On Maho Shoujo anime/manga

[mneme]

So, I was asked by an acqaintance if I had any reccomendations for magical girl anime/manga. Since I've been (in between everything -else- I've been doing), working on a magical girl Apocalypse World game (with some collaborators, who have been doing great work while I'm in a fallow "working on everything but" period), I wrote back...maybe a bit

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[drcpunk]

One thing I found useful to bear in mind is that, even when the rules of the universe are tightly worked out in any give anime of this genre, Love Wins is also a law of the universe.

Just as I accept that in the Speed Racer movie, the laws of physics are different and cars can go sideways and jump over other cars, so I need to accept that in Sailor Moon, love is The Most Important thing. This means that when our heroine races to follow her beloved into a trap, knowing it is a trap, ignoring her friends who are saying, "Look, let us make a plan before you go into the trap -- we're not saying don't go into the trap", even though in the world I believe I inhabit, this is completely wrong, in the world of Sailor Moon, it is Completely Right. That's how the rules of that universe work.

I do prefer when this law works side by side with what I think of as basic common sense, I grant. I still cherish that moment in a different anime where one character says, "Look, what you are doing it morally and ethically wrong. And, it's illegal. More to the point, it will not work."

But, I also like how the emotional climax works in the best of this genre, when it is earned by everything that came before.