the_sun_is_up | Entries tagged with magical girl project

Gotta clear some room on my harddrive, so it's time to watch some shitty anime that's been collecting dust in my to-watch folder.

Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream: a few assorted eps including the season finale.

I could describe PRAD as a Magic Idol Singer show except with ice skating and dancing instead of singing, but that would be quite deceitful of me because this is not a show about ice skating or magic or teenage girls — it's a show about clothing and the sale thereof. Yes, PRAD is one of those "30-minute commercial masquerading as a tv show" deals that were so popular in the U.S. during the 80's. Much is made of the girls' outfits, with one's skill at assembling fashionable ensembles being an important factor in one's success as an ice skating idol, and the main trio of girls even compete in a big contest where the prize is (drumroll please) a pair of shoes. The show also features some award-winningly terrifying uncanny-valley CGI whenever the girls have a dance/skate number, which is frequently. Possibly this was done as a nod to the arcade games upon which the anime was based? Dear Japan: Stop basing your anime on pachinko and/or arcade games. STOP IT THIS INSTANT.

All that said, this show pleasantly surprised me in that I didn't completely hate it. It's very by-the-numbers and was clearly made by a "creative" team who were half-assing it all the way through, but it wasn't as soulless and materialistic as it could have been. Actually I think the show's attempts at being un-shallow and heartfelt, though admirable, were a big detriment to it, especially in the finale. I don't know how to properly describe the facepalm-worthy crescendo of stupid that is the finale, but basically it's what happens when a writing team realizes "Shit, our show's climax is an ice-dancing competition. That's not epic enough! Gotta make it more epic, even if the result makes no sense whatsoever!" Just.... so stupid, y'all.

Happy Seven: all eps except the last one.

Jeez and I thought PRAD was by-the-numbers. Happy Seven is what happens when a bunch of peeps collaborate to make a moe magical girl anime with absolutely no new ideas in it. We will hit every cliché, gentlemen, every goddamn one! Starting with the characters: The heroine is a clumsy ditzy lovestruck pigtailed blonde, and her cohort includes a cool big sis with a hefty rack, a pair of loli twins who speak in unison and fall asleep at random moments, a dog-girl instead of the usual cat-girl who says "-wan" after all her sentences, a Rei Ayanami clone who goes all dere-dere for fishes, a braids-and-glasses techno-whiz chick, and a shy crybaby who turns into a tough bifauxnen when she transforms. The villains are a purple-haired purple-wearing haughty sorceress with a fan and the silver-ponytailed bishie student council president, and the token dude of the heroine's posse is a bland squinty prince-charming type whom absolutely every female in the cast wants to bone. The heroine, her two muggle pals, all seven members of the magical girl posse, and the purple villainess are all hankering for this guy's dull flavorless sausage, to the point where it becomes a major subplot that takes up a huge chunk of the runtime. I'd almost call this a harem anime, except that Mr. Blanderson is clearly not the protagonist.

The plot is what you've come to expect: Team of magical girls and token dude fight monsters that possess angsty people, resulting in a Victim-of-the-Week/Monster-of-the-Week formula, with the villains showing up occasionally to vaguely foreshadow some impending doom. The only unusual element here is that the heroine spends most of the show's run as a muggle; she starts off as a Victim-of-the-Week, and when the team senses a weird power lying dormant within her, they let her become their manager. Her powers only awaken during the finale. This could have made for an interesting twist, but unfortunately this show, like most bottom-of-the-barrel moe shows, spends most of its time faffing about with dull slice-of-life nonsense and finding every available excuse to turn the castmembers into chibis. There's even one episode that has zero monsters or magic in it and is just unapologetically filler. In a 13-episode series.

Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge: Gedou Otome Tai: a few assorted eps.

So this is a moe Cute Witch show about five witchy sisters who live amongst the muggles by day and fail miserably at being evil by night, blah blah slice-of-life and lulzy hijinks, but I really only have one thing to say about this show: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THE FANSERVICE?!?

I expect a dude-aimed magical girl show to have fanservice, but not quite this much and certainly not this, um, sleazy? Like, we're edging into Moetan territory here. The main source of creepy is the 2nd and 4th sisters, Maika and Kanashi. Kanashi's in elementary school but looks like a busty high-schooler. Maika's in high school but looks like a flat-chested braids-and-glasses elementary-schooler. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Maika has a part-time job modeling children's clothing for what I can only assume is some fetish magazine or website considering the way they have her pose (and yes, she even dons the stereotypical school swimsuit). Meanwhile Kanashi's whole shtick is that she looks like jailbait but is totally clueless about it, so she's constantly shown in male-gaze-o-vision and her male teacher repeatedly explodes into nosebleeds and then berates himself for having dirty thoughts about his pre-puberty students, har har what a knee-slapper. I guess it's okay to treat the ten-year-old like a Playboy bunny so long as she doesn't look like she's ten. /SARCASM

Jewelpet, Season 1: eps 1-4, unsubbed.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Even if I'd had English subtitles to liven up the experience, I doubt I'd have been able to stay awake through this one. Mostly it strikes me as an extremely poor man's Onegai My Melody.

Magical Canan: assorted eps, Spanish subs (which I don't speak).

Another one where I don't need to hear the dialogue to know that it's shit. This is a suitable-for-broadcast adaptation of a porno OVA, which itself was adapted from a porno game, which I strongly suspect was meant as a porno spoof of Cardcaptor Sakura. Hence the series carries the stink of lazy ripoff. And what it doesn't rip from CCS, it swipes from Pretty Sammy. The visuals also look incredibly cheap, to the point where I started wondering if I was watching the porno version by mistake.

At one point, the heroine ends up at a cosplay café in Akiba where one of the waitresses is dressed up as Mew Mint from Tokyo Mew Mew. I guess the writers had never heard of "Don't mention a better anime in the middle of your crappy anime."

Welp, that's 1 GB freed up. Now to dig into the umpteen bazillion TMM/MerMelo/Sugar Sugar Rune/CCS episodes I've got squatting on here.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Zero Punctuation

POP QUIZ: Name a bunch of narrative elements guaranteed to make pre-teen and teenage girls fork over all their money.

-mermaids
-princesses
-pop stardom
-Sailor Moon
-foofy dresses
-shirtless surfer dudes
-forbidden romance
-Gackt

In 2003, Michiko Yokote and Pink Hanamori had the bright idea to mash all these things into one guaranteed-to-sell manga. In fact, it's possible they were a little too confident in the failproof nature of their brainchild, because they don't seem to have put much effort into making it, y'know, not suck.

Mermaid Melody is bad. More than that, it's incompetent. I've read plenty of bad manga in my time, but even so, it's rare that I come across one that's fails on such a basic level of "how to tell a functional story with words and pictures." I hate to say it, but it's a lot like Hen in that sense. It's like...

Okay, so modern-day Hollywood puts out plenty of bad movies, like the Transformers films. But at least those films were made by people who grasp the basics of film-making and could probably have made something a lot better if they'd tried harder. On the flip side, you have the films featured on MST3K and Cinema Snob where the creators were so incompetent that they couldn't even keep the boom-mike out of the camera's view.

What I'm saying is: In Mermaid Melody, that boom-mike has a starring role.

Oh fuck these analogies, I'll just show you:

( Cut for large images )

But let's leave the details aside and widen our scope a bit: What about that failsafe premise I was praising before? MerMelo is about a bunch of mermaids who transform into idol singers and fight the forces of evil with their voices. It sounds like a pretty winning concept, but it's brought down by one big problem: MerMelo's heroines fight by singing. In a manga. Manga being a solely visual medium.

This ensures that nearly every single fight scene in MerMelo lasts a mere two pages. Each fight consists of three steps: 1) the heroines show up and say their In The Name Of The Moon speech, 2) the villain-of-the-week grimaces and yells some variant on "I'll get you next time, you meddling kids!" and departs, and 3) the heroines say their closing catchphrase: "How'd you like an encore?" That's literally it. Seriously, between steps 1 and 2, they may as well write the words "Insert song performance here" because we never get to see the girls sing for more than a page, nor do we see any of the lyrics. It's possible to depict singing in a soundless medium and still make it interesting — Full Moon Wo Sagashite did a pretty good job with that — and a few of MerMelo's battles at least make a vague attempt at being cinematic, but most of the time they don't even bother.

This also has the side effect of making villains look even more ridiculous and trivial than they usually are in this genre. The villain keeps sending his minions out on missions to kidnap the mermaids for use in his evil plot, but the minions always attack the mermaids head-on instead of using subterfuge, and the mermaids' songs always defeat the minion-of-the-week in one hit. These villains are so easily beaten and so disorganized that they can't possibly pose a threat.

Speaking of laughable villains, the main villain's consort is the resident Dark Magical Girl, a fallen mermaid princess named Sara. Her deal is that she was in love with a human who dumped her, and most of her dialogue is wangsty moaning about how no one can possibly understaaaaand how she feeeeels oh woe is me, I am literally the first person to get dumped in the history of everything. It's pretty insufferable, especially when we find out that he only dumped her for the sake of her kingdom.

Back to what I'd tentatively call the "combat": Fighting one's enemies via song is already a rather shaky concept, but MerMelo exacerbates this towards the end of the first story-arc by throwing in a bunch of shallow nonsensical bollocks about believing in yourself — for example, Lucia's given a magic harp with no strings, but she's able to play it because she belieeeeeves hard enough. Belief as a weapon can work, but here it's almost insulting how pastede on yey it is.

Another plot element that annoyed me: In the first volume, Lucia finds out, to her surprise, that she's a princess. She's spent all thirteen years of her life as a mermaid, and yet her caretakers and friends failed to tell her that she rules the top half of the Pacific because... she's still young? We never get a clear answer. Given the melodramatic tone of this manga, I assumed they included the "I'm a princess?!?" reveal in the name of creating cheap drama, but no, it's totally underplayed. It's like, "Oh by the way, you're a princess," "Oh that's a surprise, I guess." We don't even see the full reveal — it's shown in a flashback.

