#so her adult self who's given up Usagi entirely | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ganymedesclock · 2 years

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I will put this in a separate post from the one I just reblogged because it's a side tangent but to use OP's example, of, "you cannot really presume Usagi is evil on the basis of her destiny as a Future Monarch", this illuminates to me why it's so important to take media analysis as something where you divide up all the pieces of the work and your response.

In-universe. Serenity is not evil. Serenity is the future. she is benevolent. she is correct. she is beautiful. Crystal Tokyo is beautiful. She saved the future from total apocalypse.

Metatextually, at least to my personal read, Serenity embodies maturity. Sailor Moon is a story about adolescence. Usagi is basically given the power to embody her own older self- the cool, beautiful, sought after grown-up that she has the potential to become, but isn't yet. This is reflected in how much of her problems are related to childhood- childish things like being 'a crybaby'. And how much of her powers reflect positions of adulthood- things like the disguise pen that enables her to position herself as various adults who are already entrenched and have jobs, are respectable and respected. And, as encapsulated in a meme at least once, sometimes the effort of mantling as those people is overwhelming to Usagi!

Serenity embodies true maturity. The World in tarot. Serenity's graciousness, authority, power, she is not just an adult with a job she is the adult with the job. In many models or interpretations of monarchy, the monarch is seen as almost the parent of the entire nation. Serenity is Chibi-usa's rightful mother, who Chibi-usa respects, though she is annoyed by Usagi in the modern day who does not live up to this ideal.

NOW. Having this laid out and established, we can THEN turn around and ask: is it a good thing to see people this way? Does Usagi really Grow Up Perfect into Serenity? Does Serenity, really, never backslide or feel like Usagi? How does this parable of adulthood mingle with the actual realities of monarchy?

But at that point what we're messing with is basically, the discussion of the performance. WHY did the author use these symbols to communicate this context, and how do we feel about it. My read on this is going to be very different, because I personally believe monarchy is unethical and I also have some personal baggage about perfection, that leaves me uncomfortable with Serenity as an individual in her own right and a future impression of who Usagi WILL be.

This leaves me much more fond of Steven Universe ultimately using Rose Quartz and her history as an allusion to Serenity, and how, actually, it wasn't a good thing that Rose Quartz retreated behind such a perfect facade. That actually, it's not Steven's job to transcend into a perfect adult who has no problems. BEING that adult... is not a very good thing. It creates problems. We love Serenity. Serenity, probably, loves us, or at least tries to. But being Serenity is not good for her. Being Serenity creates a certain amount of insincerity and struggle in her personal life. In We Need To Talk, Greg demands that Rose actually talks to him "like a real person", to which Rose, visibly disquieted, says she's not a real person and she thought he knew that. She was serving him the fantasy of idealized Serenity and not the reality of an actual, flawed, struggling person- an "Usagi" who thought she had to put away all her childish things and grow up so she wouldn't be bad anymore.

But Steven Universe isn't directly a story about Rose Quartz. It's a story about Steven, the child of this Usagi/Serenity character, and subtextually, it is not a contemporary or peer to Sailor Moon- it is a successor. Rebecca Sugar experienced Sailor Moon, and felt feelings, and drew from those feelings. And this is significant, because Rose Quartz is not Usagi. She is, sort of, an echo of Usagi digested by Sugar and processed into a new entity entirely. Sailor Moon is not required reading for Steven Universe. We know who Rose is because the story tells us. It would be meaningless to take the context of Rose Quartz and put it directly back into Serenity.

And I could even be completely wrong about this connection. Ultimately the only versions of these figures I can talk about are the versions of these figures who I have, myself, 'digested', and warped a bit by the lenses I view them through. But I'd never be able to get there at all, if I didn't have some kind of conversation with myself about my feelings, and my relationship with both of these media, and what qualities they have, regardless of my feelings.

#long post #Steven Universe #Sailor Moon

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thefloatingstone · 6 years

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Heya! I was just wondering, why don't you like magical-girl horror games/tv shows? (This isn't meant to be confrontational at all, I'm just wondering! :3)

Hey anon! :D no worries! This didn’t come across as confrontational at all!

