Wait wait, hear me out. Don’t flood my comments yet with CCS and Sailor Moon shouts. I did think about this a little and I’d like to share my musings with you first. You are of course welcome to fill my comments with CCS and Sailor Moon shouts afterwards.
I recently finished watching Magical Girl Raising Project and as is the general trend for me, I enjoyed it considerably more than the average viewer. To the point where I got curious about other people’s complaints with the show. So after completing my own review, I headed off the the great Google wilds in a quest for opinions. I found them! Man people out there sure have… opinions.
There are a few very justified criticisms of the series that I won’t go into here but the most frequently recurring complaint I saw was that Raising Project was “just another dark magical girl show”. After reading a dozen or so variations of this, usually accompanied with suggestions for better “dark” magical girl shows, I realized that if I really thought about it, all magical girl shows are fairly grim in nature. It’s the light ones that should be considered an anomaly in fact.
Granted, my experience with the genre is limited. I also use a classification system that is far from universal so I might not be assessing what magical girl shows are correctly to begin with. To remove that obstacle, I simply looked up a few Top Ten Magical Girl series lists and compiled the results. Let’s take a good look at them together, shall we?
Here are the first results that came up for me
From MAL – that doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of “10”:
- Sailor Moon
- Card Captor Sakura
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
- Cute High Earth Defense Club Love
- Shugo Chara!
- Princess Tutu
- Searching for the Full Moon
- Pretty Cure
- Prétear
- Kamichama Karin
- Magical Doremi
- Magical Princess Minky Momo
- Day Break Illusion
- Tokyo Mew Mew
- Kampfer
- Powerpuff Girls Z
- Shugo Chara!
- Magical Girl Raising Project
- Tokyo Mew Mew
- Day Break Illusion
- Precure!
- Yuki Yuna is a Hero
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Cardcaptor Sakura
- Princess Tutu
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
- Full Moon o Sagashite
- Is This a Zombie?
- Shugo Chara!
- Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei!
- Lady Jewelpet
- Sugar Sugar Rune
And finally from fan generated The Top Tens
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica
- Sailor Moon
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
- Princess Tutu
- Revolutionary Girl Utena (Thank You!)
- Cardcaptor Sakura
- Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya
- Is This a Zombie?
- Kill la Kill
- Kamichama Karin
It should be noted that I was not looking for “dark” magical girl or “deconstruction”. This is simply what came up as the most frequent and popular examples of the magical girl genre in general. If we take out Madoka, Raising Project, Yuki Yuna and Daybreak Illusion (I’m surprised this made it) which are all openly billed as “Dark” as well as Kill la Kill, Utena, Is This a Zombie?, Tutu and Cute High Earth Defense Club Love which consider themselves deconstructions or parodies, we are left with a small handful of recurring titles.
Essentially, the archetypical Magical Girl anime seems to be identified as Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Shugo Chara!, all of which make 3 of the lists.
Unfortunately, I haven’t seen Shugo Chara! and can’t really comment about it. Since it’s billed as a children’s manga, I assume any more unpleasant elements are copiously sugar coated, but I am willing to bet there is still some nightmare fuel buried deep under the sparkles. Otherwise, let’s just call it the exception that proves the rule.
I have however seen the other three and there’s an argument to be made that they are not all blindly optimistic and uniformly happy.
I saw Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha quite some time ago. I do remember that it featured a really young girl that had to physically fight with her opponents. Lyrical Nanoha is a bit of a SciFi take on the genre which substitutes magic with super advanced magic like technology, and forces combat to be close range and visceral. When you add to that the serious treatment of social problems and real-world considerations, as well as the intense and very sad backstory which is eventually revealed for the main antagonist (Fate), it becomes difficult to remember that you are dealing with a character that is a 9-year-old girl. There’s no way around the fact that the events are traumatic for Nanoha, and although the violence might not be as graphic as certain other series, the narrative doesn’t shy away from the fact that there is nothing enviable about being a magical girl.
When reading up a bit for this post (I know, I did research… who even am I anymore?) I found out for the first time that the series was conceived as a Seinen which may explain the more mature and serious tone as well as some of the decidedly adult elements, such as exploitation, labor and wealth distribution, disproportionate power dynamics in pseudo utopian social structures and so on. The more I think back on it the more I realize this may in fact have simply been a little too early (2004) to be official called a dark magical girl show and had it come out some years later, it would have fallen into the category.
