／人◕ ‿‿ ◕人＼ Make a contact with me, Madoka!! (Spoilerific)

According to the outline the author gave, we're about halfway through-ish. It's supposed to have 6 parts, and we're somewhere in part 3, and hopefully this won't turn into a Homestuck situation.

Also the author puts up a chapter roughly once a month and does the best thing an author can do for his fans: regular progress reports on his twitter. So you're going to be reading for a while, but you don't have to worry about getting to the last chapter and then wondering how long you'll have to wait for the next.

 

Also just fyi this is my ultimate Sayaka song -

 

I fucking love Madoka and I really want more darker magical girl shows like it. Does anyone know of any that are dubbed?

 

It really depends on your qualifications for dark, probably, but here's some general recs?

Princess Tutu, despite the name, is one I've heard argued as darker, and that has a dub. Magic Knight Rayearth is...not exactly magical girls, it's more girls getting shounen power-ups with costume-changes, but that one does have darker elements as well--I'm best able to speak to the manga, there, since I never saw the anime, but they can't have changed that much, and it was dubbed too.

Alice 19th is a magical girl manga written by Yuu Watase, and high-school me remembers it as being kind of messed up, but I am unsure as to how much of that was the manga actually being kind of dark and how much was high-school me being conservative. It was translated by Viz way back when.

 

Also there's Sailor Nothing, if you'd like a reading material rec with your anime and manga recs. (advisory: trigger warning for ...basically everything but let's be real if you watched All The Madokas you're probably prepared for and fine with that)

I've seen pmmm cited on some of those "magical girl genre is all about celebrating GIRL POWER uwu" posts and just laughed and laughed and laughed because holy shit if you watched Madoka and all you got out of it was "yay girl power fighting evil with love and beauty and pretty dresses" then you have spectacularly missed the point. You have this being that approaches young girls at their lowest and most vulnerable moments to grant them one wish (that almost always turns sour in the worst possible ways and furthermore let's be real here, if offered one wish at 14 or so, how many of us would have blown that wish on something that in retrospect would have been really stupid? *raises hand*) and give them the prettiest outfits and the coolest magical powers? And just kind of glosses over that part where all it'll cost them is literally their goddamn soul? WOW THAT SURE DOESN'T HAVE ANY DISTURBING PARALLELS TO REAL LIFE SOCIETY THAT HIT WAY TOO CLOSE TO HOME NO SIR REE BOB

Someday I want to run a pmmm-flavored GURPS/d20/whatever Magical Girls campaign. Lead the players to believe that it is totally typical cute sparkly magical girl stuff and then with no warning flip that shit grimdark.

[edited because I accidentally a word]

 

Possibly my favorite part of the whole "PMMM experience" was the Japanese advertising, in which the only clue to what you were in for was the fact that the ads mentioned Urabochi Gen as the director--everything else was fluff and sparkles and happiness. That was some next-level trolling.

 

Hell, I went into it knowing vaguely that it got dark at some point, but that did not prepare me.

"Oh, this is nice, this is cute, this is--what? okay, apparently the Witches are suicide-baiting people, that's kind of surprisingly dark but okay, this is still nice, this is stiOH JESUS FUCK"

 

As a fellow "healing-type writer", I enjoyed hearing about that dodge.

Also, if you haven't, you should see this analysis series on Rebellion (rebellion spoilers duh), and also this analysis that argues that Homura's a PTSD allegory (also rebellion spoilers duh).

 

Since I'm the biggest madoka-slut I know I had to get in on this.

So JesuOtaku was one of my favorite anime reviewers and during her rundown of 2014's anime she made the comparison of Daybreak Illusion that some fanboy took a look at Madoka Magica and said "I CAN DO THIS BUT BETTER!!!" and made this "crunchy candy" styled anime full of angst and symbolism and broodiness and OH WHAT DOES IT MEAN.

I agreed with her analogy until I actually made myself read the sequel manga to the series; Puella Magi Kazumi Magica: the Innocent Malice and OH BOY. Wow. Daybreak Illusion at least seems to have its own original ideas and concepts based off the tarot. Kazumi Magica meanwhile is a lolita shaped turd that upends the rules and concepts of the original series in order to have like three different mental breakdowns among a group of like 7 girls, 4 of which literally just pop the fuck out of nowhere. Also a nice healthy dose of cosmic horror within the first five chapters AND a near-death sequence that makes episode 10 of the anime look like a mild inconvenience.

 

...I actually liked Kazumi Magica. I mean, the pacing wasn't so good, and some of the characters could've used more fleshing out, but I thought that some of the ideas were good. The idea of artificial magical girls, and magical girl gangs, and magical girls who tried to subvert their Kyubey-designed fates, are very interesting to me.

Also, what does that have to do with JesuOtaku? It's entirely possible she just didn't read the extra manga.

 

If you want PMMM manga, Different Story is good. Oriko Magica is also pretty good. I haven't actually read Kazumi Magica because I heard it wasn't executed very well.

 

I have read all of the available manga, actually. And some that are freaking impossible to find online (where are the scans of Tart Magica and Suzune Magica?!)

 

I like some of the Madoka Magica spinoff manga--Kazumi Magica wasn't my favorite, but I like others--and it's easiest for me to sort of view them as...deuterocanon, if that makes sense? Because some of them don't quite fit the series' internal logic, even those that aren't explicitly set in parallel universes. But they still do fun things with the concepts and I still like them, so I generally think of them as "kind of canon."

I think my favorite is Tart Magica, or at least what I've read of it, because it's Magical Girl Joan of Arc, and who isn't here for that?

 

Not only Magical Girl Joan of Arc, but adorably gay Magical Girl Joan of Arc. With her very own medieval!Homura! From Italy! With cool shadowpowers! And a name that's weirdly Fullmetal Alchemist!

 

What even is Madoka Magica. We don't know but we're extremely grateful for it.

 

So long as you apply a lot of Death of the Author, that is.

 

JesuOtaku had a mini-series called Anime Derby where she would watch all the anime of a season and summarize them, then eliminate one each week based on being the most disliked each week. Daybreak Illusion was dropped after one episode.

 

OK. And that still doesn't have to do with Kazumi Magica - if she was only watching the anime, then of course she wouldn't compare Daybreak Illusion with a supplementary manga that she might not have even heard of.

Anyways, I did watch all of Daybreak Illusion, and honestly? It was coasting a lot on what Madoka set up. It had some good ideas, but they didn't really come to fruition - a lot of threads were left dangling, and it never really grew into its own Thing, out of what it was borrowing from Madoka. Nothing really stood out, in terms of story or animation (though the voice acting was good IIRC, and it did get emotional responses from me at least.)

 

Slightly OT but JO came out as trans last week and uses he/him now

 

Am I misunderstanding or did JesuOtaku just compare the Madoka Magica anime and Daybreak Illusion? And then @epithimia was the one that compared Daybreak Illusion to Madoka Magica including the sidestory manga?

Also, I do not keep up with The Nostalgia Critic and his cohort so thanks for the update; I would've probably screwed up the pronouns eventually.