This is gonna be largely more anecdotal than factual, and the factual parts will come from other people’s posts more than what I’ve made myself, and whose opinions on this I found as explaining emotions I’d felt myself for a while, without knowing how to articulate it.

(Under the cut because this is gonna be a lot of words. And gifs because of course I put gifs in things)

So I’ve been a Sailor Moon fan since I was about 13. (this is not the reason WHY I dislike grimdark Magical Girl Shows but its a good place to start). the Sailor Moon R movie was the very first DVD I ever bought and the first thing I ever saw of the show (I had seen anime before and had a good idea what it was but this was my first experience with Magical girls and Sailor Moon). And I remember very clearly how enthralled 13 year old me was at this story. About these girls a year older than I was, fighting this bad guy from outer space who badly injured Usagi’s boyfriend. And that no matter HOW MUCH Usagi reached out to the bad guy to try and understand him, just how much he RESISTED her friendship. I remember the scene where he grabs the Silver Crystal on her chest and tries to rip it off little me actively thought “holy shit! This guy just WILL NOT STOP!! How on earth can he be stopped if he just KEEPS COMING???”

But of course, in the end, Sailor Moon is able to reach him. She is able to offer understanding for his sadness, and when he finally realises her sincerity, he is “defeated” BUT. More Importantly. He is the one who ends up saving Sailor Moon’s life at the end as a last goodbye gift to Mamoru, the boy he was in love with and who Sailor Moon loves as well. Before he leaves forever.

So a thing here. Not ONCE while watching the film the first time, did I EVER think to myself “Just stab him, Sailor Moon!” or “Stop trying to reach him and just kill him!!”. Like, NONE of those thoughts came to mind. I was fully invested in seeing Sailor Moon stop the bad guy, not by stabbing or killing him, but by REACHING HIM.

So anyway. We move on and for a while as a teenager I went through that dumb phase where I thought every magical girl show was a “Sailor Moon Rip off” and that they must all be bad because of it! In part it was true, as Sailor Moon was the first Magical Girl show that had girls use magic to fight bad guys, rather than become Jpop idols or adults or anything along those lines. However, Just because something takes cues from a genre changer doesn’t make it bad… right?

So, as I grow up I start to understand Magical Girl shows. I get what they are. They are, at their core, about young girls (usually between 12 - 16) transforming into a magical alter ego to fight bad guys and protect or save a love interest as well as their friends (mentored by a small animal friend). And this idea just seemed like… so obvious to me? But I had the luxury of growing up with this idea. That girls could fight bad guys without being tom boys or masculine or “hot and sexy”. I had the Powerpuff Girls growing up after all. Girls could be heroes while still being girls and liking girl things and wanting to have boyfriends and loving their families and wanting to protect their friends! And magical girl shows are always about getting more and more powerfull, so that by the END of the show, you face the biggest meanest bad guy of all! And then you beat him in the end. And it takes great sacrifice and you lose things and even people you love, and you have to give up so much. But in the end you win! and the biggest bad guy is dead. And you get to live your life full of hope and happiness as you’ve granted the people of earth and your friends a safe and happy life. You have protected that which you love. And it was hard, but by believing in yourself and your friendship you did it! And now, even if something bad happens again, you are powerful enough to face it.

And then, in 2011, along came Madoka Magica.

I was recommended Madoka Magica by a guy who runs (to this day) an anime store in the city I lived. Saying it was a Magical Girl show with a darker edge to it. And told me “watch until episode 3, and you’ll know if you’d like it or not”.

Having watched Revolutionary Girl Utena by now, I was excited by what I considered a “Trap” anime. An anime that leads you to believe its one thing, and then after a few episode throws the curtain back and goes “HAHA FOOLED YOU!! THIS IS ACTUALLY SO MUCH MORE THAN IT SEEMED!”Utena did this as well. And Utena was and is my favourite anime. (tied by Sailor Moon.)

