Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

The Magic Idol Singer genre is primarily a realm of lightweight escapism: It takes a career that only sounds great in theory (being a pop singer), scrubs away all the ugly, seedy, soulless, and exploitative elements of the job, and presents us with an idealized fantasy of what we wish pop stardom was like. For the first several episodes, Creamy Mami fits this bill; it's just a big ball of fluff. But then in Episode 13, it gets... interesting.

Okay, actually it gets creepy and gross, but it does so in a way that's very interesting to media over-analyzers like myself.

At the start of the episode, Yuu ducks into a House of Mirrors at the local amusement park, transforms into Creamy Mami, and runs off to her latest gig. What she doesn't yet realize is that her magic combined with those mirrors to create a doppelganger of her — an eeeeevil doppelganger. Soon enough, the evil fake Mami is wreaking all sorts of havoc and tarnishing the real Mami's good name.

What kind of devilish mischief is she getting up to you ask? Well, first she announces in an interview that she's in love with her production company's president, Shingo, and then she poses for a bunch of titillating semi-nude photos. You might be wondering what's so bad about that. Well my friends, it's time to talk about Contractual Purity.

Remember when Miley Cyrus posed for those semi-nude photos in Vanity Fair, and everyone freaked out because she's supposed to be this pure, wholesome Disney child? Well from what I've read, Japanese idol singers have it even worse than that, partially due to the whole moe aesthetic, which was a thing even back before the term "moe" was coined. The Japanese idol singer, in general, is supposed to be perfectly pure, innocent, and virginal. Some singers even have contracts that forbid them from dating, such as that chick from AKB48 who shaved her head and tearfully apologized to her fans after she was caught breaking the "no boyfriends" rule. That happened this year by the way. Why did she feel the need to grovel like that? Because she ruined her fans' ability to fantasize about her being an innocent virgin with not a single sex-related thought in her head; therefore she had utterly failed as an idol.

Of course, being a fluffy and conservative kids' show, Creamy Mami is not going to rock the boat on this issue. The show is very much in agreement that the fake Mami is eeeeeeevil for sullying her purity-sue image with hints of sexuality. Just look at this conversation between her and Toshio, the heroine's love interest who's smitten with Mami, at an autograph signing:

Toshio: If possible, I hope you don't appear on those [Playboy-esque] magazines again. I really don't like that.
Fake Mami: Oh that. I wondered if I should have gone halfway or not...
Toshio: Huh?
Fake Mami: That's right, I actually wanted to strip down even more. But the cameraman said this is the first time and so...
Toshio: It's not that. As a fan, I want to appreciate Mami-chan's innocent image.
Fake Mami: Oh jeeze! That's such an old way of thinking!
Toshio: It may be a little old but... we as fans...
Crowd of Male Fans: (loudly chanting) That's right, that's right.
Fake Mami: Could you all please behave. I'm not your doll.

She's right, she's not their doll. But the show clearly expects us to disagree with her and to sympathize with Toshio. We're supposed to agree that Mami owes it to Toshio and the other male fans to stay pure and not do anything that might shatter their fantasies of her. We're supposed to disagree with the fake Mami's (accurate) claims that contractual purity is an out-dated idea. And we're supposed to agree with the real Mami later on when she begs the fake Mami not to "destroy fans' dreams."

That last line — "I'm not your doll" — is especially telling, because fake Mami is asserting her independence, and the show clearly thinks this is a bad thing. That article from the Atlantic notes that in addition to being pure and innocent, idols are supposed to be submissive and obedient: the goal is to make each fan feel "like he or she has the power to make them more popular. To maintain this illusion of control, members of the group can't do anything to show they are independent from fans." The fake Mami isn't villainous just because she posed for cheesecake shots and admitted being attracted to a man; she's villainous because she acted of her own free will and refused to be bossed around by her fans' entitlement complexes.

Writing this post has made me realize: The whole "little girl uses magic to become an idol singer" concept is so fitting, and in such a twisted way. After all, what are idol singers but post-pubescent girls and women who pretend to behave like pre-pubescent children. What better way to create the perfect idol singer than to take an elementary-schooler and give her the body of a teenager? If she's still mentally at an age where she thinks boys have cooties, you won't even need those "no dating" clauses to keep her in line.

*sigh* Time to paint a big target on my chest. Time for you to bring out all your rotten fruit. Because seriously, no one wants to hear this. Nobody wants to hear about why Madoka Magica sucks because everyone fucking adores this show. Its fandom is massive and rabid and I’d have to be pretty stupid to invite their wrath. Oh well.

