tarhalindur

[tarhalindur]

I think there's something to this, but I'm wondering how much of this is the Jesus Freak crew as opposed to the Southern (Southern Baptist et al) shift to a more politicized religion (to try to cover segregation under freedom of religion) in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. For all its supposed honor culture, there's an old strain of Southern victimhood dating back at least as far as the Lost Causers if not to the antebellum period or even further back that may be the more important ingredient there.

No One Gives A Shit That You're A Jesus Freak

It occurred to me that the through line of presenting your demographic as victims as a culture war tactic traces back very clearly to the Religious Right of the Nineties and their drive to be persecuted.

[tarhalindur]

If you'll pardon me nerding out for a minute: it's probably primarily seinen-targeted (or more accurately the TV equivalent of that, seinen proper being a manga target demographic specifically).

So, the first thing to note is that AIUI it has been a truism for at least 25 years and probably more like at least 30-40 that mahou shoujo has two predominant viewer demographics: preteen and to a lesser extent early teen girls (the younger end of shoujo - my understanding is that mahou shoujo was fairly commonly "that genre you liked when you were a kid but disavowed as childish when reaching adolescence" for Japanese girls) and men aged 20-29. Which fits, especially if my understanding of average Japanese teenage girl attitudes is correct: josei rarely gets anime adaptations (josei works usually get live-action adaptations instead - some combination of relative production costs and/or the josei audience only watching live-action) and part of the reason battle shounen is Like That is because it's playing to the desires of its target audience (also I doubt Japan is free from the common stigma towards young/teenage boys liking Girly Things(tm), especially since AIUI this is a country where it is culturally unacceptable/seen as unmanly for boys/men to like sweets).

So, which of the two (or both)? There may be a smoking gun here; I vaguely remember coming across an interview/article or the like once where someone on the PMMM production team noted that they knew the show was an even bigger hit than they had expected when they overheard two 14-year-old girls on the train talking about the show (with the implication that even if the show was successful they weren't necessarily expecting it to be big among even teenage girls until it actually was, which would basically require that the target audience was the other usual target audience which is to say seinen). Even if my memory is playing tricks on me seinen targeting seems likely, though: the usual rule of thumb is that mahou shoujo aimed at the young girl audience is made to sell toys and PMMM (like some other shows like Nanoha before it, and Nanoha is telling because a) it is 100% a seinen-targeted work and b) Shinbou directed the first season) is not set up to sell toys (merch yes, toys no - PMMM's only heavily featured plot trinkets are the Soul Gems, contrast the plethora of various power objects in something like Sailor Moon or Precure - I believe you actually have some of the Sailor Moon ones at least?). Also there's the part where Precure had IIRC already basically cornered the toy market by 2011 making new kid-targeted mahou shoujo outside of the franchise uneconomical to produce.

(Also I'm like 98% sure that PMMM aired in too late a timeslot to be aimed at anything other than teenagers and adults and with both teenage demographics potentially biased against the genre for different reasons and the josei audience not watching anime that leaves the seinen audience as the only possible primary target.)

what demographic (you know, shoujo/shounen/seinen/josei) does PMMM fall under?

I've actually tried to figure that out myself in the past but the answer is more elusive than you'd think. The series is both genre-busting and demographic-busting. The general consensus is that PMMM is a seinen series (meaning it's aimed at a mature male audience), but there are also elements of shoujo. In general the series has a broad appeal to all ages and genders.

[tarhalindur]

You know, HelioA, the funny thing is that there's a real chance that the show inadvertently most responsible for this is... Utena. ([](#urbansmile)... wait wrong website.)

(The line here specifically runs through the Mai franchise: Mai-HiME basically raids Akio for a major character, leading to a setup where the gender of the magical girls does implicitly matter for wifery-related reasons. And on top of that Mai-HiME is also one of the big harbingers of the 2004 yuri apocalypse along with MariMite, Nanoha, and Kannazuki no Miko (and also Precure) so the elseworld semi-sequel Mai-Otome leans into that with a technobabble issue that is basically an excuse for Class S lasting into adulthood... and then proceeds to use this as a rather uncomfortable plot point not once but twice because Sunrise learned the wrong lessons from HiME's popularity, but I digress. And I'm nearly positive Urobutchi and the rest of the PMMM staff were familiar with Mai-HiME and presumably Mai-Otome as well.)

It’s really starting to annoy me how Western magical-girl-themed tabletop RPGs tend to jump through hoops to explain why Only Girls Can Have Magic Powers when that’s just… not really broadly true of their ostensible source material?

Like, yes, a few magical girl shows do make a big deal out of gender, but for the most part there’s no indication that having magical powers is gender-specific, and most classic examples of the genre prominently feature boys with powers similar to those of the female leads – usually in supporting or antagonistic roles, true, but that’s typically less a reflection of the metaphysics of the setting and more a reflection of who the show’s target audience is.

