Anime Feminist’s Recommendation Backlog: Girls in Strange Worlds
Anime Feminist has been in operation since Fall 2016, which means eight years! We’ve written about hundreds of shows, and recommended plenty of them, and as the years go on it’s easy for some of the smaller titles to get lost in the shuffle. That’s why we decided to try out a “backlog” series. People are getting into anime for the first time or coming back to it from a long time away all the time, after all!
When putting together this list, we placed the cutoff at the end of 2020, just to really let comparatively older titles shine. Plus, it leaves some options on the table if decide to circle back to this topic in a few years! We also didn’t include any titles that are already on our pinned recommendation lists.
Have you seen any of these already, or plan to look them up now? Let us know in the comments, along with what you’d be interested in for future “flashback”-type articles–more stuff from the vaults? Staff picks by vintage year? We wanna know!
and it was good! i give it an 8/10. and I'm making a post about it because I went into the tag after I finished it hoping to see some cute gifs and art of lesbians and instead i just saw a bunch of people calling it mid or at the absolute worst comparing it to *shudders* w/onder e/gg p/riority.
So i'm going to talk about my thoughts on it and why I think it's good and some of you all just see something that vaguely looks like Madoka and decide to write it off!
So first, yes, the Madoka influences are obvious. We have a pink haired protag and a dark-haired deuteragonist. there's some magical girl elements and it's a little dark and sometimes girls die.
but that's. really where the similarities end. You really can't call it a Madoka ripoff at all.
From off the cuff, I remember my first thoughts was that I was happy that Shingetsu wasn't the dark, cold, stoic person that she immediately appeared to be. She was determined, but she was also awkward and clearly deeply hurting but tried to be kind regardless. I liked that Mangetsu wasn't a selfless, sacrificing protag, but rather someone with a bit of selfishness and the desire to matter. That dynamic was really prominent to me and really set Granbelm apart as more than just a """Madoka ripoff"".
Secondly, it's. not even a magical girl show.
I think people saw that the girls had magic outfits and though "ah. clearly magical girls." but that's not. What magical girls are?? There's no transformation sequences for the girls, they aren't fighting any distant evil thing that threatens the world, and their magical forms aren't considered secondary personas or identities by any stretch of the term.
If anything, these girls are wizards who just happen to have magic robes. There's really no magical girl element at all.
That's out of the way. I want to talk about the show itself now rather than just defending it from unreasonable detractions. This is going to be spoiler-y.
What's interesting to me about Granbelm is that the only real enemy here is human nature. There's no magic enemy a la Madoka witches or Precure Dark Kingdom, and even Magiaconatus is itself a sort of concept rather than an antagonist, an ideal or a dream. The "antagonist," if there is anything, is just....human desire. It's humans who push themselves, who want too much, whose wishes drive them off the edge. The tragedy is that all of them could stop at any time. They could give up on their wishes and honestly, for most of them, their lives would still be mostly fine. But because they can't let go of the possibility of a magic fix to their problems, they get lost in their own desires. It's the possibility of power itself that is the "bad guy." And that's what makes Shingetsu's desire to destroy that possibility of power so interesting.
If there's one other thing that Granbelm does that's Madoka-like, it's the rug pull about who the actual protagonist is. Much like how we learn that from the beginning Homura has really be the protagonist of the show, even more so we learn that Shingetsu was the protagonist of Granbelm.
Mangetsu is portrayed as the protagonist of the show at first, but then we learn that she's not real, and has never been real. She was a doll created by Shingetsu's desperate desire for a friend. Mangetsu has spent the whole show thinking that she has nothing - she's not good at sports or school, she's not really a part of any friend groups, and she always feels a bit lonely. Learning that she's been right the whole time and that her feelings of "nothingness" stem from the fact that she genuinely doesn't have a past, that her memories of being a living person are fabricated, at first breaks her, as all the people she thought were part of her life slowly forget her.
And then she shifts her perspective. And realizes that no matter what happens, that the fact she had the chance to exist was a miracle.
I saw another comment that Granbelm was nihilistic. They're right, but in the wrong way. Granbelm acknowledges that life is inherently pointless. But because of that, we get to choose our own purpose. Once we realize that life has no inherent meaning, we get to give it our own. We get to find joy in the mundane - in eating good food, enjoying a starry sky, laughing with your friends. That even if you feel invisible, the things you have done for others, they leave a mark. People may not remember you, but they will remember the way you made them feel, and you continue to exist in that feeling, in that ripple that you caused with your existence. No one has nothing. No one is nothing. Just the fact that you are alive is a fucking miracle! Today you can go stand outside and feel the wind! You can smile at a passerby! You can watch a cloud go by! Isn't that wild? Isn't that wonderful?
Shingetsu watched almost everyone around her deteriorate because they wanted more, more, more. She watched their desire for power destroy them, because they couldn't be happy with what they had, while simultaneously putting her on a pedestal for her own power where she could never be touched by love. And the one person she expected to hate her the most, for accidentally creating her and consigning her to a meaningless existence, tells her "this mundane moment right now where we are alive and breathing, matters. I don't want power. I just want to enjoy this moment, and to tell you that all the little things, it matters."
Shingetsu wanted to destroy magic because she wanted to be free of its hold. But because Mangetsu, now she wants to destroy magic so that the people who would otherwise be destroyed by it might not feel like they had to strive for it - and could instead look back and realize that where they are right now is good.
I like that at the end, it's pretty ambiguous whether the promise of Magiaconatus came true - is Shingetsu actually invisible? Does no one see or interact with her? We're not totally sure. Maybe she is. Maybe she just keeps to herself. Maybe that's Mangetsu joining her as a transfer student.
But we do know that Shingetsu knows now, that it all matters. That she's more than just the power she once had. All the little moments mean something, and always meant something.
