#magia record na

[thewhitefluffyhat]

The Problems with Magius

To add context to my thoughts on the finale of the Magia Record anime, here’s a condensed version of a post I’d been meaning to put up a ages ago regarding my frustrations with the finale of the Magia Record game.

tl;dr: The problem with Magius as villains in the game was that doppels were legit and the heroes implicitly represented a return to Kyuubey’s status quo. As a result, Magius then kicked puppies to make up for the fact that the story as a whole lacked any cohesive argument or theme.

“The villains have a point, so the writers have them cross an unrelated moral line to justify the heroes defeating them" is a common yet unsatisfying writing shortcut, and Magius fits right into the pattern.  Indeed, the reason I lost interest in MagiReco so drastically after the first anime season aired was that said Season 1 finale suggested that the anime would take that direction too!

It’s an offshoot of the general problem that the game’s writers seemed to have no idea what story they wanted to tell besides "Team Iroha good, Magius evil."

As-is, the game couldn't make up its mind on exactly why the Magius were evil. Was this a story about sympathetic kids who were genuinely trying to help everyone and went so far into "the ends justify the means" that they accidentally became what they hated: well-intentioned extremists like Kyuubey?  Or was this a story of magic fascists who wanted to seize power for themselves and enact magical girl supremacy over humanity?

The basic outline of the plot (especially the whole Ui backstory which is foreshadowed from the start, and which made it inevitable that Touka and Nemu will be trivially redeemed) went hard on the former. But then the visual imagery and rhetorical trappings vaguely gestured at the latter and it suddenly got very messy.

And I do mean "vaguely." Touka gave a few speeches, but the plot never actually explored what "magical girl fascists" would even mean for the rest of humanity. The Magius leaders' ambitions weren’t especially threatening - even Touka's desire was to blast off and meet aliens rather than crush humanity in the grip of her iron fist. And the Magius grunts were either magically brainwashed, never knew about the "magical girl supremacy" angle, or talked about real problems like the prejudice against Kamihama’s Eastern districts. The end result was truly bizarre, a fascist cult that was not interested in fostering hate, fear, or control of the "other" they were supposedly targeting!

Instead, the Magius had correctly identified the true source of their struggles (Kyuubey's system), and had a functional solution that even the heroes admitted was already saving lives. So the Magius leaders got impatient and started kicking puppies because... well, because Touka is an immature 11-year-old, apparently.

Meanwhile, Magia Record as a game was fundamentally focused on magical girls vs magical girls, to the point where the non-magical girl characters didn’t even get detailed portraits. You'd think a story about magical fascism would prioritize the perspectives of the people they would hurt, right? At bare minimum, shouldn't they include a non-magical girl on Team Iroha? But in practice, neither the rank-and-file Magius nor Team Iroha actually showed any interest in this angle of the plot.

(The above scene where Team Iroha tries to come up with aspects of Kamihama they want to save and awkwardly list buildings instead of people makes the lack of non-magical girl characters especially blatant, in my opinion. Sorry Tsuruno, I really don’t care about some unnamed shopping center!)

The result was a nasty thematic tangle, where uhhh, I guess the Magius said they are magic fascists, except the game wasn’t going to talk about the day-to-day implications of any of that and also ultimately the system they created was so unambiguously beneficial for both magical girls and humans that the “happy ending” keeps it in place!

However… when your story ends with "the villain's system is a good thing, now that the heroes are in charge of it," maybe consider not equating the villains with fascists?  Because now your heroes kind of look like fascists too, oops!

Also, reinforcing the "villains kick puppies because villains" problem was that just like other stories in that lazy mold, our "heroes" were fighting for a return to the oppressive status quo while only the antagonists were advocating for any change to address the genuine problems. It had always been a huge frustration for me that Arc 1 Iroha never, ever came up with her own alternative to Kyuubey's system. Even by the end of the story, when Team Iroha was attacking Magius grunts in their base, she had nothing to offer them but empty platitudes that amounted to "we'll work together to find a solution later! :)"

Though, to be honest, I was pretty lukewarm on Team Iroha since the beginning of the game. Their motivations started out as the incredibly boring and obvious "wow the shady bad guys look shady so we don't trust them." Now pile on the broad themes of the witch system. When witches are symbolically representative of darker emotions (and even maturity itself) being considered an ugly, uncontrollable thing in women, then it's not exactly a progressive look when your antagonists stand for "let's use witches to empower ourselves and overthrow our oppressors" and the best your protagonists can muster is a kneejerk "but witches baaaad" response.