So I watched Madoka Magica and I liked it a lot!! I watched all 12 episodes, and it was hard, but by the time I got to the end, I felt rewarded for sticking through all the really terrible things that happened to the characters. I described it to other people as “It’s going to make you feel terrible and if you’re able to stick with it, it will reward you by the end!”. Some people saw the end of the show as rather hopeless, or stagnant, but I saw it as an empowering message. That even if someone tells you something is impossible, you should try anyway! Because you are more powerful than they realise! And THAT, I felt, is why all the suffering was important. Because it needed to challenge just HOW TERRIBLE being a magical girl is, and just what a bad idea it is, and even if you become one you can’t change anything. But then Madoka at the end plays the system against itself, and fixes things for every girl throughout history forever. And yes there are still bad times and friends still die, but she took away the dark core of the situation.

Also, Utena had given me a taste for genre deconstruction by this point.

So yay! a great show with a really unique take on the idea of “Magical Girl!” Awesome! There was nothing else like it!

….aaaaand then…. Madoka became super super popular. And that’s when the trouble started.

I found out a few months ago, that Madoka Magica’s writer and creator, Gen Urobuchi, (a man) created Madoka Magica with a very specific idea in mind; That women having goals and wishes are dangerous and lead to suffering. That girls should not have ideals and ambition. Because it will only hurt and punish them. And he wanted to show that in Madoka Magica by showing how, if no girl in the show had ever made a wish, none of the bad things in the show would have happened at all. He has stated this in multiple interviews.

Madoka Magica, however, was an anime, and had several people working on the show, not just one guy. So how much was altered and changed to circumvent his intentions I don’t know. But even if his opinions could devalue the show as a message of empowerment, it can’t change the fact that I WAS empowered by it.

But as I said, then Madoka Magica became OBSCENELY popular. But like… that was not the problem. What the problem was was… “an anime, written by a man, about cute magical girls suffering horribly, became popular with a male audience”.

And due to the insane level of popularity, this lead to copycat shows. And these shows did not copy Madoka Magica’s deconstruction of the genre, they did not copy the art style, they did not copy the deeper look at Magical Girls as a concept. They copied the idea of “Grown Men making shows about cute really moe looking girls suffer horribly for a male audience”.

And during this surge of Madoka copycats, I watched “Yuki Yuuna is a hero” and I HATED it.

Yuki Yuuna is a story about a group of girls who are given the opportunity to become magical girls and help make the world a better place. They are already all part of an after school club called “the hero club” where they do things like volunteer work, or babysitting, or helping out at libraries etc etc. So the idea of becoming REAL heroes and saving the world?? Of course they absolutely want to do that!!

So they get essentially tricked into this situation where they fight giant monsters who come to destroy the world, and they each have a “final move” they can use to destroy these monsters. However, after a difficult battle which had all of them use their biggest move at least once to protect each other and save the world, they all find themselves slightly injured and, weirdly, a part of their body stops working. One girl becomes mute, another loses sight in her one eye, another hearing in her one ear etc etc.

The show goes on to explain that, in becoming magical girls, what these girls have really become, are sacrifices to the gods to protect the earth. And each time they use the gods’ power, they sacrifice a physical part of themselves to use the power of the gods.

So these girls essentially get slowly MAIMED throughout the series, because they wanted to make the world a better place! They didn’t even get wishes like in Madoka! they LITERALLY just wanted to save the world. And they were punished for it.

And just in case it wasn’t clear who this show was for, ALL their transformation sequences are accompanied by aggresive fanservice shots.

of these 14 year old girls.

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And that’s where the entire idea of “Grimdark Magical Girl” show fell apart for me as a concept. And I didn’t bother checking out any more.

And what did we get after this?

Magical Girl Raising Project. a show where a group of CHILDREN who want to become magical girls have to Battle Royale each other to fucking death until the last child standing

And now the recent Magical Girl Site. A Magical girl show that includes Domestic abuse, vicious school bullying, self harm etc etc.

Even Re:Creators, a show I LIKE had this with their ONE magical girl character, Mamika. I am extremely pissed off that Re:Creators decided that Mamika, the magical girl, is the character that had to be killed horribly so that her death could motivate OTHER characters into action.