As for the non-plot parts of the manga, aside from the feeble comedy I already mentioned, it's mostly just a hurricane of fanservicey shojo clichés. I even started playing "spot the clichés" to entertain myself, but I'll need a separate post to list 'em all.

Anyway, final verdict on Mermaid Melody: an evil genius concept sunk by embarrassingly incompetent execution.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Parts the Clonus Horror - MST3K

OKAY OKAY OKAY. There was that Magical Girl Project thing I was doing. And still am doing! I've just been lazy about posting.

Today it's time to take a voyage into the Magic Idol Singer subgenre, which is a distinct niche unto itself despite producing only about 8 shows over a 30-year period. Lately I've been reading Full Moon Wo Sagashite, which I've seen held up as the pinnacle of the subgenre. However, I've been holding off on talking about it, because Full Moon is one of the later entries in the genre, and I've heard that its approach is rather subversive. To understand the rebellious present, we must first examine the stodgy past, i.e.: Creamy Mami, the first Magic Idol Singer.

Creamy Mami was a 1983 original anime by Studio Pierrot; Full Moon was a 2002 manga by Arina Tanemura, adapted into a heavily cut-down and fillerized 2002 anime that I haven't seen. And right from the start, the journeys of their respective heroines are drastically different.

First off, Yuu winds up becoming Creamy Mami entirely by accident. She helps an alien, and he rewards her with the power to turn into a sixteen-year-old. In Episode 2, she's wandering around town in her older form, when she's spotted by a music exec and dragged into singing in a televised solo performance, filling in for an idol who's running late. By contrast, Mitsuki becomes Full Moon almost entirely by her own design. When she bumps into a couple of shinigami by chance, she interrogates them about their powers and asks them to make her older, specifically because she wants to attend a singing audition with an age limit. The shinigami grant her request, and she goes to the audition and blows everyone away. Then she gets an agent, releases a single, and quickly works her way towards fame in a (I assume) more conventional way than Yuu's serendipitous "discovered on the street" debut.

Second, and closely related to the above, Yuu has zero interest in singing prior to becoming an idol. In fact, when she first gets kicked out on stage, she uses her powers to summon a magic microphone which invents a signature song for her, teaches her the song, and gives her the talent to sing it, all in the blink of an eye. Mitsuki, on the other hand, has a lifelong passion for singing, to the point where she refuses lifesaving surgery for her throat cancer because she doesn't want to lose her voice. Her singing talent is all her own — all the shinigami do is remove the throat tumor when she's aged up, so that she can sing at full volume.

Third, both girls' powers are restricted by a one-year time-limit, but for completely different reasons. Yuu's time-limit is arbitrary; the alien just gave her a year's worth of powers. Mitsuki's time-limit exists because she's fated to die of throat cancer in one year, so her powers will only be relevant until then.

Fourth, while Mitsuki wants nothing more than to be a singer, the Creamy Mami writers made the bizarre choice of having Yuu dislike being a singer at first. After her debut performance, Yuu reflects that it was fun but she wouldn't want to do it again, and it's never made clear why. She spends most of Episode 3 avoiding the manager who discovered her and who is now searching for her Cinderella-style. In the end, he ignores her protests and basically badgers her into becoming one of his full-time singers. I'm guessing this was done as a cheap attempt at creating conflict and drama, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. The target audience of this show is little girls who are dying to become a glamorous idol singer; why make the heroine be a girl who rejects that life and has to be strong-armed into it? If you're going to make a shameless wish-fulfillment anime, you could at least have the protagonist appreciate her amazing good fortune.

As you've probably guessed by now, I infinitely prefer Mitsuki's origin story. I like that she has so much agency; she knows what she wants, and she pursues it. Even before getting powers, she's already plotting to sneak out of her grandma's house and go to that audition. When she happens to run into a pair of empowering entities, she seizes the opportunity and milks it for all it's worth. I also like that music and idol singing is woven into her character and her life pre-magic-empowerment, and even into her past (her dead father was an idol singer); it makes the magic idol singer gimmick feel more natural and in sync with the story, rather than just a random fantasy getting dumped on somebody with no interest in or connection to it. And most of all, I like that Mitsuki blatantly asks for her powers. Most Magic Idols and Magic Warriors either have to be wheedled and nagged into accepting powers, or they're just empowered automatically, without their consent or input. It's very rare and refreshing for a heroine to go "I want powers. Hey you, magical person, give me powers!"

The one area where Mitsuki's agency falters is in the individual transformations. Yuu (like most MGs) has a magic object with which she can trigger her transformation; she has total control. Mitsuki has no magic object; instead she must rely on her male love interest to trigger her transformation by snapping his fingers, and I'm sure there's a very interesting essay about gender politics somewhere in there. However, the only problem with this that Mitsuki encounters is when she needs to transform but her love interest is far away; to fix this, she has a magic whistle to summon him, and I don't recall Takuto ever ignoring the whistle or refusing to transform Mitsuki, although the author definitely could have explored that possibility if she wanted to.

Current Mood: full
Current Location: au restaurant
Current Music: The Atomic Brain - MST3K

It occurred to me that although I'm a fan of the Precure franchise and have watched assorted episodes from each of its 7 iterations, I've never watched the ending to a Precure anime.

I guess it's because your average Precure season is around 50 episodes long and stuffed full of irrelevant filler, and my attention span just isn't up to the task. So I figured hey, why not skip over all that middle stuff and just watch the endings.

So I did!

Futari wa Pretty Cure: Eps 46-49

Short verdict: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
( Long verdict )

Futari wa Max Heart: Eps 45-47

Short verdict: More appropriately epic, but kind of repetitive.
( Long verdict )

Splash Star: Eps 46-49

I'd heard from the approximately three people who actually watched Splash Star that despite its mediocre rip-offy appearance, it was actually pretty hardcore, particularly in its ending.

Short verdict: Holy shit guys, Splash Star's ending is HARDCORE.
( Long verdict )

Yes Precure Five: Eps 46-49

Short verdict: WUSSY.
( Long verdict )

Yes Precure Five GoGo

Short verdict: Couldn't be arsed to watch it. Has it even been subbed yet?

Fresh Precure: Eps 46-50

Short verdict: BADASSSSSSSSSSS
( Long verdict )

Current Mood: PUMPED after that last one
Current Music: But ohgod the theme songs for this franchise are all so annoyingggggg

Toei has released some info and pictures for their newest Precure installment: DokiDoki Precure! So now it's time for my yearly tradition of mocking the Precure staff's abject lack of imagination while lobbing popcorn at the screen.

First of all, I had to take a moment to hurl at the title. It's just a pet peeve of mine, but I absolutely loathe it when shows include the word "doki" in their title and/or episode titles because a) it's way overused, to the point that some of these characters should be suffering heart failure from all the doki-doki-ing their shows are doing, and b) shows with "doki" in the title are practically guaranteed to be nauseatingly sugary girls' shows or nauseatingly sugary moe garbage. We're not getting off to a good start here, Toei.

But let's talk about the characters. Just as Smile Precure's cast looked suspiciously similar to the Yes Precure Five cast, with Doki it appears that we're cribbing from Fresh, with a side order of Suite. Our heroine is a blonde who wears pink, and her posse is composed of a) the love child of Cure Pine and Cure Muse wearing Cure Sunshine's outfit, b) the love child of Cure Berry and Cure Beat, and c) the typical long-blue-haired chick descended from Cures White, Aqua, and Beauty. I'm also amused to note that the heroine has pink hair in her civilian form, but blonde hair in her magical form, though I guess both of those colors would look equally unrealistic to a Japanese person. However the biggest thing they copied from Fresh is the playing-card-suit motif (although Fresh probably ripped it from Shugo Chara). The heroine's theme is hearts (natch), and her blue friend's theme is diamonds, just like Cure Berry.

And of course their personality types match their appearances pretty neatly. Our heroine is headstrong and altruistic, although unusually she's actually good at schoolwork instead of being a complete airhead. Judging by her poses, the Pine/Muse lovechild is already looking to be the cutesy moe-appeal one just like Peace and, well, Muse. (And ugh, she's doing that awful pigeon-toed saggy-knee thing, save me!) The blue one is the sum of her predecessors, being the quiet, level-headed, brainy one who stands for intellect and is on the student council, though much to my surprise, she's not a lonely rich girl. And the purple side-ponytail one is, wait for it, "a cool and beautiful super idol and extremely popular fashionista" who "dislikes fighting alongside others, preferring to stand alone." Ding-ding-ding! You have just won the purple lottery! If there was a threeway between Angel Salvia, Mew Zakuro, and Cure Beat, this chick would be the result. Though I like how she has tomboy-short hair in her civilian form; usually the aloof onee-sama type has long hair.

Fortunately, the girls' names are significantly less stupid than last year's. I did have to laugh when I saw that the heroine's name is Cure Heart, because of course it is! Most MG shows can't stop banging on about the power of heart, so may as well just cut to the chase and name your protagonist "Heart." However Cure Diamond and Cure Rosetta are both lovely and reasonably dignified names, and Cure Sword is downright badass. There's never been a Cure named after a weapon before, and apparently her main attack is called "Holy Sword" which sounds awesome. Wait a sec, Cure Sword harbors guilt over a past failure and she's a foreigner on Earth who originally hails from the magic world? Okay we're definitely doing a throwback to Angel Salvia here. (That's not a complaint — I'm actually kind of charmed that Doki is taking notes from a property as old and forgotten as Wedding Peach.)

Bitching aside, I do quite like the character designs for Doki, especially the swirly style of the hairdos and the spiky white accents on the outfits and the asymmetry. The designs may be predictable but at least they're well-executed.

I have to say, I'm surprised that Toei revealed all the character designs right off the bat, seeing as how Heartcatch and Suite tried to keep us in suspense about who'd turn out to be a Cure. I wonder if there'll be any DMGs in this iteration. Probably not, since the playing-card motif only allows for four posse-members.