(Imagine explicitly citing Sailor Moon as one of the game’s core inspirations, then turning around and swatting players with a rolled-up newspaper if they want to be Tuxedo Mask. Now don’t imagine it, because I’ve encountered games that literally do this!)

It feels like the games that go this route are trying to invent in-character justifications for something that exists for out-of-character reasons (i.e., the gender demographics of the leading characters reflecting the gender demographics of the target audience), and in the process tumbling headlong down the slippery slope of gender essentialism when they just plain didn’t have to do that.

I’ll grant that some games make a valiant effort to address those implications, but it feels like they’re making a lot of work for themselves when they could just have said “hey, this game is about magical girls, so you should probably play as a girl”.

[tarhalindur]

I'm not so sure that question isn't implicitly answered in the negative - or more accurately that the rule is that only people who can get pregnant can make a contract (so cis girls yes, cis boys no, trans depends on exactly how the system works but level 0 is trans boys yes trans girls no). It's just shown via visuals and metaphor - a couple of prominent shots are quietly drawing off microscope imagery of egg cells, and there's also the extremely prominent egg metaphors running through the entire show[1] which is in turn part and parcel of probably the single most blunt message in the entire show: "girls are people and their value is not limited to their virginity and/or ability to bear children". (I'd put pretty good odds that part of the show's subtext is an absolutely stinging rebuke of Japanese otaku purity culture.)

(One of the quiet rules of PMMM: Anything Saotome-sensei says is relevant, and outside of possibly her taste in partners Saotome-sensei is always right.)

[1] - Basically every mention of or visual/visual metaphor of eggs in PMMM can be read as a metaphor for a human egg cell - probably even the episode 4 fried egg, since a fried egg is broken and cooked and can no longer hatch which fits quite neatly with the surface-level metaphor for that shot.

It’s really starting to annoy me how Western magical-girl-themed tabletop RPGs tend to jump through hoops to explain why Only Girls Can Have Magic Powers when that’s just… not really broadly true of their ostensible source material?

Like, yes, a few magical girl shows do make a big deal out of gender, but for the most part there’s no indication that having magical powers is gender-specific, and most classic examples of the genre prominently feature boys with powers similar to those of the female leads – usually in supporting or antagonistic roles, true, but that’s typically less a reflection of the metaphysics of the setting and more a reflection of who the show’s target audience is.

(Imagine explicitly citing Sailor Moon as one of the game’s core inspirations, then turning around and swatting players with a rolled-up newspaper if they want to be Tuxedo Mask. Now don’t imagine it, because I’ve encountered games that literally do this!)

It feels like the games that go this route are trying to invent in-character justifications for something that exists for out-of-character reasons (i.e., the gender demographics of the leading characters reflecting the gender demographics of the target audience), and in the process tumbling headlong down the slippery slope of gender essentialism when they just plain didn’t have to do that.

I’ll grant that some games make a valiant effort to address those implications, but it feels like they’re making a lot of work for themselves when they could just have said “hey, this game is about magical girls, so you should probably play as a girl”.

[tarhalindur]

Come on now, you forgot the punchline: "Next stop, parting the Red Sea!".

Samantha Carter: Sun Destroyer

[tarhalindur]

Thought related to this: Kyouko/Homura as a post-series, non-Rebellion AU where Kyouko manages to get Homura to open up to her is an underrated concept (either as a mutual-second-loves romantic pairing or as a platonic pairing, or maybe something in between). They're uniquely well placed to understand and accept each others' positions; both have lost their first love, and I'd bet that Kyouko who grew up religious in what society would have considered a cult (very possibly correctly, reading between the lines wrt her father) would at least accept what Homura thinks/feels about Madoka even if she didn't necessarily understand it herself (after all, she'd have wanted the same understanding for the religion she once openly believed in and still does deep down even if she lies to herself about it). (I could see Homura initially not being so thoughtful if she learned about Kyouko's past, but I'd put good odds she would realize her error once the comparison to her own beliefs wrt Madoka came up.)

(The one obvious issue I could see cropping up in the romantic version is that I think Homura is fairly likely to be somewhere on the ace spectrum and PMMM 5 is not at all subtle at implying via the direction that Kyouko is, uh, not. Could still easily work if Homura is demisexual or has an almost strictly reactive sex drive, though.)

How do you feel about the idea of Kyoko arguably being the second person that Homura is the most attached to? It made me think of an AU where Kyoko was the one who ended up saving her from Izabel.

I like that idea! I do wish that we got more scenes of Homura and Kyoko together, I do think they got along rather well. Unlike Sayaka who is almost always antagonistic towards Homura and Mami, who's on a broken pedestal.

Of course, I do think Homura very much cares about all the girls, but I definitely do see merit in the idea that she likes Kyoko the most after Madoka.