Hell even I like this show. Mostly. But goddamn it, every time I see some reviewer gush over how amazing and perfect it is, it gives me an eye twitch.

Today it was JesuOtaku. I watched her review of PMMM, and don’t get me wrong, it’s a good review and you should watch it, but when she got to the end of the review and started praising the narrative and inevitably gave the show 4 stars out of 4, I just got... eye-twitchy. It was the same feeling I got when I saw Zac Bertschy gave PMMM full marks across the board. These two in particular are both reviewers who tend to have little patience for weepy pandery moe dramas, and yet here they are, watching yet another weepy pandery moe drama and... giving it a glowing review??

So over two years after seeing it for the first time, and after working on this post off-and-on for god knows how long, here’s me, giving my take on this universally beloved show and why I think it’s pretty good but certainly not great and brought down by some pretty glaring flaws.

First off, we have to ask ourselves: why does Madoka Magica exist? Or more specifically: who is it for?

At its core, PMMM is a moe drama just like Uta Kata and Elfen Lied, and the purpose of shows like these is to:

a) present us with a bunch of cute innocent young girls

and

b) beat them with the angsty stick until they cry, thus turning them into adorable helpless woobies that the target audience of adult men can fantasize about hugging and/or boning.

( Moe, Agency, Victimhood, Sexism, and Faust )

Writing this post has made me rather depressed, because I really really want to like Madoka Magica. Scratch that, I do like Madoka Magica. Mostly. Because for the most part, it’s a really good show. Art direction, animation styles, cinematography, soundtrack, voice acting — all are absolutely fantastic. I even like a lot of its ideas and some of the execution, and I think it could have been a really brilliant, landmark show. But the core themes and the way it handles them are so damn skeevy that I just... I can’t. I look at this show, and all I feel is disappointment.

And that’s why, whenever I see some intelligent thoughtful reviewer give this thing a perfect score, I feel the need to punch something.

Edit: Whoops, forgot to include my favorite quote about Madoka, from somebody else on Dreamwidth:

It is a work designed to punish its female protagonists for caring and to blame them for their beliefs; everything in it was written with murder in its eyes.

Yep, pretty much. I still like it, but yeah, ick.

In my experience, adaptations are usually inferior to their source material. However, I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover that the MerMelo anime is a vast improvement over the manga. The Coleman-Francis-esque boom-mike phenomenon has been largely expunged from the anime, the amateurish wrinkles ironed out.

For example, there’s the episode centering around Meru, the young mermaid from Hanon’s kingdom. Not only did the anime writers cut out all the melodramatic nonsense with Meru hitting on Kaito and making Lucia jealous, but they also strengthened Meru’s motivation and made the build-up to her betrayal of Hanon much smoother. In the manga, Meru’s all gaga about Hanon, and when she suddenly turns on her, we get a brief last-minute flashback indicating that Meru blames Hanon for failing to find her missing mom. In the anime, Meru sees the heroines flirting with their respective dudes and grows more and more aghast that the princesses she idolized are wasting their time romancing lowly human boys instead of finding her missing mom, until she finally gets upset enough to betray Hanon.

There’s also much better use of flashbacks. Hanon, Rina, Caren, Sara, and Mitsuki all have sad backstories that get developed much more gracefully, thoroughly, and earlier than in the manga. And praise the gods, Sara’s tedious wangsting about how she’s literally the only person in the world who’s ever been dumped, boo hoo, woe is me, was cut from the anime.

However, the anime's still got its share of problems, mostly owing to the central gimmick of replacing fight scenes with musical numbers. The manga's problem was that comics are a silent medium, so all the fight-scenes-cum-musical-numbers barely even existed, lasting an average of two pages apiece. The anime has the opposite problem: the addition of sound means they can let us hear the songs. Which they do. Repeatedly. We get to hear the same minute-long sugary J-Pop tune performed all the way through in every single episode. The animators at least try to make this visually interesting, but it's not like they had a huge budget or an overflowing of talent to work with, so the choreography and cinematography end up being pretty dull. It gets worse when the villainous Black Beauty Sisters show up; their song is a minute and a half, which they sing every time they show up, with the exact same chunk of stock footage used every single time. The heroines do get three power-ups over the course of the first season, with "power-up" in this case translating to "new song," but that's still an average of 12-13 eps spent with one song before we get to hear something new.

( Continued... )

Final verdict: The MerMelo anime is miles better than the manga, but it still blows in some pretty major areas. Polishing a turd can only get you so far.

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.

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 )

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.