Current Mood: snarky
Current Music: Cinema Snob

Recently I watched the first five episodes of Mai-Hime. Coincidentally, somebody on Tumblr asked me the other day whether or not I'd categorize Mai-Hime as a Magical Girl show, and since I was already planning to make a post on that exact subject, I guess I should go ahead and post it already.

Is Mai-Hime a Magical Girl anime?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer:

Evidence For
-It fits the bare minimum criteria I established at the start of this project: its protagonists are a) female and b) magic-users.
-It fits the second criteria I established later in the project: secrecy. The heroines must keep their powers and mission secret from the muggle masses.
-The girls' magic power is exclusive to females.
-In keeping with the Magic Warrior subgenre:
--The girls' main mission is to protect humanity by fighting monsters of the week (or at least that's what they're initially told).
--The girls' powers are limited.
--The heroine is a newcomer to magic, having spent her childhood as a clueless muggle.
-The girls use a Greyskull phrase to call out their Childs — in this case, simply shouting the Child's name.
-The girls each have a glowing mark on their bodies that signifies their special status. This isn't exclusively a MG trope, but it shows up enough that I think it warrants a mention. When the Inner Senshi were discovered in Sailor Moon, they each had their respective planetary signs show up on their foreheads, and the Tokyo Mew Mew girls each had a Mew Mark that indicated which animal they were fused with.
-I've heard that there are some characters who fit the Dark Magical Girl archetype, though I'll have to watch further to confirm that.

Evidence Against
-No transformation. This is a biggie, because a lynchpin of the genre is the dual identity, the switching back and forth between two personas which is signified by changing one's physical appearance. However Cardcaptor Sakura proved that you don't need to transform in order to be a Magical Girl, but Sakura did adhere to the following criteria which is...
-The girls' magic is not dependent on an object. The formula for Magic Warrior shows dictates that the heroine is unable to use magic until she is given a magical object which is the key to her power. Take that object away, and she goes back to being a powerless muggle. For most girls, this object is their transformation device. For Sakura, it's her bird-head wand. But the Mai-Hime girls don't have anything like this. They use magical weapons, but they weren't given them — instead they conjure them out of thin air at will. And when we see Mai discover her Hime powers in the first episode, her powers just awaken on their own; she doesn't require an outside party's help to unlock/bestow them.
--On the flip side, Mai does require an outsider's guidance to successfully unlock her full magical powers and summon her Child. And the girls' powers are tied to the Hime Star, so you could consider that to be their key object, although that's a pretty big stretch.
-No "In The Name Of The Moon" speech.
-No foofy outfits.
-No cutesy mascot mentor.
-No alias.
-No dual identities? The girls don't change their appearance/clothes/name when they use their powers, and so far I haven't seen much done with the dual identity theme that forms the core of the genre. However I guess you could argue that the Childs serve as the girls' alternate identity, and the Child-summoning stock footage does bear some resemblance to a transformation sequence, particularly Mai's which also features a shot of a sword plunging out of her chest à la Utena.

Current Mood: sleepy

So I've been sick with a cold for the past two weeks (probably got it from working as a parking cashier at the county fair) but now that I'm feeling better, here's my promised second post on Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, about all the things it does right.

As I mentioned before, I was first drawn to KKJ because I'd heard that it was one of the more dark and subversive entries in the genre. Specifically, I'd heard that it did a lot of the same things that Puella Magi Madoka Magica did except, y'know, 10 years earlier. And indeed, I was not disappointed — there is some pretty awesomely deconstructy stuff going on here!

But first, here's a plot summary: Maron Kusakabe is Kaitou Jeanne, reincarnation of Jeanne D'Arc and teenage Magic Warrior on a mission from God. Her job is to fight demons who take up residence inside beautiful paintings and then possess and corrupt nearby humans. Unfortunately, whenever she exorcises a demon from a painting, the painting disappears, so the public all think she's an art thief. As if battling demons and evading the muggle police weren't enough, she also has a rival in the mysterious Kaitou Sinbad, whom Maron theorizes must be working for the Devil.

So this is all pretty standard stuff, right? Ohoho no, it is not. Most of what I told you in that plot summary gets kicked in the head by the end of the series as Maron discovers that her magical girl gig is not at all like what she thought it was. This is one of those stories where all the big selling points are also MASSIVE SPOILERS so...

( KKJ as a Magical Girl deconstruction, in list form. Contains HUGE SPOILERS for the whole series. )

In the end, KKJ is one of the strongest deconstructions of the Magic Warrior genre that I've seen so far and a very interesting read. If only the romance subplot wasn't so obnoxious, I could whole-heartedly like this series.

Current Mood: sleepy

Prompted by the MG Project, I've been buying and reading a lot of shojo manga lately. This is unusual for me because I usually approach reading shojo with the same caution I'd use when defusing a bomb. However the Magical Girl genre tends to be on the friendlier, less brain-bleach-necessitating side of shojo, and indeed I've been enjoying myself a lot as I plowed through assorted volumes of Sugar Sugar Rune, Shugo Chara, Sailor V, and Mermaid Melody.

Then I read Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and I was like "Oh yeah, that's why I hardly ever read shojo. BECAUSE IT IS FREQUENTLY HORRIBLE."

I picked up this title because I'd heard that Arina Tanemura's work tends to be among the more angsty, dark, and subversive in the Magical Girl genre, and KKJ in particular had some later plot twists that really intrigued me. And Tanemura's art is quite good, even if her art style is the most terrifying goddamn thing I've ever seen. It's like shojo on steroids. THE EYES. THEY ARE TOO BIG.

Having finished the series, I find KKJ frustrating because it's such a mixed bag. In fact, I'll break it down:

As a Magical Girl story, it's quite good.
As an epic womance between a magical girl and her muggle bff, or between a magical girl and her mascot mentor, it's also pretty good.
As a het romance, it is freaking awful.

At this point, I'm going to dive into spoiler territory because I can't rant properly otherwise.

( KKJ as a het romance — making me throw my book at the wall a lot )

In short, the het romance portion of KKJ is up to its eyeballs in everything I absolutely despise about shojo, which really soured the whole experience for me.

This post is getting long, so next time I'll talk about all the things that KKJ does right, especially in the vein of Dark And Subversive Magical Girl Narratives and Ladies Talking To Each Other And Being Ambiguously Gay.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: The Cinema Snob reviews American Commando 3

Lately on the Magical Girl Project, I've been focusing my researching on merchandise. Specifically, I've been mostly ignoring the requisite deluge of posters, stationery, coloring books, figures, dolls, love-pillows, and other random crap, instead focusing on the toy versions of objects that appear in the actual shows — mostly wands and transformation trinkets — because this is the area of merchandising that seems to have a visible effect on the evolution of the genre and on how these shows are made.

There are several common tropes in the Magical Girl genre which I think can be traced back to this type of merchandising:

1) Magical Girls have more than one magical doodad at a time. In the early years of the genre, heroines would either have no magical doodads at all, or they would have just the one. As the genre progressed, it became standard for each Magical Girl to have at least 2 magical doodads on hand at all times — usually one for transforming and one for attacking — and sometimes more than that.

2) Magical Girls periodically switch out older magical doodads for newer ones. This trend started with Hana no ko Lunlun, who traded out her magic brooch for a different one halfway through the series. This mid-season switch was continued by Minky Momo and the Pierrot girls, except they also traded out their wands for new ones. Then Magical Girl shows started running longer and the switching-out of magical doodads became something that happened every season, starting with Sailor Moon, who burned through 5 transforming devices and 6 wands plus the disguise pen and the Holy Grail over the course of the anime.

3) Magical Girl doodads are designed with their merchandising potential in mind. Somebody on TV Tropes quipped that in the Precure franchise, "it's usually obvious that at least one magical trinket per season was designed to be a toy first and an implement of magical ass-kicking second," and this phenomenon is not limited to Precure. Sailor Moon, Doremi, and other merch-driven shows with high ratings tend to feature magical devices that a) blatantly look like they're made of plastic thus making it easy to replicate them in toy form and b) look like they'd be fun to play with but not so practical in a fight. As technology has marched on, the genre has seen a wave of cell-phone-looking magical doodads, and shows as far back as Minky Momo and the Pierrot oeuvre have consistently used doodads that emit colorful flashing lights when certain buttons are pressed, making the average Magical Girl's arsenal look less like mystical artifacts summoned from a foreign world and more like stuff you'd buy for your 5-year-old at Toys R Us.

The designers working on these shows are obviously smart enough to know that the success of their work is largely reliant on having a solid merchandise deal that sells well, so it's easier and more practical to just design the show's magical doodads to look and act like toys to begin with, rather than designing them as realistic weapons and then having to toy-ify them later. I've heard that when Neon Genesis Evangelion was in development, one of the hurdles it faced was that the merch people wanted Anno and co. to redesign the Evas to look more like standard mecha, because they were concerned that it would be difficult to make plastic toys out of the curvy, fluid, muscular Evas.* Apparently someone talked them into it, but if they hadn't changed their minds, I imagine it would have been a big problem. If the toy people don't want to make merch for your show, you're screwed, so it seems like the average Magical Girl bling designer tries to avoid this situation altogether by keeping the need for merchandising in mind right from the get-go.

4) Magical Girl doodads get added for an anime adaptation. Saint Tail for example has a golden gem-tipped cane that she uses in the anime, and I've heard that she didn't have any such thing in the original manga. Why did the anime creators add it in? Because merchandising, that's why. On my merch searches, I've also encountered a number of doodads that appeared in the anime version of Rayearth but which I don't recall being in the manga. Since the only bling in the Rayearth manga was the girls' swords, which would be difficult to toy-ify, I'm guessing that's why the anime added some extra doodads to sell as toys.