[tarhalindur]

As for trope changes- I would say the biggest change in the past 10 years is that following the success of PMMM a lot more magical girl shows are adult-focused and darker than the standard fare. It's not as common now but for a long time we were inundated with Madoka clones, lol. Except most of them didn't have PMMM's heart and soul so they kinda fall flat.

I'll push back on this one slightly - PMMM accelerated the trend and got quite a few projects greenlit (including some that desperately wanted to be another PMMM - looking at you, Selector WIXOSS!) but the shift towards adult-focused magical girls predates PMMM by a few years. There were experiments in that direction as early as the 1990s (Galaxy Fraulein Yuna comes to mind, arguably Utena as well depending on whether you consider it part of the genre - also there's the likes of Princess Tutu though that's early 2000s, and while Full Moon wo Sagashite is very shoujo it's a very dark shoujo) and they really kick in with Fall 2004 which brought us Nanoha (which the PMMM staff was absolutely without a shadow of a doubt familiar with, Shinbou directed Nanoha S1) and Mai-HiME (whose status as part of the genre was debated due to shedding many of the genre trappings and adding mons - IIRC there's an interview where the PMMM staff noted that they made sure to hew to the genre trappings and I doubt that's unrelated - but I strongly suspect the PMMM staff was familiar with it; it's the prototype for a couple of PMMM features (I'd put good odds Kyubey was directly inspired by Nagi from Mai-HiME) and I suspect Kajiura's HiME OST is what got her hired for PMMM in the first place (Magia and Mysterioso even follow the same naming scheme as Kajiura's main battle themes for the Mai franchise, namely Mezame and MATERIALISE)).

Also in 2011 we got Symphogear (which used a blatant mix of Nanoha and Mai-HiME inspiration, it just uses a different HiME arc than PMMM does), and while I suspect Symphogear had enough time to make some changes to account for PMMM it was 100% greenlit before PMMM aired.

In general I've also noticed a steady decline of the genre. The 90s and 2000s were full of traditional magical girl warrior shows, and in the wake of PMMM the 2010s had a lot of "edgy" magical girl shows. But now, aside from Precure, there really don't seem to be consistent entries in the genre. It makes me very sad. It's not like magical girls are extinct or anything, far from it, but imo it's not the popular genre it used to be. I swear 75% of the anime coming out nowadays is isekai or vaguely fantasy themed in general and it just holds no appeal to me. You'd think with the dozens upon dozens of anime that get made every year they could squeeze in more magical girl shows than Precure.

Sadly, nothing new about this either - I've noted this before elsewhere but magical girls now are in almost exactly the same place that mecha was circa 2005, where everything is either a reboot/continuation of an existing franchise, an attempt to imitate the show that went nova, or in a different subgenre (and the one surviving non-magical girl warrior subgenre is dying as well, since the more idol-themed magical girl shows - and increasingly Precure as well, for that matter - have been getting outcompeted by the modern shoujo-targeted pure idol shows). Same root causes, too: one franchise cornered the toy market making kids' shows outside of that franchise uneconomical (Gundam and Precure, respectively), then a show came along and went nova that is simultaneously a deconstruction and an example of the genre done so well as to be its apotheosis overshadowing even very well done predecessors (Eva/Madoka).

If magical girls follow mecha's path then we'll see Mahou Shoujo Gurren Lagann in a couple of years (possibly by Shaft or a Shaft vet) followed by a string of attempts to reboot the genre that all mostly fail with a big surge in them starting around 2035 or so. (Then again, there may not quite be a niche for Mahou Shoujo Gurren Lagann. Eva did a good job tearing apart mecha to its foundations but while it manages to put its characters back together it left the genre in pieces; PMMM 12 instead neatly wraps up mahou shoujo in a nice bow.)

hey I just read your post on PMMM as a deconstruction of the magic girl genre, from 2013. I clicked your blog and wow you're still talking about magical girls 10 years later! I really admire your enthusiasm, it makes me happy when people are so passionate about something!

I guess I should ask something then, how do you feel the genre evolved or changed from 10 years ago to now? lots of trope changes? any modern magical girl show you enjoy?

Oh wow, thank you so much! If you're interested, I rewrote that PMMM deconstruction post literally just a few months ago.

As for trope changes- I would say the biggest change in the past 10 years is that following the success of PMMM a lot more magical girl shows are adult-focused and darker than the standard fare. It's not as common now but for a long time we were inundated with Madoka clones, lol. Except most of them didn't have PMMM's heart and soul so they kinda fall flat.

In general I've also noticed a steady decline of the genre. The 90s and 2000s were full of traditional magical girl warrior shows, and in the wake of PMMM the 2010s had a lot of "edgy" magical girl shows. But now, aside from Precure, there really don't seem to be consistent entries in the genre.

