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Why women criticise sexualised character designs |OT2| I have no pants and I must scream (READ OP)
- Thread starter Persephone
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The anime is just really nice (and short) animated fights between super hero versions of historical/mythical figures with faux deep philosophical issues bugging the main character. It removes all the dumb ero/guro shit written by Nasu and Urobachi and just focuses on the spectacle/drama stuff.
Fate GO the gacha games where all the new historical figures ended up being women with giant breasts is more popular than any game discussed on ERA except maybe Fortnite and even then it was still the most googled game of last year, so you'd see why the material before it would get discussed.
Just so we're clear I ain't defending shit just giving you an insight as to why people watch it.
The dude who does it to her is a 200 year old monster who is literally full of those worms and is basically trying to trying to raise her breed into his line of magicians because they are losing the ability to use magic mostly in his main family line. Its al kinds of fucked up.
Hey Leonardo Di Vinci wasn't always a women, he just decided to be a women because he liked the feminine body more than his original. Its is as crazy as it sounds/ Also Thomas Edison is super american with a Lion Head and a American flag colored costume and is super beef cake.
Dude Sabers Backstory is fucking bonkers. Its literally no way anything good was going to come out of everyone lying about everything happening in Camelot. Also Saber is a hermaphrodite who is the father of Mordred posted earlier in the thread and her whole weird relationship with Lancelot and Guinevere of her universe.
That shit is wild dude.
Yeah I know don't worry, just caught me offguard reading that shit lol
I...um...nevermind. I'll rather try to forget this shit quickly.
I mean I watched the shows Unlimited Blade Works before Fate Zero and I had no Idea about how fucked up The Head of the Matou family was. There are great women and girls all through fate but they like everyone else gets fucked in that universe. I mean its a universe where a kid is the sole survivor of a massive magical fire that killed everyone he ever knew that tramatized him so hard that he basically became a walking helping machine because it was the only way he felt any kind of emotion. And that dude is the main character, the only person not fucked in the head is Rin Tohsoka
What do you think about Madoka Magica? I recently watched the anime after a friend recommended it to me.
I didn't want to watch it at first because I was scared that there would be a lot of sexualization of minors considering it's a show about magical underage girls.
Luckily the show went in a completely different direction from what I was expecting (except a really short scene in the last episode :( ) and it quickly became one of my favorite anime.
I didn't want to watch it at first because I was scared that there would be a lot of sexualization of minors considering it's a show about magical underage girls.
Luckily the show went in a completely different direction from what I was expecting (except a really short scene in the last episode :( ) and it quickly became one of my favorite anime.
If you can read japanese there are plenty associations out there takling about it already .
And out of respect for the multiplicity of their viewpoints I'd rather you go look them up with equal care and attention and google them out .
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For me, Madoka was an interesting show when it came out. It was a deconstruction of the Magical Girl genre, that while dark, still managed to emphasize the relationships the girls had with each other and treat them with some degree of dignity. It was gruesome, and at times cruel, but the characters felt honest i guess. When I finished the original series I was satisfied and not really offended, it was nice little genre tragedy.
The problem I have with the series is it's legacy. After it was a success it felt like lots of other series tried to outdo the tragedy and gore. Characters stopped being human, and just became puppets to be abused by the story. The stories stopped being a deconstruction of the genre and just became derivative torture porn of adolescent girls.
It is honestly infuriating to me that the Magical Girl genre has become so abusive to its characters. What at one point used to be the closest thing to Shonen for girls, where they could be the heroes and get the cool powers and fights, became a genre that punished women for having hopes and desires to do good and help people. Anime needs more cool heroines, and the Magical Girls story is a great vehicle for them, hopefully there will be some form of reconstruction to the genre and we'll get relatable and fun heroines like the Sailor Moon cast again.
Don't be like this. If you make an unusual claim, and someone politely asks you for a source, it's very rude to reply this way.If you can read japanese there are plenty associations links out there takling about it already .