Anyway, I think it's interesting how something like toy merchandising can shape the evolution of a whole genre and its aesthetics. However there are some shows that avoid these merch-driven tropes, and they tend to be a) shows aimed at dudes, because the toy merch is almost always restricted to the shows aimed at little girls, and/or b) artsy auteur-ish shows like NGE whose creators apparently didn't need or want to rely on merch money to get their show off the ground. Shows like Devil Hunter Yohko, Princess Tutu, Earth Maiden Arjuna, Pretear, Uta Kata, Mai-Otome, Saint October, and mostly recently PMMM avoid excessive bling, design their bling to look like it was made from precious metals rather than plastic, and/or give their heroines practical-looking conventional weaponry.

* According to Wikipedia, Anno designed the Evas that way on purpose: "With recent robot anime series there have been too many instances of toy makers sticking their big noses in from the design stage so they can get a spec that is easy to turn into a toy. I don't want any interference from toy makers, so I'm going to design a robot that just cannot be turned into a toy." Lol oh Anno. a) Your resistance was futile and b) no wonder your show ran out of money.

Current Mood: cold

One of the big challenges of this project has been sub-genre identification. It's pretty clear that within the Magical Girl genre, several sub-genres exist: TV Tropes identifies the three big ones as the Magic Warrior, the Cute Witch, and the Magic Idol, and I came up with a few more out of necessity, like the Psychic and the Object User. However the question is, how does one determine which sub-genre a given show belongs to? What are the specific attributes that define each sub-genre?

So here are some of the main parameters I've established for determining which sub-genre a given show fits into:

Natural Magic vs. Given Magic: I remember

sailorptah mentioning that people in PMMM fandom were debating whether Kyubey gave Madoka her magical powers or whether she had latent powers all along and Kyubey simply unlocked them. I was perplexed by this because to my mind, "giving magic" and "unlocking magical potential" are functionally the exact same thing.

A defining trait of the Magic Warrior is that she spends the first chunk of her life as a muggle, totally unaware of the existence of magic up until the fateful day (usually occurring in the first episode) when she is contacted by some magical entity who lets her in on the masquerade and gives her a magical object that lets her transform. Regardless of whether her magic is "given" or "unlocked," the Magic Warrior requires the assistance of an outside party to kickstart her magic-using career.

For example, compare the origin stories of Wedding Peach and Futari wa Precure: In Wedding Peach, Momoko is the daughter of an angel and her friends are all reincarnations of angels, so it seems obvious that they all possess an innate genetic magical power. In Futari wa Precure, the two mascot mentors crash-land into Nagisa and Honoka's houses apparently by chance and recruit the girls to be Pretty Cures because they're the most convenient choices; no mention is made of destiny or innate powers or the girls having some kind of specialness that makes them prime candidates — they're just a couple of muggles who were in the right place at the right time. Yet despite these differences, the heroines of these two shows get initiated in basically the same way: they're visited by a magical being who tells them that magic exists, gives them a magical doodad, and asks them to transform into a superhero in order to save the world and go fight that monster that's trying to kill you as we speak.

This is what I mean by "given" magic: a Magical Girl who cannot access her powers and isn't even aware she has them until an outside party comes along to enlighten her and unlock her potential, or a Magical Girl who is a totally ordinary muggle with no hidden powers at all until an outside party comes along and hits her with the empowering stick. And while PMMM was actually pretty clear in establishing that Madoka is the former (otherwise why would Kyubey be badgering her all the time), other shows can be pretty vague about how much of the heroine's magic was given and how much was innate potential, thus reinforcing my belief that they're functionally the same.

On the other hand, there's "natural" magic, a feature of the Cute Witch and Psychic sub-genres. A natural magic-user doesn't need the help an outside party to access her powers — instead her powers just manifest on their own, either at birth or gradually as she grows older. Harry Potter, for example, is a natural magic-user because even before he learned any spells or was told about the hidden magical world, he had already discovered his ability to make weird things happen. With a typical Cute Witch, we don't even get to see her discover her abilities — at the start of her story, she's already been using magic for a while and is totally used to it. A natural magic-user also usually doesn't require a magical object to cast magic. A magic wand certainly helps, but even if you take it away, a Cute Witch can usually still do a little magic. The earliest Cute Witches didn't use wands at all, simply pointing or winking to cast magic, and Psychics are similarly unfettered by a reliance on doodads. By contrast, if you take away a Magic Warrior's transformation trinket, she's as powerless as any other muggle.

Unlimited Magic vs. Limited Magic: Another key difference between Cute Witches and Magic Warriors is the range of powers they have access to.

Magic Warriors usually have "limited" magic, meaning that they can only do a few different magical things. Look at Sailor Moon's powers: she can transform, she can disguise herself, she can purify monsters with a finishing move, she can throw her tiara like a frisbee, she can sometimes bring people back from the dead, and she has the standard superhero powers like strength/speed/jumping/resilience/etc. And probably some other ones I forgot. That might sound like a lot, but it's actually quite restrictive when you think about it. Can Sailor Moon make a freshly-cooked steak appear out of thin air? How about a house? Can she split a preexisting house into two houses? Can she summon the guard dog of hell? Rearrange furniture with her mind? Make someone's dessert disappear from under their nose? Bestow sentience and mobility onto potatoes and carrots?

These are all tricks I've seen Cute Witches do, because a Cute Witch usually has "unlimited" magic: she can theoretically do anything with her magic so long as she has reached the required skill and power levels. Also, since Magic Warriors have a clearly defined job description and mission (save the world) their powers are specific to the task at hand. Sailor Moon can't make a steak out of thin air because that ability isn't applicable to monster-fighting; her abilities are limited to only those she needs in order to do her job properly. Cute Witches, on the other hand, have missions that are less pressing or less specialized, and their job description is usually "being a magic-user," so they have more freedom to use their magic on silly things like steak-conjuring and vegetable-animating.

The "limited" magic that characterizes Magic Warriors (and Magic Idols, since they have a similarly specific mission) can be traced back to the old Object User genre, in which the heroine's power was entirely tied to this one doodad that could perform a very specific type of magic and nothing else. In fact, the very first two Magical Girls demonstrate the "limited"/"unlimited" dichotomy quite nicely. Akko, the first Object User, was given a magic mirror that had exactly one power: it could turn her appearance into whatever she wanted. A pretty versatile power, but still. Sally, the first Cute Witch, was the complete opposite: she could do anything that popped into her head simply by pointing her finger. The only limit was her imagination.

Foreign vs. Native: This one's pretty simple: Cute Witches are usually from another world; Magic Warriors are usually from Earth. On the rare occasion that a Magic Warrior is born on another world (as in Hyperspeed Grandoll) or was from another world in a previous life (as in Sailor Moon), she'll still have spent the majority of her life on Earth and will have no memories of life on the other world (until the plot gives those memories back). This ties into the "natural vs given" dichotomy and the difference in origin stories: a Cute Witch's homeworld is usually a magical world, so she grew up with magic all around her and is totally used to it, while a Magic Warrior, even if she has latent powers, grew up as a muggle on Earth and so has to be informed about the magical world's existence.

The last two decades have seen the appearance of a few "home-grown" witches who break with tradition by being from Earth, such as in Ojamajo Doremi and Sasami MG Club, but the majority of Cute Witches are still foreigners.

Fighting Evil By Moonlight: At the end of the day, I think there's one thing that separates the Magic Warriors from everyone else, and it's right there in their name: Magic Warriors fight evil. Cute Witches and others might fight evil on occasion, but Magic Warriors have it as their main gig. Note that "fighting" doesn't have to involve violence. Perhaps "opposing" would be more accurate, because some Magic Warriors conduct their battles nonviolently (like Princess Tutu) or by proxy (like My Melody). The term "evil" is also open to interpretation. In Cardcaptor Sakura, for example, the Clow Cards aren't evil, they're just chaotic and resistant to capture, but they also cause a lot of trouble when out of their box, which is where Sakura comes in.

Hybrids: Obviously not all shows fall neatly into these categories, which brings us to a sub-genre that I call the MW/CW Hybrid. Basically if a Magical Girl a) has fighting evil as her main gig but b) comes from a foreign magical world, that's what defines a Hybrid show. Hybrids are usually "natural" magic-users, since they come from a world where magic is ordinary, but they're also usually "limited" magic-users, because they have a specific job to do and only need the skills necessary to do it. Examples of this mini-genre are Panty and Stocking, Otogi Jushi Akazukin, Onegai My Melody, Super Doll Licca-chan, Jewel BEM Hunter Lime, and Shamanic Princess.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Sensual World - Kate Bush

So I've come down with a case of the summer lazies, and while I've been continuing to work on the MG Project, this "work" hasn't involved doing any write-ups because writing takes effort and thought and all that stuff that's so hard to summon when it's summer. In such cases, it often takes something extreme to jolt one out of one's couch-potato-ness. In my case, it was something extremely bad.

I just watched the first episode of Twin Angel: Kawaii Moe Desu Barf on Crunchyroll, and while Moetan and Ultimate Girls were painful viewing experiences because of their intense sleaze, Twin Angel: Technicolor Yawn was painful because of its unrelenting badness. The opening credits alone was one of the most agonizing things I've ever had to sit through. Whoever told the voice actresses to sing like that should be taken out behind the barn and shot. And after all the vapid cutesy giggling in this episode, I'm pretty sure I never want to hear anyone laugh ever again.

I could attempt to explain why this thing is so godawful, but Gia Manry at ANN did it better, so I'll just quote her: "You know that show that non-anime fans vaguely imagine anime as being? The one always parodied by fictional anime-within-anime (like Genshiken's Kujibiki Unbalance)? High-pitched, overly colorful, and usually mind-numbingly stupid? This is that show."

Actually I'm quite thankful to the ANN preview folks because their universally revolted reactions to this thing sufficiently prepared me for what lay ahead, while also providing some much-needed snarking. Although Theron's review had one unintentionally funny part in it that almost broke my brain:

"[the bouncing tits] and certain other elements suggest that teen and preteen girls are not the only target audience here."

I... wait wait wait. Stop the presses. You're saying that certain elements of this episode suggested that teen/preteen girls aren't the only target audience.

