nadialtravis replied to your post “nadialtravis...
i honestly wouldn’t mind dark magical girl shows if they all weren’t so fucking BAD. like i know madoka gets a bad rap but i honestly liked it, but now there’s so much shit just trying to imitate it and it all just fails so spectacularly it’s just. the worst.
the problem is madoka is Fine only because it, in a roundabout way, ends up letting madoka embrace some of the core themes of magical girls: the ability to break free of your limitations in order to make the world a better place. the ability to weaponize your love and hope in order to protect the people around you. she did that to the best of her ability given the tools available, which by the way were working literally 200% against her at every turn because kyubey’s a bastard.
and even then the rebellion movie decided: “hm. y’know how we ended our anime on a note that actually resolved the plot, made sense, and finished the character development of the main cast? what if we reversed that to make things Even Edgier and also turned homura into an abusive Crazy Lesbian stereotype”
every dark magical girl anime only wants to copy the things that madoka did wrong, i.e. literally everything leading up to the end. the blaming the girls for everything that ever happens, the use of the mascot being evil to “subvert expectations” and then never blaming them for their actions, the needless parade of miserable things that happens to the girls at a rate that far exceeds anything resembling realism, the “oh sweaty! (: all magic comes with downsides! (((: why wouldn’t it? (((((:", that stopping being a magical girl (despite being Perfectly Reasonable re: all the above) is seen as even worse than becoming a magical girl because of Consequences (usually left vague)
most “dark” magical girl series do all of those things and then pretends it’s “solving” some “problem” with the genre, nevermind that the “problems” they’re “solving” are seen in like, literally every genre marketed towards kids. (the power of friendship is such a staple that saying it evokes literally every genre imaginable across media - sports manga/anime, magical girls, idol anime, rpg’s, tokusatsu, shonen series like one piece or naruto, etc.)
if you want a good dark magical girl series, watch princess tutu. it manages to be dark without ever sacrificing the core ideals of magical girls series, sexualizing its main character, or robbing its main characters of the happy ending they earned.
