glee-is-epic replied to your post:Magical Girl Henshins: Agency Part 3
I think if lack of agency in transformation were to be fetishized normally it would have the character shocked at what what was happening. That’s really common in body/gender transformation fetish stories.
Yeah, I see that sometimes, like in the ToLoveRu henshin, where the heroine gets tied up with tentacles and is all "oh my, how surprising!" about it. okay that henshin was kinda sexy I guess stop looking at me like that
So far we've been examining the building blocks used to create Magical Girl henshins, so now let's zoom out and talk about the structure in which these techniques live.
Most Magical Girl henshins can be broken down into three sections:
The Invocation: The heroine performs various actions necessary to trigger the henshin.
The Transformation: The changing clothes part.
The Tada: Fully dressed, the heroine dances around a bit and strikes a pose.
Let's tackle the invocation first. It usually contains one or more of the following:
shouting a Greyskull phrase (e.g.: Moon Prism Power Make-up)
fiddling around with compacts
waving wands
compacts and wands emitting blinky lights
dancing around
gesturing
raising a hand to the sky
The earliest invocations were very simple, taking only a second or two:
Sally: waves her hand
Akko: opens compact, says magic words
Melmo: eats a pill
Cutey Honey: touches her choker, says magic words, flash of light
However, in the 80s, spearheaded by Minky Momo and the Pierrot girls, invocations suddenly became much longer and more complex, requiring the girls to fiddle with multiple trinkets and dance around waving their wands a bunch, all while their doodads put on a spectacular light show.
(Minky Momo - 82)
(Persia - 84)
Meanwhile, the actual transformation part remained very short, sometimes happening offscreen.
Then Sailor Moon came along and changed all that. Sailor Moon's henshins were the first to show each bit of clothing being put on separately, so to accommodate this fleshed out transformation, her invocation was cut down: say magic words, push a button, blinky lights, and maybe some floating around.
(92)
(93)
Sailor Senshi ain't got time to be faffing about with complicated trinkets.
Some of Sailor Moon's descendants cut things down even further.
(Wedding Peach - 95)
(Mermaid Melody - 03)
Doremi's (99) are especially concise.
Sailor Moon's children also got more imaginative with their invocations. In addition to the usual stuff, Tokyo Mew Mew (02) features: kissing the trinket, a DNA motif, a close-up of hands, and/or a close-up of the girls' Mew tattoo.
However invocations started to get complicated again with the advent of the Precure franchise. Here's what the first one (04) looked like:
And here's what they look like today:
To recap: She fiddles with the trinket, changes her hair color, fiddles with the trinket, spins around, fiddles with the trinket, spins around, and fiddles with the trinket. Whew!
Though even HapCha can't match Shugo Chara's (07) invocation for sheer length. This thing clocks in at a whopping 25 seconds and adds "plummenting to earth at terminal velocity" to the standard formula.
Though the side characters' invocations are much sparer.
However, male-aimed MG shows have mostly resisted the influence of Precure and kep their invocations simple and concise. In particular, there's little-to-no fiddling around with magic doodads, probably because that's not the kind of merchandise male-aimed shows sell.
The first episode of Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu LOVE!/Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! (that magical boy show) came out yesterday! Have you seen the first episode yet? If so, what did you think?
I SAW THAT IT’S OUT I READ THE ANN PREVIEW POSTS I HAVEN’T HAD A CHANCE TO WATCH IT YET BUT AAAAAAAAAAH OMG
Your henshin series has the perfect amount of nerdiness! I can't wait to sit down to watch a magical girl series and think, "Ooh, what a good combination of glaze and ping." I think everyone loves having new dimensions for their geekery! Thanks for sharing this with us, it's really awesome :)
I don't know how much you've watched of Utena, but it'll be interesting to see how that factors into the Agency discussion - considering how it's Anthy who controls the transformation.
O SNAP I forgot to mention that in the Agency posts because it’s like… reverse agency. I will have to post about that at some point! Because that henshin is really awesome.
Just wanted to say I love how you write. You are spot on and fricking hilarious. I've only read Angel Blade and Beat Angel Escalayer so far, but you are bang on the money. Thanks for being awesome
Yaaaaay somebody likes my porno posts! I had a lot of fun with those. :3
What were some of your childhood MG anime? The ones you view with rose-tinted nostalgia specs now (regardless of whether or not they hold up!)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MAN EMBARASSMENT TIME.
For me it was Winx Club. Just… Winx Club. The 4kids dub. Which aired on Toonami when I was in high school. Ugggggh that show is so dumb and yet I loved itttttt. It is the epitome of everything that is wrong with girl-aimed media, and I normally hate shit like that, but IDEK you guys. It’s my ultimate guilty pleasure.
That’s about the only one. I didn’t get into MG anime until college; the other anime I watched as a kid were all fighting shonen (YYH, RuroKen, Yugioh, Cyborg 009 <—-BEST SHOW EVER, etc). Though I distantly recall watching some bits of Sailor Moon as a kid (maybe at a friend’s house) because that show has a bit of nostalgia shine on it. And I have hella nostalgia for that hokey English Sailor Moon theme song. It’s like the Pokemon theme song — if you’re of a certain age, it’s just ingrained in your brain.