Dude, you've been reviewing for ANN for a while now, so I'm just going to assume you were high when you watched this episode, or maybe the show's awfulness caused some kind of temporary brain damage. Because there was not one single second of this episode that was even remotely aimed at anyone female, much less at teen/preteen girls. For fuck's sake, literally the third shot after the opening credits end is a close-up of the heroine's lovingly animated bouncing tits, complete with "boing boing" sound effects. And that's only scratching the surface. I mean, I'll freely admit that I'm terrible at telling the difference between girl-aimed anime and guy-aimed anime, but Twin Angel: Jiggle Jiggle is one of the most blatant examples I've ever seen of "made for the horny moe otaku and no one else" anime. (Plus there's the fact that it aired at 1:45 in the morning. Yeah, that was a pretty big hint.)

Also, I was reading some of the forum comments on the preview guide and became annoyed at hearing people defend the show by saying that it's a parody. So let's get something straight, boys and girls:

When you have a show that takes a bunch of really painfully tired clichés and plays them absolutely straight, that is not a parody. It might be attempting parody, but if so, it is failing miserably. To be a parody, you have to actually comment on or mock the thing you're parodying; you have to take all those clichés and show us why they're stupid and bad and don't make sense. Hell, one of the earliest definitions of the word was "a parodie, to make it absurder than it was" — the key being "absurder." If your "parody" is indistinguishable from the thing you're parodying, you're doing it wrong.

Dai Mahou Touge is a parody. Puni Puni Poemi is a parody. Even Ultimate Girls had certain elements of parody to it. Twin Angel: Unicorn Puke is just a lazy crappy rip-off.

As a final note, Dear Japan: Please stop naming blue-haired characters "Aoi." It stopped being clever a long time ago.

Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: The Cinema Snob

Okay. Okay. Yeah.

So this Magical Girl Project thing. In an ideal world, I would watch every episode of every single show included in the project, but for various reasons, this just isn't practical. As a compromise, I've been trying to watch at least a few episodes of every show, so that I can have a first-hand opinion on it and get a general feel for what its deal is. Unfortunately, this does mean every show, even the horrendously bad ones, and there are two shows in particular I've been dreading having to watch. Moetan was one. Ultimate Girls is the other.

To explain why, allow me to simply describe the premise of the show:

Our leads are a trio of schoolgirls, natch. One is a shy, quivering, trembling moeblob who's frequently on the verge of tears, one is a perky otaku chick, and one is an ice queen who secretly has a quivery moe filling. They're tasked with protecting Tokyo from giant Godzilla-esque monsters. They do this by transforming into giant versions of themselves, clad in superhero spandex, so that they can fight the monsters head-to-head. Unfortunately, their power is on a time limit: shortly after transforming, their clothing starts to shred off. However this is a good thing, because their superpowers run on something called M.O.E., which is a silly acronym that basically means "female shame at being naked in public." The more embarrassed the girls become at their disintegrating clothes, the higher their power level rises.

The otaku chick is the only one who reacts to the shredding clothes with some level of poise by going "Eh, I'm a badass superhero, a little nudity isn't going to hurt," but of course since their powers run on shame, this means that she's the weakest of the bunch and gets curb-stomped on her first mission because she failed to generate the necessary levels of humiliation. On the other hand, the ineffectual wibbling too-moe-to-function protagonist is the one with the strongest power, even though she's also the least effective fighter, the most reluctant about the whole superhero gig, and the most traumatized by the public nudity. Early on, before the source of their power is revealed, the ice queen chick has the bright idea to grab some banners off a nearby skyscraper and fashion herself a makeshift bandage bikini. But of course this cripples her power, and the mascot mentor tells her that she needs to strip off the bandages right away and succumb to her shame if she wants to beat the monster.

Also, the news media nicknames the three girls based on their breast sizes.

I just. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH THIS, YOU GUYS. Like, I would try to do some kind of feminist analysis of this dreck, but my feminist faculties have thrown up their hands and given up. No scratch that, they haven't just given up — they're gone, they've bounced, they're sacked out on a beach in Tahiti knocking back daquiris. But do I even need to analyze something like this? I feel like it kind of speaks for itself!

As for its place in the Magical Girl genre, Ultimate Girls is going about its work with tongue firmly in cheek, spoofing both the MG genre and the Ultraman franchise. The show is actually kind of funny when it's not being awful — when the girls transform in eps 2 and 3, we're treated to a photograph of the Tokyo skyline with an arrow pointing to a location in the city, and a caption saying "So-and-So is transforming here, please wait," and there's a loading bar showing the girl's progress — and there are some neat shout-outs to other Magical Girl shows, like in the first episode when the heroine ends up in a cosplay outfit of Corrector Yui (both shows have the same director). I feel like there's a halfway decent fun silly Magical Girl parody in here somewhere, buried under all the DEAR GOD PLEASE STOP.

Also, Ultimate Girls is (obviously) a very extreme example of making a Magical Girl show for a male audience. It's like the showrunners were trying to wring as much cheesecake and moe pandering out of the genre as was humanly possible. I haven't yet mentioned the transformation sequence, in which the robotic mascot sticks out a rod that looks suspiciously like a penis, and the girl grabs ahold of the rod, causing the mascot to have an orgasm and spray thick white fluid all over the girl which then turns into her new clothes. Then we're treated to several zoomed-in shots of her spandex-clad crotch. It's some of the sleaziest, creepiest camerawork I've ever seen in a fanservice anime. This may be a show about superheroes who are powered by shame, but it's clear that the showrunners have no shame whatsoever.

Speaking of the showrunners, Ultimate Girls was made by a studio that appropriately enough call themselves "m.o.e." The acronym stands for "Masters of Entertainment." Seriously. Guys, methinks you would've been better served to just paint a target on your chest, especially since you're the studio who made CosPrayers. And indeed, the Irony Gods did not let this act of hubris go unpunished: Ultimate Girls was the last show made by the studio, in 2005, and since then it looks like they've kicked the bucket. Pardon me while I completely fail to hide my glee.

Current Mood: facepalm

Today on the Magical Girl Project, we have the other Proto-Magic-Warrior OVA that came out in 1985 alongside Genmu Senki Leda and which also features a chainmail-bikini-wearing sword-swinging heroine: Dream Hunter Rem.

Dream Hunter Rem is a peculiar case of a series that started out as hentai but switched to ecchi after the first episode. I've heard of this happening in between adaptations, like a porno game or OVA that gets adapted into a clean tv series, but never within the same series. In Rem's case, the switch happened because the creators found out that people liked the plot. Hey, I guess some people really do "read it for the articles"! Having seen the first episode, I now understand why: the porn bits are actually rather sparse and not very good, while the plot and premise are much more interesting. The show also spawned a two-episode sequel, New Dream Hunter Rem, which came out in the early 90s.

At this point I should admit that all my opinions on this show should be taken with numerous grains of salt because I could only find it in unsubbed form. It's kind of difficult to analyze a show when you can't understand what the hell anyone's saying, but I'll try anyway!

Rem is a green-haired teenage (?) girl who moonlights as a paranormal private detective. Basically she enters peoples' dreams and does battle with the demons that possess and torment people while they sleep. In the dream world, she wields a laser sword, and in the real world, she has a revolver loaded with silver bullets and a couple of rocket launchers mounted to her car. She's assisted by her adorable sidekicks, a kitten and puppy who can transform into larger ferocious versions of themselves during battle, and she also has a Buddhist monk friend, Enko, who always swings by in the nick of time to save Rem whenever she's in a sticky spot, although the show uses this device way too frequently for my liking. I guess it's because this is an ecchi show, and the male viewers like seeing cute girls get tied up, but the show's over-reliance on having Tuxedo Monk rescue Rem from James-Bond-esque death traps kind of undermines her status as a badass action hero.

However Rem does get in some pretty memorable moments of badassery, like when she's about to get chomped by a huge toothy monster, so instead she dives into its mouth and slices it apart from the inside, or in the hentai pilot episode, where she's getting tentacle-raped by a monster's glowing laser-tentacle-wang, and she retaliates by shooting the laser-tentacle back out of her cooch and spearing the monster with it. Like, holy shit, girl must do a lot of Kegels. She also has some very impressive driving skills. Seriously, she would not be out of place on the streets of Los Angeles.

As far as its place in the MG genre, Dream Hunter Rem is a Proto-Magic-Warrior show like Cutey Honey and Devil Hunter Yohko, and therefore it doesn't adhere to all the conventions we've come to expect in Magic Warrior shows because, well, those conventions hadn't been established yet. For starters, Rem is naturally magical, as opposed to being given magic; in fact, her magic comes from her ancestors just like Devil Hunter Yohko's does. Also, the show starts in medias res; unlike in most MW shows which open with the heroine receiving her powers, it's clear in the first episode that Rem's been doing this for a while now. Rem does have the requisite cutesy sidekicks, but they actually help out in fights rather than dispensing wisdom, guidance, and new gadgets. Speaking of gadgets, Rem has no transformation trinket, although she does have a very brief transformation sequence, and instead of magic wands, she uses conventional weaponry, though she does use a magic flute in one episode.

As a side note, I'm intrigued that all four of the pre-Sailor-Moon Magic Warriors (Cutey Honey, Rem, Yohko, and Leda/Yohko) used the same thing as their main weapon: a sword.

Also similar to its Proto-Magic-Warrior peers, Dream Hunter Rem is very enthusiastic with the gore and tits. Rem gets all the flesh melted off her bones twice (although she quickly pops back to life again which is pretty funny) and the show is a bit torture-porn-ish in places, since most of the demons' victims are attractive young women whom we get to see ripped apart in loving detail. At one point, Rem also gets impaled by three giant phallic spikes which made me rather suspicious. On the tits side of things, in addition to Rem's amusingly inadequate "armor" and the frequent strategically-placed clothing damage she sustains, there's also an episode where Rem attends a girls' school and of course they milk that for all it's worth. Though I guess I can't really complain about that one because woohoo LesYay!