Very well then, let’s move on the Cardcaptor Sakura. A fantastic show that deserves the praise it receives and is having a bit of a revival with the new season. I’m a huge fan of clamp in general so I have always been biased for this show, but I actually only saw the anime as an adult and therefore don’t share the nostalgia factor many fans have.
Unlike Nanoha, Sakura was conceptualized as a Magical Girl romance series aimed at a fairly young audience. Even more so in anime form. This is probably the best example I can think of, of the traditional pure, happy, unimpeachable good magical girl premise. The tone stays fairly light, often comedic and the narrative shies steeply away from more mature themes. And yet, even here Sakura is faced with some very unpleasant realities.
For one, she lost her mother at a very young age and although she is blessed with one of the most wonderful anime dads of all time, the complicated circumstances of her parents relationship have left her isolated from most of her extended family and put a strain on her father that is difficult to ignore.
Sakura’s relationship with Yuki starts off adorable but takes on a distinctively melancholy bend when he becomes Yue. At this point Sakura looses someone she (and her brother) held very dear, someone that has always been kind and comforting to her, to see them replaced by a cold and distant stranger that threatens to separate her from the person she loves the most. It feels somehow supremely unfair and again, let’s remember that Sakura is 10 years old when she has to take on all this.
Increasingly, it becomes clear that Sakura is completely alone. Clow Reed’s presence is felt heavily throughout the story although he is rarely seen, but as a morally ambiguous character he can’t be counted on to provide any substantial support or guidance and then there’s Tomoyo.
Tomoyo is Sakura’s dear and ever faithful best friend. Sweet, understanding and beautiful, we all want a friend like Tomoyo. She serves that dual purpose of being *the normal* that can be an audience surrogate to throw exposition at as well as the damsel in distress to push the plot along when needed. She can fulfill both roles by being the kind and supportive little girl she is, and yet the show felt the need to include this particular bit of backstory for her:
Tomoyo’s mother, Sonomi, was somewhat obsessed with Nadeshiko (Sakura’s mother) when they were younger, and now seems to have shifted her attentions to Sakura herself. We are shown that Sonomi is an absentee mother who doesn’t seem to spend any time with her daughter and yet would go out of her way for Sakura. Attending her school activities and taking care of her during a vacation, like a mother would. More than a few times we see Sonomi lavishing attention on Sakura while completely ignoring her own daughter. In a heartbreaking revelation, Tomoyo even tells Sakura that her mom makes her grow her hair long and styles it like Nadeshiko’s in order to remember her. These are just little throw away moments and Tomoyo doesn’t seem deeply affected by them but it’s still a very troubling element to including in a kid’s show.
And this is as light as it gets.
Possibly the best-known example of the genre is Sailor Moon. Her name is synonymous with Magical Girls and despite being a venerable 26 years old (whoa) she is still recognized as the reigning queen of Magical girls.
I’m sure you all know that certain episodes get disturbing. From the start we are dealing with a girl that essentially witnessed the genocide of her people and the destruction of her entire world. She bears both the guilt and responsibility of having survived the worst cataclysm possible.
Thankfully, she gets the support of her friends, but we see that the scouts have to sacrifice themselves on several occasions to save the situation and once again, the burden of that responsibility falls entirely of Serena’s shoulders. And let’s face it, girlfriend ain’t equipped for that type of realness. She gets overwhelmed by managing to eat breakfast every day.
It’s ok though, she can always turn to, she can always turn to her one true love for the encouragement she needs. Well except for the fact that he is emotionally withholding, distant and for a number of episodes, brainwashed into servitude by the main villain of the series. There are countless examples of the girls suffering both physically and emotionally throughout the run of the series. The tackling of homosexuality in later seasons even brought about real-world controversy and sparked some very serious debates about gay rights, acceptance and identity.
No matter what you may think of the show itself, it’s difficult to discount its legacy as mere fluff. The way I see it, stretching those dramatic action scenes to include blood would be a simple aesthetic change rather than a complete upending of the genre!
I’m not being glib on purpose. I do understand that there is a drastic difference in tone and presentation in these series that goes a long way in distinguishing one from the other. However, the notion that mature themes and gruesome situations are somehow absent from most Magical Girl series is just not true and including them doesn’t immediately box a show into a very specific and limited sub-genre that has only one thing to offer. These dark elements are in some shape or form present in pretty much all magical girl shows. Just another dark magical girl show can mean a lot of things.