As a huge Aikatsu fan, I applaud your posts. I love the series to bits, but the fact that it overly glamorizes the idol industry (ESPECIALLY the Japanese idol industry) and caters it towards children has always made me REALLY uncomfortable.
Here are all of my posts so far in the "Magical Girl Henshins" series. I'll keep updating this list as I go. You can also access this list from the "tag" page. And thanks to whoever suggested I do this — good idea! (I forget who it was. :F)
EPILEPSY WARNING: Most of these posts contain at least one seizurey gif.
In one of my henshin posts, I joked that you could use literally anything for glaze, like squirrels. And then I remembered: THERE WAS A SHOW THAT ACTUALLY DID THAT. Sort of.
Milk is a rabbit, not a squirrel, and she's turning into a weapon, not clothes, but I still enjoy how she gloms onto Cure Dream's bicep and then pings into a bracelet. I want to see more stuff like this. Outfits made entirely of squirrels! Do it, Precure!
Does Utena count as a Magical Girl anime? It's just I went through the tag and it's pretty short!
I’ve only watched a few eps of Utena (though I’m planning to rectify that soon), but from what I’ve seen, yes it’s a Magical Girl anime, albeit a very weird one. I haven’t posted much Utena stuff because… I’m not sure why. :?
I applaud everything you said about Aikatsu and Pretty Rhythm, especially Aikatsu. A lot of people watching these shows tend to get too caught up in the cutesy character designs and pretty outfits to remember that the pop music industry isn't as happy shiny as it may seem. Case in point, the Minegishi Minami scandal in early 2013.
Yay, I’m glad I’m not the only one creeped out by those shows. And yeah, Minegishi is one of the ones who always springs to mind in these situations, along with the whole phenomenon of no-dating clauses in pop-singer contracts. Ick.
To be fair re: Aikatsu (I can't talk much about PR, I'm not far in it) it veers quite clear of those elements, even in implications. The girls are frequently assertive and state their opinions (and change their shows to suit them), and the one episode that discussed weight even made a huge point of "don't starve yourself, your health is the real biggest concern." While it's certainly sanitized and encouraging a culture that has it's issues, I'd say the shows really aren't that "vapid". (1/2)
It doesn’t strike me as any more exploitative or outside of the general little girl desire for cute clothes, singing, dancing, and fans any more than something like Hannah Montana, or even magical idol series like FMwS. Maybe I’m just saying that as a fan, but I think it really does focus more on friendship, individuality, and following dreams more than any of the real-life idol cliches. (I wouldn’t class them as MG shows, though. The “henshin” is just a sparkly way to change outfits.) 2/2
To be fair, it’s been a while since I’ve watched those shows, and I only watched like 8 eps apiece, and they tend to blur together.
As I recall, PR was the really materialistic one, with some of the most shameless merch-shilling I’ve ever seen (come to our store! Which exists in RL Harajuku! BUY OUR STUFFFFFF), while Aikatsu was the really deluded one, where you just have to laugh at how many light-years removed from any known reality it is.
And that’s exactly my problem: The Aikatsu girls being assertive, having control over their shows, being told that their health is more important than looking good (HAHAHA no seriously), individuality, friendship — those are all excellent messages to be sending kids, until you remember the context. This show is about pop singers, and in the real pop world, idols are expected to starve themselves until they drop, to obey their managers’ and producers’ whims without complaint, to sign contracts that promise they won’t date boys, etc. My issue with PR and Aikatsu is that they take a very fucked-up part of our society and sugar-coat the bejeezus out of it. And then they sell the result to little kids who don’t know any better.
Put another way: If Doremi or Precure did that “health > being skinny” plot, I’d buy it, because those are shows about regular girls being regular girls (who are also magical). When Aikatsu does it, I call bullshit, because it’s a show about pop singers, and in a world where fucking Kesha can develop bulimia because her producer (allegedly) said she was too fat, you simply can’t do a “health > being skinny” plot in a pop-singer anime without looking like a blatant liar.
I guess we could debate about whether these shows are so far removed from the real pop industry that it doesn’t really matter — like Precure is a sugar-coated depiction of war, but it’s so different from real wars that no one’s going to get creeped out by it. But for me at least, Aikatsu and PR fall into the “close enough to reality to be creepy” zone.
As for stuff like Hannah Montana and Full Moon, those also give me the creeps — I mean, just try to watch old eps of Hannah Montana knowing what you know about how Miley Cyrus’s life turned out. Or go watch Britney Spears’s early music videos from when she was a cutesy virginal pop princess, before her life became a… Circus. However with something like Full Moon, at least it was created by an actual mangaka who wanted to tell an interesting and enriching story. Aikatsu and PR were created by toy companies, for the same reason the Transformers cartoons were created — to sell you shit. So their white-washing of an exploitative industry (an industry with which they have close ties) comes across even creepier.
(I just want to clarify: I’m not shitting on Aikatsu and PR fans here. You like what you like, and liking something crappy doesn’t make you a bad person. Lord knows, I’m not one to judge, given some of the dreck I like.)
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