Anyway, I'm enjoying these old Magic Warrior shows. It's fun to see what the genre was like before it really became a genre. And I'm amused to note that there's one way in which Rem does adhere to genre tradition: she dresses almost entirely in pink and red.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: MST3K - Laserblast

It occurs to me that I've had a lot to say about Japanese magical girls over the course of this project, but what about magical girl shows made outside of Japan? Because they do exist: Winx Club and Angel's Friends from Italy, Jem and the Holograms from the US, W.I.T.C.H. from a joint effort of Italy/France/Disney, Petit Petit Muse from Korea, and doubtless some other ones I haven't yet heard of. Well I decided early on that because of the large cultural differences at work, I was going to have to relegate the non-Japanese MG shows to a separate project and restrict the main MG project to just anime.

However, yesterday I discovered that someone had put most of the dubbed episodes of Angel's Friends onto Youtube, so in the name of outrunning the copyright police, let's take a little detour and talk about those Italian magical girl shows.

I've heard mostly positive things about WITCH, though I've never watched it myself. Winx Club on the other hand, I have a more personal relationship with. I watched a bunch of the first season back in high school when the dub was first being broadcast stateside, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit how much I liked it because from what I can remember, it wasn't very good. What can I say, it was a guilty pleasure.

Both WITCH and Winx premiered in 2004, which brings us to Angel's Friends, which debuted in 2009 and which I'd barely even heard of until I stumbled across it on Youtube. Angel's Friends centers around the old idea that every person has an angel and a devil sitting on either shoulder, giving conflicting advice about how to act. In this story, our heroes are a group of teenage female angels, their antagonists are a group of teenage co-ed devils, and the two groups split their time between attending their respective angel/devil schools and fighting with each other over the hearts and minds of their designated humans. Also: teen-oriented morals, transformation sequences, a hawt bad-boy love interest, shopping, sparkles, giggling, and the power of FRIEEEENDSHIP.

And I have to say, Winx may have been a guilty pleasure but at least it was a pleasure. I can't say the same for Angel's Friends. I had to force myself to keep watching this thing for research purposes, and so I'd have a license to bitch about it. After a few episodes, I think Stockholm Syndrome started to set in, but the experience was still about as pleasant as eating heaping spoonfuls of the sugary synthetic powder inside a Pixy Stix.

In fact, it'd be quicker to just list off all the aspects of Angel's Friends that prompted me to make the Excalibur face:

Strike 1: There's a friendship speech in the second episode between two girls who have only just been introduced.

Strike 2: The main romance appears to have been written by a Zutarian. I am so not kidding, the first thing that popped into my head when I realized who was going to be boinking who was "Ack, it's Zutara! It's come back to haunt me!" The devil love interest even looks like Zuko — same hair color and style (circa Season 3), same anemic skintone, and he even has a red mark over his left eye!

Strike 3: The angels are led by a man; the devils are led by a woman. The main villain, who's out to get both the angels and the devils, is also a woman.

Strike 4: Too much glitter. TOOOOOO MUUUUUUCH.

Strike 5: The way in which the main conflict between angels and devils is set up and regulated is the most contrived clumsy-ass shit I've ever seen. I seriously laughed out loud when the head angel was expositing about how the rules of this universe work.

Strike 6: The art style. I think this might be an Italian animation thing — while current anime frequently annoys me by visually infantilizing its female characters, Italian shows like Winx and Angel's Friends go too far in the opposite direction by making their female characters look like Bratz dolls: pouty lips, thick eyelashes, and supermodel-esque bodies. And there's something about their legs that I can't pinpoint but it always bugged me.

Strike 7: Speaking of Winx, the Angel's Friends tv show is pretty blatantly cribbing from it. I hate to use the term "rip-off," but I think it might be somewhat applicable here. From what I've heard and seen of the source material, the original Angel's Friends comics are markedly different from the tv adaptation, so it seems that the showrunners retooled the property to be more reminiscent of Winx in the name of the almighty Euro.

Strike 8: The animation. I'm a pretty terrible judge of animation, but there's something funky going on with Angel's Friends' animation and it never stops annoying the crap out of me. I especially notice it in the way the characters' hands move — like when they pick up an object, they don't look like they're actually making physical contact with it.

Strike 9: I think it was a mistake to have the heroine's ladybug mascot communicate with her via very soft buzzes. It makes the heroine look like she's constantly talking to herself, plus she always has to clumsily restate what she just heard the ladybug say for the audience's benefit.

Strike 10: The ladybug's name is Cox. It's pronounced like "cocks." I know, I know, this isn't the show's fault, it's just an unfortunate linguistic coincidence, but it still made every scene between the heroine and her ladybug unintentionally hilarious.

Although I will give the show this: it makes it all the way until the fifth episode before it sends the heroines off to the shopping mall. No seriously, as sad as it sounds, that's a genuine compliment; with a show of this tone, I'd expect the girls to be hitting the mall by episode three at the latest. And I admit to genuinely liking the cranky nasally-voiced devil chick; she was the only aspect of the show that actually made me want to keep watching. Just goes to show how much difference the right voice actor can make.

Anyway, I'm a little too braindead from sugar overdose to analyze this thing or tell you how it fits into the genre overall, but the one thing I can tell you about it is that it's baaaaaad. Don't watch it. You have better things to do. Now I'm going to go wash the Pixy Stix aftertaste out of my mouth by eating some bruschetta, an Italian import that is worth spending time on.

Current Mood: ugh
Current Location: actually the bruschetta is from Canada, go figure

Today on the Magical Girl Project, I'm sampling two shows with very similar premises from the same era: Risky Safety from 1999 and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar from 2001. Both shows involve miniature apprentice-level Magical Girls who travel to the human world in order to pass a test that will allow them to become fully-fledged magic users, with said test requiring the collection of MacGuffins. Both are also early examples of cutesy-wootsy Magical Girl shows made for a male audience.

A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is about an adorable pink-haired apprentice Season Fairy named Sugar. Season Fairies are in charge of creating weather in the human world; Sugar’s specialty is snow, which she creates by playing a magic flute. After arriving in the human world, Sugar promptly passes out from hunger and is discovered by the muggle heroine, Saga. Saga is a control freak; she likes to have her day all neatly planned out and diligently sticks to her schedule. However, now that ditzy, playful, fish-out-of-water Sugar is staying at her house, you can bet that Saga’s carefully-laid plans are all going out the window. Two of Sugar’s friends quickly join them, Salt the sun fairy and Pepper the wind fairy, and when you add the fact that Saga’s the only human around who can see the fairies, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~

Risky Safety is about an adorable apprentice shinigami named Risky who has come to Earth to collect souls. She happens upon the muggle heroine, Moe, who is depressed after being rejected her crush and is longing for death. However, before Risky can make Moe’s wish come true, she’s interrupted by her brain-roommate. See, Risky is sharing a body with an apprentice angel, Safety, and who’s in control of their shared body depends on the overall mood: happy events make Safety come out, sad events make Risky come out. The duo move in with Moe and continue to fight over her soul, with Risky trying to claim it and Safety trying to save it, and when you add the fact that Safety has a magical bow whose arrows can make people fall in love with the first person they see and the first arrow she fires accidentally hits a Pomeranian, you have a recipe for ~*~wacky hijinks!~*~

I was expecting my reaction to A Little Snow Fairy Sugar to being something like “UGH IT’S SO CUTE AND SACCHARINE I’M GONNA BARF.” However I was pleasantly surprised by how un-painful the experience was. Make no mistake, ALSFS has cuteness gushing out of its every twee orifice, but the cuteness has a certain Disney-esque sincerity to it that saves it from being nauseating.

Risky Safety is a more subdued affair, and the sweetness is balanced out by Risky’s more tomboyish, rude, and growly-voiced brand of cute. The quieter tone is complimented by a muted color palette of browns, greys, and creams, in contrast to the more candy-colored ALSFS, although I think Risky Safety is almost too muted, like someone leaned too hard on the desaturate button.

As far as content, both shows are Cute Witch stories at the core, with the added twist of the magical girls being miniaturized and invisible to everyone except their one muggle friend, whose role in the story is consequently expanded. ALSFS tweaks things a bit by having one of the heroine’s posse be a Magical Boy, and adding a couple more Magical Boys later on. Risky Safety is a more interesting twist on the genre due to the sharing-a-body schtick and the fact that the two magical girls are directly at odds with one another, and the evil-ish one is also the slightly more prominent one in the story.

An interesting thing about both shows is that they were among the earliest male-aimed Magical Girl shows on broadcast TV, coming soon after the success of Cardcaptor Sakura and a few years before Nanoha and the height of the moe craze. Also, both shows are almost completely devoid of fanservice and could easily be mistaken for kids’ shows. I don’t know if these two things are related, or how — you’d think the early male-aimed broadcast MG shows would be more fanservice-heavy than later ones because they’d be less assured of success and would want to hedge their bets with lots of attention-grabbing T&A.

Also I’d like to note that even in the short time I was watching and in spite of the size difference between the heroines, ALSFS managed to squeeze in the required Magical Girl LesYay Quota: Sugar really likes to kiss people on the cheek or nose whenever she’s happy, and the first time she does this to Saga, the latter gets all blushy and flustered. A+ effort, ALSFS.

Current Mood: hungry

Okay boys and girls, it's time to descend into the belly of the beast. It's time to examine one of the worst shows that the Magical Girl genre has to offer.

Because while I may have referred to shows like Wedding Peach and CosPrayers as the "unholy abominations" of Magical-Girl-dom, I was mostly being facetious. Aside from some gross T&A in CosPrayers, those two shows are pretty harmless, with their greatest crime being mediocrity. Neither of those shows made me feel like I needed to take a shower afterwards. Neither had me twitchily glancing over my shoulder to make sure the FBI wasn't peeking in my window. Neither made me feel queasy simply from knowing of their existence.