So either you don't read it , or you need to ask your best friend google already ...
Same for LGBT issues and black people issues plenty associations with tons of material to read.
So as we say in french
I don't want to come off as rude but again french gingers have french gingers issues hence their associations websites are in full french with no translation, same for japanese , japanese gingers have japanese gingers issues and their content in therefore soleley in japanese .
And around here , and other places when I point out "you need to know the language" I always get even more responses and doubts about those social issues even exists . And that"s tiresome .
So sorry for preemptively over correcting .
Also because much like LGBT people on their own issues not all gingers agree , there are multiple association with multiple viewpoints , so it's better to just listen to everyone and it's better for me to not just sling one link out of the dozens that exists .
I edited my message to reflect that
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I never saw Madoka Magika but I suppose it got real big popular hence the publishers/editors are trying to ape the formula ...
At least your whole message rings a bell with what's happening to Yaoi and Bara now , Yuri On Ice got real big all over the world and in both Japan and France (we are their biggest market outside of their own ) it got insane popular so now every Yaoi / Bara new series is mixing their genre with sports manga/anime tropes to be looking like Yuri On Ice .
And well that's sad . I hope Magical Girl stories will stop doing that as much as for Yaoi because it never bodes well when everyone tries to tap from the same pool . :(
Yeah its a pretty common practice in a lot of mediums. A new movie or series tries something different or tweaks the standard formula a bit, and surprisingly becomes popular, so a bunch of imitators are rushed out without understanding why the original was good. You see it in action and horror movie trends in the US a lot. It's really sad that Madoka's legacy will be the popularity of grimdark abusive stories that really just torture their main characters rather than thoughtful looks at adolescent depression, or how predators can exploit people's desire to feel special.
I'm sad to see Yuri on Ice is just generating superficial copies. It was such a happy surprise when I found that show, and I hoped it would lead to a lot more series valuing queer relationships in Anime. It was a lot more than just another Yaoi fanservice show, and had the courage to make it's relationship cannon.
Especially since when it comes to Yuri On Ice sure they used sports manga tropes , but that's because artistical ice skating does have a fair share of queer male atheltes that the audience didn't mind , it felt believable because the setup is believable . While making Yaoi stories in soccer or american football or baseball ... well it just doesn't work as well .
(At least "En route vers Kodokan" - a half French half japanese Yaoi centered around Judo - did take the time to pick a sport where a lot of gay and bi men are out of the closet very publcly so again the setup does work too , they just don't ape Yuri On Ice , they actually do their own thing too on top of thankfully picking a sport where it is accepted and known even within the fans of the sport. )
Yikes ! Hope a "new kid of the block" will brake the cycle with something new because 8 years of seeing a genre spiraled down is not cool !
I kept hearing people gush about all this Fate stuff, which has always been super weird to me as I knew from TVTropes it all originally started as hentai, but hey, stranger things have happened. Now that the anime is on Netflix I was thinking "perhaps I should be more open minded and give it a try, if only to know what the cool kids are talking about", but I kept putting it off because, frankly, it seemed like really unappealing, anime-ass anime.
Needless to say, this last page has completely eradicated any lingering intention I might have had of watching it. For which I'm extremely thankful. :)
Needless to say, this last page has completely eradicated any lingering intention I might have had of watching it. For which I'm extremely thankful. :)
This "generation of imitators that don't understand why the original works" seems to happen with particularly alarming frequency when the original is a dark deconstruction of a genre:
- Watchmen -> entire 90s decade of grimdark antiheroes.
- Evangelion -> mecha shows must now include impenetrable conspiracies, religious imagery and / or tons of mindfuck.
- Madoka -> what you describe above.
PreCure's still going strong, more or less, and completely divorced of what the MG genre has become too.
I remember people on this thread not being fans of the franchise though.
Reconstruction usually means to bounce back from a deconstruction right? I mean, hasn't Pretty Cure been playing it straight for a while now? (Isn't there a male pretty cure too?)