The only reason I am able to swallow this in Re:Creators, despite being angry about it, is that before she died, Mamika was shown to possibly be the strongest character in the whole show. To the level of being completely OP. And the fact that she died because she tried to reach the main bad guy, knowing full well she most likely would not survive, but she wanted to try anyway.

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It still makes me mad, but at least it does take the sting away SOMEWHAT. Especially since Re:Creators is not a magical girl show. And its entire point is to dissect all its characters by removing them from their own anime and video games and forcing them into a reality where they have to face things they would not normally have to worry about in their safer, more genre-based universes.

“Dark Magical Girl” or as I like to refer to it as; “Grimdark magical girl” shows are now the most popular versions of the magical girl genre.

a genre that STARTED as manga written by women for girls to read and feel empowered by. They have now been turned into a genre for teenaged to adult men to enjoy cute moe girls in horriffic torture porn. (see. Because torture makes it MATURE and ADULT).

They are no longer shows spreading messages to young girls about believing in themselves and their friends and their own power, but are instead torture porn for men.

There is an excellent post by a tumblr user called @timemachineyeah which I link to all the time regarding this topic which I will do so again here;

https://thefloatingstone.tumblr.com/post/165077370034/i-cant-remember-if-youve-posted-about-this#notes

And in the OP’s words (emphasis mine):

“[…]That’s not subversive. That’s our whole fucking lives. That’s what we get everywhere else. Nothing a girl does can be right. We’re bad to have ambitions and to want things. Even the “nice” things we do are dismissed with ulterior motives as soon as someone decides they’re done with us.

And I fucking hate people calling it “so profound” and whatever, when it’s ultimately torture porn and the message isn’t even deep.

And more than that, I hate that it’s success has spawned a series of knockoffs, so that now moe torture porn grimdark magical girls has become the most common iteration of the genre. So we had the incredibly ableist (OMFG WORST SHOW EVER MADE) Yuki Yuuna is a Hero, and we’re getting the “Magical Girls have to CULL EACH OTHER in a grim CHILDREN-LED FIGHT TO THE DEATH” of Magical Girl Raising Project and like I’m so fucking done with these grown ass men making shows for other grown ass men shitting all over girls’ power fantasies and thinking that shitting all over girls’ power fantasies is something new and subversive and not a reassertion of the status quo.“

Does that mean I think men can’t make magical girl shows? Of course men can make Magical girl shows! Revolutionary Girl Utena is an ENTIRE show about the patriarchy and its destruction of girls and the role of women in society and the eventual triumph of our female heroes OVER PATRIARCHAL BULLSHIT ITSELF” and it was created by a man!!

Namely Kunihiko Ikuhara!

And not only did he make Revolutionary Girl Utena, but he is large responsible for not only making Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune a couple in the original anime, but for largely fleshing out their motivations and drive in the anime, making season S of Sailor Moon PROFOUNDLY better than the exact same arc in the manga!

But this is not what is happening here. Heck, I have a suspicion one of these grimdark shows might have originally been written by a woman.

What’s happening here is not about who the creator of these shows are, it is who these shows are INTENDED for. And what their intent as a show is. And yes. a lot of Magical girl shows have the intent of selling merchandise. Let’s not pretend PreCure or Jewel Pet are trying to become feminist icons or anything. But even if their intent is merely to sell toys, they STILL have the function of telling girls to have hopes and dreams, fight to protect their friends, and that it is OK TO DO SO WHILE STILL BEING A GIRL. Something American tv wasn’t doing at the time! Instead all girl characters from America who were “tough” were all tomboys who hated pink and refused to wear dresses, a la Spinelli in the cartoon “Recess”.

It was not until Sailor Moon showed up girls were taught you don’t HAVE to be a brutish loud angry tough girl to believe in your own power.

But now the magical girl genre’s most popular shows are not about girls being powerful and having dreams and protecting the earth.

It’s about how much our cute moe looking protagonists can suffer. For having the audacity to want to having power to protect others.

#Anonymous #Magical Girls #Mahou Shoujo #anime #long post #gif warning #video

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