This is what sets them apart from today's specimen: Moetan. As you might have guessed from my intro, it's lolicon. It's a show made specifically for those guys who draw hentai doujinshi depicting Cardcaptor Sakura being brutally raped by anonymous disembodied penises. That group of people was apparently large enough that someone in the anime industry felt it was financially sound to make an entire show for that demographic and broadcast it on TV.

Also I just found out that the director of Moetan is the same guy who directed my beloved Getsumen to Heiki Miina. I may feel the need to sob loudly into my pillow during this review.

Actually I must be getting jaded, because the loli fanservice in Moetan didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I guess Kodomo No Jikan desensitized me to such things, or maybe I was distracted from the fanservice by some of the other stupid features of the show. For starters: What the hell is going on with the characters' ages?

Moetan presents us with a couple of heroines who are clearly children, and then it tells us that they're actually 17 years old. I can only assume this was a pathetically flimsy attempt to provide guilt-free lolicon — "she may look 10, but she's really 17, so it's okay!" — because there is no part of me that believes that the heroine of Moetan is 17. She looks like a little kid, she acts like a little kid, she dresses like a little kid, she walks like a little kid, she talks like a little kid, to the point where the whole "oh but she's rly 17, you guys" thing is just insulting our intelligence. If you're going to make a pedo-bait anime, you could at least own it.

However, I might be able to overlook the bone-headed "she's really 17" contrivance if the show itself didn't constantly keep banging on about it. The other characters will constantly tease the two heroines for looking like elementary-schoolers/behaving like elementary-schoolers/having the intelligence of elementary-schoolers, and while this is ostensibly just a way of provoking that cutesy "stop treating me like a kid!" reaction in the girls, I can't help getting stuck on the fact that the other characters are totally right. Moetan, why do you keep pointing out your own bad writing? Are you trying to do some kind of ironic self-referential humor thing? Because it's not working! If you know that making the heroine 17 was a stupid decision, then the fact that you did it anyway just makes it worse, and constantly pointing this out just makes you look even dumber.

Actually self-referential "humor" is a problem throughout this show. Moetan comes across as a weak attempt at parody, not understanding that a true parody needs to have more substance than just pointing at a trope and going "look everyone, it's a trope!" In the first episode, the transformed heroine teaches her love interest to say the phrase "Don't you think magical girls look the same after they transform?" in English. Moetan, congratulations on noticing something that everyone who has ever watched Sailor Moon has made fun of. But the show doesn't do anything interesting with the Clark Kenting trope, it just points it out, like the writers expect a gold star for having eyeballs in their faces.

This problem with channeling Captain Obvious isn't even restricted to the failed parody elements — the mascot characters suffer from it too. These mascots serve double-duty as the audience surrogate characters, meaning that they spend a lot of time drooling over all the hawt loli ass that's on display. But the writers apparently thought all that literal drool wasn't enough to get this concept across: the mascots also make frequent comments on how hot the girls' outfits are, how pervy the transformation sequence looks, etc etc, and dude. Dude. I FUCKING NOTICED. I noticed that the 10-year-old girl is wearing clothing that appears to be made of wet tissue paper. I noticed this because the camera ZOOMED IN on her extremely detailed ass and taint area SEVERAL TIMES. YOU DO NOT NEED TO POINT THESE THINGS OUT TO ME IN THE DIALOGUE.

Seriously, those bits of dialogue are like the show is throwing up a big neon sign saying "YOU MAY NOW BEGIN JERKING OFF." Sorry Moetan, but I'm pretty sure your audience starting doing that during the opening credits. I doubt they're going to wait for your prompting.

Umpteen paragraphs in, and I haven't even talked about how dull the show is. Thank god for the nauseating bits of "I DIDN'T NEED TO SEE THAT" loli fanservice jolting me into wakefulness, because aside from that and the weak attempts at humor, this show is just a boring pointless slog. There's hardly any action in it! I mean surely a big part of Magic Warrior shows, especially those aimed at men, is rousing bombastic fight scenes, but so far Moetan has devoted only a tiny bit of its time to Monster-of-the-Week fights. Things perked up a little in Episode 4 when the Dark Magical Girl showed up to wreck some shit, but even that was pretty brief.

So in the end, Moetan surprised me by having loli fanservice be only one of its many problems. Snip out all the prepubescent vulva shots and this show would still be a worthless piece of crap.

Current Mood: bored

Today I sampled two vicious parodies of the Magical Girl genre, both directed by the same dude: Dai Mahou Touge and Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan.

Dai Mahou Touge is about Punie, the princess of the magical world who has travelled to Earth as part of a test to prove her worthiness as future queen. She dresses in red, she wields a magic wand, and she's joined by a cutesy plushie-looking sidekick with a squeaky voice and a verbal tic, a shy buxom bespectacled muggle best friend, and a Dark Magical Girl rival who wears all purple and wields a scythe.

So basically it's a completely standard and cliché Cute Witch anime. Except that the magical world is a fascist dictatorship, the Dark Magical Girl is the daughter of the good king and queen who were violently overthrown by Punie's tyrant mother, the cutesy sidekick is a hardened cynical badass who only accompanies Punie because she brutally beat him into submission and to this day he's constantly trying to kill her whenever he gets the chance, Punie's magical incantation is "Lyrical Tokarev, Kill Them All!" and her wand has a big red eyeball on it that pops open with a revolting SQUELCH whenever she casts a spell. Also Punie herself is a ruthless bloodthirsty sociopath who prefers to use excruciating submission maneuvers in lieu of magic when subduing her opponents and who is willing to do anything and kill anyone to get her way. One time she dropped a nuclear bomb on the school because she didn't want anyone to find out that the princess of the magical world was bad at math.

Basically it's like if Azula starred in a Magical Girl anime.

And as you'd expect from that summary, it is a barrel of laughs, although you must have a strong stomach for pitch black comedy and cringe-worthy violence. It's really quite a joy to watch Punie merrily skipping around causing mayhem and stomping all over our expectations about what this kind of show is supposed to be like. The show is also graced with a healthy dose of Japanese weirdness — at one point, Punie brings a bunch of vegetables to life and we get to see a sentient potato very seriously commit seppuku with a potato peeler before nobly flinging himself into a soup pot — and amusing shout-outs to other canons — the cutesy mascot's backstory has a bunch of references to gritty U.S. war films, an Alien facehugger makes a cameo, and when the queen is listing off the other witches she beat out for the throne, she mentions Sally, Akko, Majokko Meg, and Minky Momo. Plus Punie herself is a really fun character in a weird way. Of course she's the worst person in the world, but she's very good at being the worst person in the world, and I have to admire how audacious, no-holds-barred, and downright badass she can be.

Anyway, I think this is a pretty excellent parody of the Cute Witch genre and I recommend it.

Then I watched the first episode of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, and to my dismay I discovered that it's pretty clearly a Magical Girlfriend/Magical Harem show where the protagonist is the male lead, meaning that it's disqualified from inclusion in my project. Much as I hate making changes to my master list this late in the game, I'm going to have to delete Dokuro-chan from all my data.

On the upside, that means I don't have to watch any more of it, which is good because it looked pretty crappy. It relies too heavily on gore, even when compared to the already gory Dai Mahou Touge, and it strikes me as a "parody" that tries to eat its cheesecake and have it too by going "look at what a violent nutbar this girl is, having a tsundere Magical Girlfriend would be terrible in the real world, but look how hot she is naked/in her undies/with her skirt up/boobs/panties/knockers/etc." Plus it does that annoying ecchi thing where all the female characters' bodies are super shiny, like they're made of plastic. Bleh.

Current Mood: amused

Welcome back to Chez Magical Girl. Our special tonight is Jewel BEM Hunter Lime, an OVA from 1997.

Jewel BEM Hunter Lime is an oddity because a) it was based on a video game and b) it appears to be the first half of a longer series that was never completed. The first episode sets up the extremely generic plot: six magical MacGuffins have been accidentally scattered across the human world, so two citizens of the magical world are tasked with retrieving them before they absorb too much negative human energy and turn into rampaging monsters. However by the end of three episodes, only three of the six objects have been retrieved, and then the series just... stops. I guess this is what Yahtzee would call "a show that ran out of something."

However that might be for the best because Jewel BEM Hunter Lime is not very good. In fact, I'd almost call it bad. The writing certainly needs some major help, the plot is your standard Monster Of The Week + Gotta Catch Em All affair, and the characters are all obnoxious clichés: Bass is the dim-witted lech whose skirt-chasing boob-grabbing antics are supposed to be funny but just make him seem like a total creeper. Lime is the humorless straight woman whose physical abuse and nagging of her male sidekick are supposed to be funny but just make her seem like an intolerable tight-ass. And Mizuki is the squeaky-voiced muggle best friend whose entire personality can be summed up as "nice." There's also quite a lot of fanservice that fortunately isn't too tasteless or crass, but it's not terribly interesting either. The English dub is actually okay, but it still suffers due to the clunky script and cardboard characters. And with the basic Monster Of The Week setup, you'd think there'd be some action scenes to liven things up, but you'd be wrong — the monsters are mostly defeated by trickery, and Lime's transforming powers are only used to put her in fetish outfits and a schoolgirl uniform. So just fetish outfits. Zing!

The show's only saving grace is something the Japanese have been perfecting for many decades now: CUTENESS. Yes, cuteness is something that JBHL excels at, and I'd almost recommend it on that basis alone. The weekly monsters are absolutely adorable both in design and personality. The first is a chubby little candle who is angry because modern-day humans don't use candles anymore, and he's one of those characters who's endearing specifically because he takes himself completely seriously and has no idea what an adorable little snugglemuffin he is. The second is a chubby coin-purse who continually tries to live up to his identity as an "evil" monster by doing bad things but consistently fails and does good things by mistake, to the point where Lime and Mizuki's classmates adopt him as a sort of class pet when he attempts to steal their underwear by politely asking for it. And the third is similar to the first except he's a chubby medical syringe who says hilarious shit like "YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE WRATH OF MY NEEDLE!" and "EXPERIENCE THE ANGER OF MY SYRINGE!" I should also mention the requisite cutesy sidekick, Poogie: a yellow blob with huge eyes who can morph into any object and who provides most of the few genuinely funny gags in the show.

