On the beauty of Magical Girl shows...except with my word vomit wandering elsewhere

[arbitrary_greay]

I'm currently sloooowly working on a Legally Blonde: The Musical post, so in the mean-time, have THE BEST ESSAY ON THE MAGICAL GIRL GENRE EVER, from Tumblr.

On the importance of Magical Girl Heroines & Weaponized Femininity

Although, as always, I have my own questions about if a piece of media's transformative power can be diminished by the way

Comments

[greywing]

That is a good Magical Girl reflection piece.

That's a real shame about Utena not being more widely watched, but I would also point out that the Mind Screw elements make it a very, very hard show to watch and deconstruct. It is definitely not a show for everyone. But the final episode is basically Utena giving a big "FUCK YOU" to The Man, and Akio's imperative, and Akio's belittling of her because of her sex, and the "men are heroes, womengirls are damsels" world view when she stands up on the power of her own strength and actually saves Anthy . . . or, rather, gives Anthy the opportunity to save herself. This is the message for all the characters in the show, male or female: You have to take the steps to save yourself. Anthy's final act is to reject the vision that Akio imposes on her and Ohtori in her own "fuck you" sequence. But to get to that scene, you have to slog through so much surrealism and shock elements that you may never get to that point. XD

[greywing]

I think values dissonance plays a large role in addressing so many of your questions and that's hard because not everyone is on the same page or can agree what that page should be. Thus we start flinging around words like "male gaze" and "female gaze" and "feminism" and "masculine" and "feminine" or even "badass" and "strong" and "weak" and not everyone has the same understanding of what those terms mean or imply or should mean and imply.

I think that's why it's difficult to ask where to "trim the fat." I mean, what if the "fat" is really the writers' fetishes being put on display and have nothing to do, at its heart, with audience/economic appeal? I often come back to looking at who is telling the story, but that doesn't always inform the "perspective" either. No one would say Joss Whedon isn't feminist in his characterizations, or that Miyazaki doesn't love his badass women, or that Ilene Chaikan didn't make some terrible narrative decisions as a lesbian penning and running a show about lesbians

[koganbot]

Want to say that this is a great conversation that I don't think I know enough to say much about directly, since I know almost zilch about manga and anime. And greywing made the major points I'd want to make. But I've got these few observations:

(1) A friend of mine who, like me, is in his fifties, knows some men about our age who several years ago were really into playing the Sailor Moon Collectible Card Game. I have no insight into this.

(2) In my Drunken Tiger review back in 2000 I have an episode at the end where a five-year-old American girl is lip syncing and acting out a Drunken Tiger album despite not knowing Korean. That episode was entirely invented, but it was based on a real girl and drew on the sort of shows she and her next older sister would put on for their mom (my ex gf) and friends down in the rec room. At one point in the review I mention her having practiced Powerpuff Girls moves in front of her TV. In actuality, it was Sailor Moon she'd practiced, over and over, the transformation when Serena twirls and becomes Sailor

[arbitrary_greay]

I'm kind of thinking on the opposite end of finding merit in things a majority may not. (for example, the way a good sector of the population, even the part that enjoys it, dismisses the notion of depth in pop music) Can you take away the "wrong" thing from a piece of media, treat it more shallowly than it should be? Like only watching Lincoln for Joseph Gordon Levitt eyecandy