise "two girls take up the title of Saint Tail" without answering any of the elephant-in-the-room questions that would naturally arise from that — especially considering that the original series had unilaterally framed "treating Saint Tail as an exploitable title instead of a person" as a disrespectful and psychologically damaging thing — that unless you were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that it planned to do something with that contradiction, it really did come off as a cheap exploitation of the IP and name without any regard for the original series. (H.C.)

login to reply
camfusedly
@camfusedly

After I left this comment, I saw that this series wasn't by the original artist, and I was very shocked. I had collected different series by Megumi Tachikawa that Tokyopop released (Dream Saga and Mink) and even though I'm way out of the target demographic these days I always kind of wondered what is up with the author and if she's doing anything new. I checked her website probably once every handful of years and it all just seems like old stuff. The idea of her coming back was exciting and it was disappointing to see... whatever this is!

I appreciate your insights! Sad to see Saint Tail get such shoddy treatment. :( Strikes me as disrespectful.

login to reply
leakedexperience
@leakedexperience

Tachikawa retired from creative work in 2019 (from what I understand, it had to do with family care), but she does at least hang around note uploading past stuff regularly, and she even sells digital copies of some old comics and doujinshi work! Also, the translation team that worked on retranslating Saint Tail is currently working on another previously untranslated series of hers, and the translator also said she's tentatively thinking of giving Mink a proper retranslation as well, so I would definitely recommend checking that out if you're interested! (H.C.)

login to reply
neckspike
@neckspike

Good writeup! I actually learned a few things.

Wanted to add about the Girls x Heroine series: the first series, Miracle Tunes, has been completely subbed in English, it was a passion project by Miracle Tunes Subs (MTSubs) and can be found around. All 5 have been subbed in French by PrettyTrad and I'm told the auto-translate on the web versions is pretty decent for those but I haven't gotten around to watching them personally. I enjoyed Miracle Tunes despite it having some cringey fatphobic and predatory homo jokes. The girls have relatable problems and worries outside of the magic stuff, the transformations are cute and fun, and the villains are amusingly silly and bumbling.

login to reply
hat-desu
@hat-desu

I love writeups like this. As someone unfamiliar with the magical girl genre as a whole, it always struck me as strange to hear people - who were also unfamiliar with it - describe Madoka in reference to it. They were describing it not by its merits, but by what it wasn't, which were tropes that they were assuming things about in the first place (not to mention thinking it was the first ever to be "dark"). It's not unlike how people will say they hate mecha anime, but make an exception for "the good ones" instead of discarding their bias.

(I'm glad to read a breakdown of Urobuchi's other works too - his "edgy" reputation and nickname among english speakers is pretty well known, but he has enough outside of just his darkest examples that it's always felt a bit pidgeonholey to still call him that so long after the last time it was relevant. As a Thunderbolt Fantasy fan I'm happy to see it cleared up, and a spotlight put on some of the more fun and positive aspects of his works. If anything, his merit is more that he is unafraid to cross that line, not that he always crosses it for no reason.)

I think seeing all the (un?)intentional slander of magical girls over the years has only fueled my desire to actually get into it proper and see for myself. The ironic parodies all making the same infantilizing jokes about them makes me feel spiteful, probably since it reminds me of how American media used to do the same thing to anime as a whole before it really hit its stride in the west.

login to reply
malymin
@malymin

Seconding Neckspike! There's a lot of interesting stuff the genre.

And Madoka is good, but it really isn't as much of a "subversion" as people say it is. Being tricked into a Faustian pact by a seemingly angelic mentor? The mid-story plot twist in Phantom Thief Jeanne (1998-2000). The granter of your powers wanting to see you, and everyone you care about, fall to tragedy and death and despair? A fairly early reveal in Princess Tutu (2002-2003). These are both shoujo, too, so it's not like these "dark" themes are exclusive to seinen series. And Madoka is hardly the first big popular seinen series in the magical girl genre: I remember when Nanoha was inescapable on TVTropes.

login to reply
leakedexperience
@leakedexperience

That reminds me, when the Magia Record anime first came out, you'd see tons of arguments over whether it was a worthy successor to the original, but when people were trying to claim the original was so much more subversive and "deconstructive", everything just kept boiling down to people actually saying "Magia Record's not edgy enough so therefore I'm declaring it as shallow." (H.C.)

login to reply