Anyway, I'm glad I watched JBHM if only for the insanely huggable monsters and mascot, but in all other respects, this show is just mediocre. While Wedding Peach suffered from blandness and CosPrayers suffered from incompetence, JBHM seems to suffer from laziness. It really comes across as something made solely to cash in on the video game, like no one working on the show cared enough to at least try and make it a little less derivative.

Current Mood: sleepy

On today’s menu, we have another Magical Girl show that deservedly takes itself seriously: Genmu Senki Leda, aka Leda: The Fantastic Adventures of Yohko. This one’s a 75-minute OVA from 1985, and its story is your standard “girl falls into another world, transforms into a prophecied warrior, and is tasked with bringing down a local villain” plot à la Magic Knight Rayearth, but it’s the execution that makes this one really stand out.

Genmu Senki Leda is a regal feast for the eyes and ears, so much so that I’m tempted to call it “arty.” The show opens with a nearly 4-minute long sequence that’s devoid of dialogue and has only minimal narration, in which the heroine, Yohko, is composing and playing a wistful piano piece inspired by her secret love for some unnamed guy, and then it cuts to her walking down the street at dusk, meeting the guy on the road, trying to work up the nerve to confess her feelings, and ultimately failing. Due to the lack of dialogue, the whole sequence instead focuses on making the visuals, editing, cinematography, and timing with the piano music as beautiful and affecting as possible. And then this is followed by another dialogue-less sequence where Yohko falls into the other world and spends several minutes wandering around looking at all the very weird flora and fauna. Speaking of which, the design work in this show got a lot of love from somebody: the plants, the animals, the landscapes, the buildings, the enemy soldiers, their robotic steeds, their weapons and gadgets — everything in this alternate world is designed to look truly alien and bizarre. In short, this is not your standard fantasy setting. Also the color palette used in the alternate world is vibrant and beautiful, and while I’m no great judge of animation, it looks like the production staff made good use of their fatter OVA budget. On the aural side, the soundtrack consists of sweeping schmaltzy orchestral music that makes me feel like I’m going to swoon every time it comes on, intermixed with Yohko’s bittersweet piano solo and some hints of synth when the score gets more energetic during action scenes.

Some other recommendable aspects of GSL:

-It passes the Bechdel Test, since Yohko’s main ally is Yoni, the shrine maiden of Leda (the local goddess), and they spend some time discussing Leda and the dilapidated state of Ashanti.

-There are several cool action scenes such as: a) the hand-to-hand fight directly after Yohko’s first transformation, where she opens a can of whoopass on the enemy troops and robots, b) the chase scene on flying-motorcycle-things when she’s trying to retrieve her walkman, c) the battle where Yohko and Yoni both hop into giant robots (the similarities to Rayearth keep piling up!) and fight off the TIE-fighter-esque enemy spaceships, and d) the sequence at the end where the villain traps Yohko in a Lotus Eater Machine, but she awesomely busts out of it and causes a bunch of stuff to blow up in spectacular fashion.

-While the characters aren’t terribly interesting or memorable, they also manage to avoid obnoxious clichés and are likeable enough, which at this point is good enough for me. I also have to commend Ringhum, Yohko’s talking dog companion, for being one of the least annoying Magical Girl animal sidekicks ever.

-And for her transformation sequence, the heroine gets eaten by a giant flower. I don’t think anything more needs to be said.

Before watching GSL, I was unsure of whether to include in my project because a) it’s an OVA film, and I’m limiting the project to episodic serieses, and b) I wasn’t sure if it even fit the genre. After watching, I’m inclined to let the former slide because 1985 was still pretty early in the genre when not much was coming out, and as for the latter, GSL’s many similarities to Rayearth have convinced me that it does indeed qualify for the genre.

A good quality version of Genmu Senki Leda is available on Youtube with English subtitles so go watch it!

Current Mood: pleased

In my quest to research Dark Magical Girls, I discovered that somebody uploaded all of Pretear to Youtube, so I'm steamrolling through it before the copyright police zap it.

So Pretear is a reverse harem anime and—

Wait, come back, I haven't finished yet! Sheesh. What I was going to say before I psychically sensed all of you spontaneously losing interest was that Pretear is also written by the same guy who directed Princess Tutu. And like Princess Tutu, Pretear is a show I'd rank amongst the best of the Magical Girl genre.

The basic plot is a mashup of Snow White and Cinderella except with the damsel in distress protagonist replaced with a plucky badass magical girl, and instead of seven dwarves, our heroine is accompanied by seven magical bishonen who act as her transformation trinkets, merging with her in order to grant her powers. Otherwise, the plot is your standard Magical Girl Warrior affair with naked henshins, elemental magic, monsters of the week, destiny, and a purple-wearing Dark Magical Girl who wants to destroy the world because she's angsty and wants everyone else to be too.

However there are a number of things that establish Pretear as a cut above its peers: Firstly, the heroine is refreshingly realistic. Maybe I've just grown demoralized by the endless parade of quivering moeblobs and shrill genki girls and airheaded failboats that clutter up the genre, but these days the surest way for a MG show to win me over is to have a protagonist who acts like an actual human being, and this is something that Himeno pulls off beautifully. She's actually rather hard to describe because she doesn't slot into any of the usual stereotypes; she's plucky and determined and energetic but also angsty and uncertain and self-critical, and my favorite part about her is how she reacts to situations in a way that feels natural and makes sense. For example, when the seven not-dwarfs first show up and try to get her to become the Pretear, she has mixed feelings about it and turns them down. But while running away, she mulls it over and changes her mind and runs back to the seven bishies, who are currently fighting a monster, and she runs up to her slap-slap-kiss love interest bishie and is like "Tell me what I need to do to become the Pretear!" Most magical girls are either all "Nooo I just want to be normal!" or all "Wheee diving headfirst into magical-girl-hood without thinking about the consequences first!" so it was nice to see a heroine whose reaction was more complex and who had the opportunity to give the proposal some thought before agreeing.

Also, in order to transform, Himeno has to merge with one of her bishies, and yes, it looks exactly as sexual as it sounds. And what I like is that Himeno immediately picks up on the innuendo, and when she first hears the merging process described by one of the (hilariously oblivious) bishies, her brain goes straight to the gutter and she has a minor freakout of "You're 'inside me?' We're 'becoming one?' BRB BRAIN MELTING ASDJKDSLFJDJFK" and it is just comedy gold. I also really loved her "STOP ANGSTING AND GET AHOLD OF YOURSELVES" speech to the boys in episode 7 — that was big "UGH I OFFICIALLY LOVE THIS CHARACTER" moment for me.

Another difference is that the show is significantly less cutesy and sugary than most MG fare. The plot is quite serious and heavy on angst, the Monsters of the Week are genuinely scary and disturbing-looking instead of being wacky golems made of mundane objects, and the show spends a minimal amount of time on filler, delving quite quickly into the dark secrets about the villainess's origins and how she's connected to the seven bishies. Himeno doesn't even have a cutesy animal sidekick/mentor; there's a cute bird-thing that serves as Team Pet, but it hardly ever has screentime. Himeno lacks the usual chunky plastic bling since her harem already serves that purpose, her weapons are pretty straightforward and hardcore — a sword, an axe, a whip, a chakram, etc — and her seven outfits deserve special mention for being really beautifully designed. Basically, this is a Magical Girl show that takes itself seriously instead of being self-admitted foof, and deserves to take itself seriously, harem of wearable bishies notwithstanding.

Another aspect of note is the relationship between Himeno and Hayate (the wind-themed bishie) which gets a lot of development and screentime during the series. Their romance reminds me a lot of Kyoko and Ren from Skip Beat: plucky heroine with secret angst meets cranky, abrasive, but secretly kind-hearted dark-haired guy by crashing into him headlong, they get off to a spectacularly bad start and hate each other, but gradually they get to know each other and realize that their bad first impressions were incorrect, and eventually they've got it bad for each other and only their mutual tsundere-ness is preventing them from sucking face. So with those similarities, I guess it's no surprise that I find the Himeno/Hayate romance to be quite adorable, and I'm pleased to report that so far their gradual transition from "I hate you" to "I like you" is well written and believable.

I also think the handling of the fairytale elements deserves special mention. The show gets major kudos for being able to breathe new life into the tired and not-very-good-to-begin-with Cinderella story by making the stepmother an overall nice person who is genuinely in love with the father, making one stepsister a lulzy sitcom-esque rival who is too ineffectual to be hate-worthy, and making the other stepsister have lots of sympathy-inducing angst behind her ice queen façade, so Himeno's dislike for her new family is less about them being puppy-stomping cartoon villains and more about feeling like a fish out of water, a poor girl suddenly thrust into a rich lifestyle and clueless about how to act or how to make her snobby stepsisters like her.

However, that's not to say that Pretear is perfect. The fight scenes are pretty short and lackluster, so if that's what you watch MG shows for then this one is going to disappoint. The focus is more on the people and their relationships and emotional drama, so the action gets short shrift. Also, I'm no expert on animation quality, but the budget for Pretear looks like it was on the modest side, so the visual quality is really inconsistent, although the art style is quite nice. And the soundtrack is... honestly dreadful. It sounds like easy listening or elevator music, with the exception of the memorable J-Pop opener.

And I have one big complaint regarding the requisite "boyfriend turns evil" plotline...( spoilers )

But overall, Pretear is a very strong Magical Girl show and I recommend it.

As a final comment: I think it's hilarious that when Himeno first uses the Wind Sword, the glowy magic power comes out of her crotch. Just, unmistakably starts blossoming out of her pelvic region. Given those O-faces she makes during her transformation sequences, I shouldn't be surprised!