Fate/Zero anime is surprisingly good. I tried to watch the Fate/Stay Night anime and could only make it a few episodes because it was tropey garbage.
Frank Miller's The Dark Knight also helped
....except it started already not understanding what it was =P
I should probably give this series a watch sometime. It's good to know their are some optimistic examples of the genre left. As for the concept of reconstruction. When I think of reconstruction I don't think of just returning to the classic way the genre was, but rather to grow and take lessons from the deconstruction.
Madoka provided a really interesting look at various concepts of themes common in the genre. For me, an ideal reconstruction would take Madoka's willingness to tackle themes like depression or co dependence, but with a more hopeful or empowering perspective. Maybe Pretty Cue is exactly that, and I've just been missing out, I really should give it a look sometime.
It's really fucked up how the one genre about female power fantasies had to get hit by a wave of edgelord deconstructions about how the fantasy is a lie and you need to suffer.
Meanwhile Shounenboys get to play it straight.
Meanwhile Shounenboys get to play it straight.
I really love Madoka Magica, but yeah, it just seems like there are quite a few magical girl shows that tried to follow it, with not as good results.
I saw a few episodes of Magical Girl Raising Project, based on light novels that started coming out a little more than a year after Madoka, and they show magical girls getting killed from the get go lol (I believe they had shown a massacre for the opening scene actually). Doesn't take long for the girls to learn about some of them getting killed, and are basically thrown into a deathmatch to decease the amount of magical girls in the area.
I also remember a boy being able to become a magical girl, so guess that was something it had going.
I saw a few episodes of Magical Girl Raising Project, based on light novels that started coming out a little more than a year after Madoka, and they show magical girls getting killed from the get go lol (I believe they had shown a massacre for the opening scene actually). Doesn't take long for the girls to learn about some of them getting killed, and are basically thrown into a deathmatch to decease the amount of magical girls in the area.
I also remember a boy being able to become a magical girl, so guess that was something it had going.
In general, a reconstruction is just a sort of return to form after a slew of more darker things. For example, Neon Genesis Evangelion spawned a lot of more darker or similar styled Mecha shows out there (although you can argue that it's not a deconstruction in some aspects of itself), but then The King of Braves GaoGaiGear became a sort of return of form after it.
Yeah, that's the correct version of reconstruction. My description was really more my hopes. Also there is never a bad time to post awesome Mecha.
That really captures my frustrations as well.
More like getting darker doesn't exactly feel like a deconstruction in the Shonen genre because they simply put end up being classified as seinen.
One Punch Man is the legit outlier he is already stronger than anyone but he's therefore bored out of his fucking mind most of the time . Also the show does spend its time throwing massive shade at the genre for being a den of series perpetuating toxic masculinity . Sadly because it went for comedic tone because getting dark just doesn't work it flies above most of the audience heads ...
Pretty sure this isn't true. Soejima's P3 work pulls a lot from Kaneko, and Hashino worked with Kaneko on four games prior to P3, three of which he directed.
I think you'd need to source something like that.
A reconstruction is more than a return to what the genre was before the deconstruction. If nothing changes, then nothing was learned during the deconstruction, and it was pointless. The reconstruction should, ideally, be more grounded, smarter, more justified, more realistic, and have characters act according to their own logical motivations.
The interesting thing about this is that doing this while remaining tonally consistent with the original works in the genre takes even more talent than a good deconstruction, so most attempts at reconstruction tend to fall somewhere along the line between "same tone as the originals" and "fully realistic consequences". GaoGaiGar would be a work closer to the former, while RahXephon would be closer to the latter.
Depends on the shounen subgenre; mecha shows have been going through deconstructions and reconstructions for decades, and are now at a place where "played straight", "deconstructed" and "reconstructed" works live happily together.
The Magical Girl genre has seen less deconstructions, and probably none as drastic and high-profile as Madoka, so it will be a while until things become a bit brighter. It's basically in its post-Evangelion moment right now, and boy was that a dark time. But give it a few years and with any luck (and some talent) something truly great will come out of it all.