So yeah. The magical girl supremacy aspect could have been an interesting story, but it would have required completely reworking both the Magius leaders and Team Iroha's backstories and characterization. In addition to rewriting the entire plot to actually focus on the "we want power" angle rather than the "legitimately beneficial alternative to Kyuubey's system" angle.

But I think if you wanted to salvage the wreckage of Magia Record’s Arc 1 Main Story, you'd be far better off deleting the fascism angle and just sticking to "kids messed with powers they couldn't control to tragic consequences." Sure, it's been done in other Madoka Magica spin offs before, but at least it would have been coherent with the existing characters and setting mechanics.  And not, you know, requiring an unearned chain of multiple deus ex machinas in order to preserve the villain’s system that the heroes spent the entire story committing to destroy.

#magia record #magia record analysis #magius #satomi touka #tamaki iroha #magia record critical #magia record na #my ramblings #read more #you can tell this post is super old #given that I took screenshots for it while the NA game was live! #XD #not that my feelings have changed since then though...

[gamer-comix]

a new beginn-- wait, nevermind

#magia record #gamer comix #iroha tamaki #tsuruno yui #ryoko natsu #sana futaba #im still not out of jokes about NA server #greatest hits

[homuraholic]

This better not be another pachinko game or I'll make them pay

#It better be a new gacha #seriously dont play with my feelings #I was never able to get back into Magia Record after NA server closed #magia exedra

[juriyuna]

You know how, on the NA server, Kanagi would accidentally refer to her boss at the maid café as "Sir" instead of "Madam", much to their dismay? Turns out that this was a localization-only thing.

In the original JP text, Kanagi refers to the café manager as 店長 (tenchou), which is a gender-neutral word that simply means "boss/manager/store owner". 店長 is also her boss' nametag, and NA localized that as "Cafe Manager", so why they translated Kanagi's 店長 as "Sir" to turn this into a misgendering joke is beyond me.

Kanagi: Boss?

Café Manager: I told you already! It's "Onee-sama"! [*localized as "Madam"]

It's up for interpretation whether the café owner is supposed to be read as a trans woman, a drag queen, or a man who goes by a feminine title to commit to the cutesy maid aesthetic. Regardless, the punchline in the original JP isn't that Kanagi is being rude-- far from it, in fact! It's that she keeps using the very generic, formal 店長/"boss" (which she also used for her manager at her old deli counter job) instead of the ladylike おネェさま/"onee-sama", cramping the café owner's style and kinda spoiling the girly roleplaying vibe the place is supposed to have.

#magia record #izumi kanagi #NA made a lot of strange choices but this one has always kinda bugged me #because it feels unnecessarily mean-spirited towards kanagi's very nice boss #plus it's funnier that kanagi just brought her grocery store work ethic to the maid café #she gets her work done posthaste but she sucks at the roleplaying thing which is a huge component of the job #and that throws off both customers and coworkers alike

[yacchannanamin]

Hanna Sarasa

#magia record #magireco #hanna sarasa #sarasa hanna #my edits #I still remember pulling her after the news that the na server was shutting down

[endmeseymour]

@magitober Day 17 - Spinoff

#magia record #tart magica #i had Darc on na but after 3 years she still hasn't come home on jp #hopefully this offering changes my luck #my art

[meerphanim]

The Artist, Alina Gray

[ Reblogs >> Likes !! ]

Psst! Click/Tap the "Read More" for close ups!

Fun fact : The paintbrushes in the background are my irl paintbrushes! I thought adding them in this would be cool~

Oh and the palette in this isn't mine HXFJGJFJBIVJV

#magia record #magireco #puella magi magia record #alina gray #alina grey #puella magi madoka magica #madoka magica #digital art #digital artist #artists on tumblr #I finished watching the anime recently!! it's really good 💕 #I can't play the magia record mobile game because NA version has shut down lmao #But I have seen the game's stories posted on YouTube so I'll probably do that #digital fanart

[automatic-purification-system]

Magitober Day VIII - BLAST

“Now that was kawaii! Time for my signature pose!”

#magia record #magitober #queuetie pie #ashley taylor #ASHLEY #the blast godzilla the NA rep herself #drawings a bit messy but its more about the action and the feeling #quote is one of her victory quotes from NA

[muffinrecord]

Happy anniversary to NA MagiReco’s EOS! <3

#Magia Record #Muffin Record #End of NA

[raposarealm]

Decided Rena would be a good model for the new event background, and was reminded of back over two years ago when some people thought she might have been the Mirrors Witch, and now here she is, in front of the background from the event about the actual Mirrors Witch’s meguca form, who’s nothing like Rena at all...