It makes me very sad. It's not like magical girls are extinct or anything, far from it, but imo it's not the popular genre it used to be. I swear 75% of the anime coming out nowadays is isekai or vaguely fantasy themed in general and it just holds no appeal to me. You'd think with the dozens upon dozens of anime that get made every year they could squeeze in more magical girl shows than Precure.

I'm hoping that the magical girl genre goes through another revitalization. Sailor Moon reinvented the genre in the 90s, and PMMM was another trailblazer that changed the direction of the genre. Who knows, maybe we'll see another breakout hit in the 2020s.

[tarhalindur]

Hopefully.

Definitely unprotected, though.

[tarhalindur]

Nah, worse.

Handholding.

#I don't actually know the actual context here for the record

[tarhalindur]

"Share and Enjoy!"

Imagine a Star Trek type food replicator that lacks an internal library of approved outputs and instead uses a generative language model to figure out what you're asking for. People having to do Midjourney-style prompt crafting to get the meals they want out of it. Abusing the system by describing things that absolutely are not food in ways which circumvent the safeguards. Occasionally it produces something that tries to eat you back which it insists with perfect confidence is in fact a strawberry crumble.

#the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation strikes again

[tarhalindur]

#Somebody needs to mention Wonder Egg Priority and that someone will be me #Dishonorable mention to Kuma Miko Bear and Science Falls in Love S2 #Attack on Titan presently DQed since the series (anime adaptation) is still ongoing #but unless the ending improves significantly in the anime add it to the list #If you want a Western example do remember the Battlestar Galactica reboot's finale going from very good to terrible in the last scene

[tarhalindur]

Yep, this.

(I was going to say "no shit", but, ah, that would technically be the exact opposite of what was actually going on so...)

Has any restaurant gone from cool to cringe at the speed Chipotle did? Seems curious that it happened so dramatically (from my casual viewpoint ofc); it was a hot hang-out spot when it first opened, now it is associated with abandoned strip-mall vibes. I certainly don't think the food quality changed at all.

Should note these observations are from dense urban locales, its reputation in suburbia will be different.

[tarhalindur]

On the straw: it's worth pointing that this likely also plays into the good old Japanese indirect kiss trope.

(One challenge here: this is a spot where the distinction between romantic and sexual attraction is relevant, I think, and also an example of how we lack a good category distinction between the two in ero-art. This is unambiguously a romantic fantasy piece but does not have to be a sexual one - we can read the nervousness as wanting to do things short of sex (the indirect kiss symbolism option rears its head here), or more broadly as just nervousness from being in close proximity to her crush (you). I'm actually tempted to read the core appeal of this piece as closer to a male- or lesbian-targeted analogue to the bodice-ripper romantic novel - a key part of the fantasy I'm seeing encoded in the piece is the girl romantically and/or sexually wanting you specifically rather than just anyone (and given the girl-next-door/osananajimi/shy nerd girl tropes there is a soft implication that she was either into you before you the POV started pursuing - her chasing being ruled out by the tropes - or alternately was the kind of girl who couldn't believe someone (especially someone like you) was into her.)

ブリジットとデートなう | 白色灯

[tarhalindur]

It's actually even worse than that; Unity just guessing is the best-case scenario. Somebody over on Ars Technica pointed out that Unity bought out most of ironSource a couple of years back; ironSource was basically a spyware developer (and the side of ironSource that dealt with the less spyware projects is the part Unity didn't buy, instead geting spun out into Rise) and one of their products was intelliCore which was designed to track installs and what things were installed on.

So either they're just guessing (in a way to fuck over devs of course)... or they're hiding (or at least not coming clean about) that Unity is now spyware. (And of course that's before we take into account the possibility of Unity having spyware metrics that they try to keep secret so they can fudge the books to screw over devs - presumably trying to claim trade secrets or something like that.)

thanks to unity's downright evil new pricing model that charges per-install (including reinstalls), it will now be impossible to sign a deal with a publisher for your unity game because i can guarantee there are zero publishers who are willing to lose money every single time your game gets downloaded and installed.

[tarhalindur]

@official-kircheis: Posts Asuna and Rio art.

Me, an intellectual who knows the best BlueAca design:

(Sadly there is a swimsuit alt that confirms that Ui is less endowed than I would like, but when the rest of the design is that good I can deal.)

(Edit: Whoops, forgot me some source!)

#gods she's so cuddleable and fuckable

[tarhalindur]

I’d also note that reader fic in particular has gotten quite popular over the last few years and is almost uniquely well-suited to being displaced by LLMs – it’s already an intermediate point between regular fanfic and RP and by dint of their interactivity LLMs are likely to be able to fill the readerfic niche more effectively than actual readerfic does.

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is

[tarhalindur]

Now now, clearly that hotel is making a killing hosting murder mystery dinner theaters!

So, I follow this “bad commercial interior design” Facebook page and-