Yea... the way Madoka has been held up as some uniquely good magical girl show (as well as the backlash disparaging it as uniquely bad) really has prevented a lot of people from really taking the genre as a whole on its own terms. It very much reminds me of the way people who are ignorant of mecha anime history tend to hold Evangelion up as a uniquely subversive work "uplifting" a childish and shallow genre for doing things that... works within the genre were already doing. A particularly moody, aesthetically distinctive, and (compared to other works within the genre) relatively short series tends to have a lot of newcomer pull, though, compared to the Precures or Gundams of the world. And so it's easy for people to simply never question that "magical girls never suffer or struggle" or "mech pilots are never traumatized by combat" outside of the one popular series that's been labeled a "subversion" on TVTropes.
I'd love to know more about GxH! I don't hate Precure, but I kind of feel sad that it's largely the only game in town for the genre these days (I kind of miss how some of the 90's-00's media mix series had a more preteen/early-adolescent feeling in their tone and content...), and would like to know more about the recent alternative options. Shame that Covid seems to have caused a small extinction event for Precure's competitors. I'm glad that in the second article, the author emphasizes that it's not so much Precure to blame for the lack of options in magical girl tv shows aimed at girls, so much as the general sexism towards "girl's shows" vs "boy's shows" that we see just as much outside Japan.
no subject
Yea... the way Madoka has been held up as some uniquely good magical girl show (as well as the backlash disparaging it as uniquely bad) really has prevented a lot of people from really taking the genre as a whole on its own terms. It very much reminds me of the way people who are ignorant of mecha anime history tend to hold Evangelion up as a uniquely subversive work "uplifting" a childish and shallow genre for doing things that... works within the genre were already doing. A particularly moody, aesthetically distinctive, and (compared to other works within the genre) relatively short series tends to have a lot of newcomer pull, though, compared to the Precures or Gundams of the world. And so it's easy for people to simply never question that "magical girls never suffer or struggle" or "mech pilots are never traumatized by combat" outside of the one popular series that's been labeled a "subversion" on TVTropes.
I'd love to know more about GxH! I don't hate Precure, but I kind of feel sad that it's largely the only game in town for the genre these days (I kind of miss how some of the 90's-00's media mix series had a more preteen/early-adolescent feeling in their tone and content...), and would like to know more about the recent alternative options. Shame that Covid seems to have caused a small extinction event for Precure's competitors. I'm glad that in the second article, the author emphasizes that it's not so much Precure to blame for the lack of options in magical girl tv shows aimed at girls, so much as the general sexism towards "girl's shows" vs "boy's shows" that we see just as much outside Japan.