Mar
10th
2017
An interesting article! · 2:41am Mar 10th, 2017
Because I'm being a slacker and not opening my word processor, have an article!
Courtesy of Anime Feminist: The Problem With the Dark Magical Girl Genre.
To tell the truth, I don't watch much anime (apart from Gundam Build Fighters, which is the best thing ever). But, given how MlP is basically a "Magical Horse" show (sometimes), I think a lot of the points made in the article are still relevant, especially when one considers the niche of "dark" fanfiction where everything is gritty and terrible and everyone's tortured to death for no reason.
Of course, I'm well on the record for not being a fan of that sort of thing. But still, I found it to be a pretty interesting take on things, so I thought I'd share. What do you think?
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Tumbleweed · 134 views
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Dunno how I feel about the whole thing (I got about halfway through and started skimming past the summary of Madoka, since that's the only one of those shows I know), but I will agree that it's not the darkness that made Madoka work, and we definitely didn't need more shows spinning off with that as the takeaway.
People like dark and edgy crap. Watchmen was interesting because it was a deconstruction/subversion of the superhero genre. It was popular. The Dark Knight Rises, likewise, was darker and edgier, giving a different look at a potential flawed future. It, too, was popular.
People then decided that darkness itself was good and so started running with it.
To be fair, there is an audience for dark stories, and I think that there are interesting ways to write dark stories. There are pretty famous authors who wrote lots of dark stories.
But I think a lot of people just ape darkness and don't understand how to do it well.
Still, as long as it sells, people will buy it.
Amusingly, in comics, they pretty much proved that it didn't sell - comic sales cratered in the 1990s and as far as I know have never recovered.
Moreover, I think that this paragraph really shows why a lot of this is misguided in the first place:
I mean, right here we see that these shows aren't for little girls (which is, frankly, obvious), they're for adults. At which point it seems like it is a kind of pointless thing to complain about, at least from the angle they chose. They aren't real people, and I think that there's cultural reasons for the whole "corruption of innocence" thing - basically, young people (especially children) are seen as innocent, so exposing them to the darkness is a means of intensifying the contrast between what is good, pure, and innocent and what is not. When children are exposed to adult situations (and I don't just mean sex, I mean things like war, politics, ect.) that is often played up for contrast, both to show the naivite of children as well as sometimes show that simpler solutions are possible but many adults choose to forget or ignore that.
I'm not saying that these shows aren't crap (they might well be, I've not seen them), but I don't think that they're crap because they're subverting children's shows.
4450425
Good points! Especially with grim comics and the 90's crash.
This said, I think part of the problematic nature comes from the audience-- I mean, when you have a bunch of grown men watching shows about teenage girls getting tortured or whatever, it can lead to people looking at it askance.
Course, I love horror flicks, which can have similar criticisms levied against them.
4450750
Have you ever seen The Cabin in the Woods? If not, you should totally watch it.
4450902
Of course!
It's been awhile, though-- I kept on meaning to nab it on blu ray but never got around to it.
4451191
Fair enough. It just was the first thing I thought of when you said what you did.