Also reminded in turn that Rena has now, alongside many others, directly fought against the true Mirrors Witch herself, but given that she never fought Mikoto, I couldn’t write that in the above :(

#would rena get along with mikoto? no im pretty sure mikoto would try to kill her #most meguca are inherently unhappy but rena at least chooses to see the world around her as it actually is #iirc mikoto's bit was using her own magic on herself to disguise the truly horrid life she lived from herself #i feel pity for her in the same way that i do for hanna #their lives sucked and i can get why they made the wishes they did #but the last acts they did as they went out (or after they did so) were unjustly cruel #i don't know too much of mikoto's story so far since the event is still being translated #but i was around for the flowers' lament on na and yeah hanna what gives #i know she was losing it badly at that point but. the azaleas really didn't have to do with anything #moral of the story: if you're fucked over by politics #fuck over the *politician* #unrelatedly major props given to the kamihama mayor for not just realizing the damage she'd done but also moving to fix them #like she's confronted by some high schoolers (and an elementary schooler) after trying to jump off a roof and. took that quite wll. #magia record #minami rena #mirror witch #sayonara storage #rapo rambles in the tags

[natsumebookss]

The one thing I know for sure about what would've happened if NA had gotten Arc II is that JuriYuna would absolutely skyrocket to top fandom ship status due to the whole enemies-to-lovers trend. In other words, I really wish more people knew about Arc II so I could gush about them and list them as one of my MagiReco OTPs and such, but so many English speakers didn't migrate to the JP server and they will never know about them.

#magia record #juri oba #yuna kureha #i don't talk much about ships on here but the two of them and kanagi/mitama just hit me so hard #enemies-to-lovers isn't normally my ship dynamic but i LOVE both of them so much #they're literally my favorite parts of arc ii #i feel like they could've reached alikari status if na had stayed open a little longer #in other news i really want juriyuna and mitanagi units

[starry-kattz]

Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie -Walpurgisnacht Rising- | OFFICIAL...

FINAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLYYYYY

#madoka magica #puella magi madoka magica #walpurgisnacht rising #am i still pissed at aniplex for shutting down the NA magia record servers? #yes #and can this movie never live up to the hype #quite possibly #am i still gonna watch for every single update on the project with a slavering anticipation? #oh hell yah #Youtube

[sicksweetcreamy]

♡♡♡ Himena's reminder to eat healthy and stay hydrated~☆

#magia record #pmmm #madoka magica #himena aika #i hatebackgroundsihate backgrounds i hatebackgrounds ihate #in celebration of this little cutie's cute little release #if NA was still up id have been saving all year for her #i initially made the morning rescue version because her connect is aqua up #and then i remembered that she's kind of sort of brainwashing everybody into being unable to eat and drink so i thought it would be ironic #please have a cool doppel himena dont let me down

[lord-pigeon]

Okay so I've had this conspiracy theory floating in my head for a good long while and I think this lowkey might be more evidence for it.

My theory is that Nasu and Lasengle are trying to basically kill off the playerbase slowly so they can finally end FGO without much of a stink.

Now why would they be doing this if FGO is such a cashcow, you wonder? Well, probably because after all the backlash a lot of guest writers get, they don't want to deal with that constantly after Nasu leaves after this Lostbelt arc. So, make the playerbase pissed, force people to leave due to lackluster releases, squeeze money from the occasional good design, and peter off.

That, or Lasagna really has that bad of a management, but they gotta be scrambling to figure out what to do when Nasu leaves. Executives probably wanna milk FGO for all its worth cause it still jumped to the top 5 after deadzones with Nitocris, but creatively it'll be a mess.

King's Raid has been trying to kill off the King's Raid playerbase for a hot while now by doing the dumbest shit and releasing the ugliest things to try and milk money last second before they have an excuse to shut down. I'm seeing it in the works...

#the shitty schedule also reminds me a bit of magia record na where it was just...rushing cause they didnt care #idk it just feels a bit kings raidy to me rn #fgo

[link-lonk]

Decided to go for pity on Infinite Iroha a second time and got spooked at pity again. I did get from the coin shop though!

#radiostatic.txt #I would've liked that second slot but oh well #this is the game reminding me not to roll for iroha alts. I did 250 rolls for Swimsuit Iroha on NA and got spooked 4 times #pmmm #magia record

[epicfranb]

My MagiReco bingo!!!

*cries in no Madoka*

#magia record #magia record bingo #hope i didn't miss anyone like last time #i keep forgetting who i have on jp and who i had on na #the only madoka I'll ever have is madoka-senpai