Lolol.
Yeah it's basically done to grab a pubescent boy's attention because honestly that's the only thing that really can. It's basically Leia on the Star Wars poster.
The problem with OPM is that it ended up being the same thing it mocked, as the second season of the anime can attest.
That and Saitama being such a boring protagonist that got sidelined in his own series.
I read that bit in another forum I frequent and I never got a source for that claim. Hence the disclaimer.
GaoGaiGar isn't really a reconstruction. It was the last entry in a series of annual super robot shows aimed at children that was running throughout the 90s and is solidly tied to that during most of the series, with heavy monster of the week for the first 30 episodes for example. It did have darker moments in the show and a post-series OVA aimed at adult audiences, but darker moments had been happening even before Eva.
Nah, there have been quite a few dark magical anime aimed at older audiences in the last few years. For a while there was a new anime in that genre every season. None have been as successful as Madoka though. In fact, I think the only show that was successful at all was "Yuuki Yuna is a Hero", but there are tons of forgotten 13/12 episode anime already, like Day Break Illusion, Magical Girl Raising Project, Magical Girl Site, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka... I guess there's Symphogear as far a successful series go, although that one starts as an odd dark take but quickly becomes just a shounen action anime starring girls halfway through season 1 so it doesn't really count.
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I'm not familiar at all with the genre (only ever saw Madoka), but don't these darker shows you mention fall into the "imitator of deconstruction that doesn't really know what makes it tick" category? A previous poster seemed to suggest so, at least.
Yes, I'm not saying they're good, I'm just saying that there have been quite a few shows trying to do that. Still, they all did get the main subversion of Madoka (magic doesn't come for free, everything has a cost), but are often still bad or mediocre in spite of that.
Supposedly, Day Break Illusion predates Madoka but it was in development hell for years.
Speaking of predating, what about pre-Madoka dark Magical Girl shows? Mai HiME comes to mind. It was one of the first MG series aimed to boys and tried to argue the genre would be better if it ditched staples like mascot characters, transformation sequences and girly outfits. It kind of pissed all away with that infamous plotwist at the end of the series, though.
Speaking of predating, what about pre-Madoka dark Magical Girl shows? Mai HiME comes to mind. It was one of the first MG series aimed to boys and tried to argue the genre would be better if it ditched staples like mascot characters, transformation sequences and girly outfits. It kind of pissed all away with that infamous plotwist at the end of the series, though.
The whole setting was created by a guy who thinks himself as a father of the magical girls and made his "daughters" fight each other to death in a tournament so the winner would become his wife. Also, you lose your power if you're not a virgin anymore because father isn't interested in sloppy seconds.
My point was that this seems to be a relatively recent development in the genre, at least in tems of mainstream, whereas mecha shows have been doing this for decades and are now at a more stable place where idealistic, deconstructed and reconstructed works can coexist (and the same thing happened with superheroes). So it's a relatively safe bet that magical girls are just going through their Watchmen / Evangelion moment, and hopefully in a few decades it will make the genre much richer.
Fate/Zero is utterly bizarre in that it is the one good thing in the whole Fate media franchise.
How a hentai game became so big it basically spawned its own media empire I do not know though.
This is very interesting because precedents exist in the mecha genre as well. The original Gundam was far darker and realistic than any super robot show before it, but it split off its own "real robot" genre rather than turning the super robot genre "darker". More recently, but still earlier than Evangelion, you have shows like Gunbuster or even lesser known ones like Zeorymer, but their spin on things didn't seem to take. I guess it makes sense that it takes a veritable cultural event like Evangelion (or Watchmen) to really shift the whole genre in a different direction.
It might also be a prerequisite that the genre has been going on for quite a while and perceived as stagnant. When Gundam was aired, the mecha genre was relatively young, so it wasn't perceived as having fallen into a rut yet. By the time of Evangelion, Super Robot shows had fallen a lot in terms of consideration and had become far more entrenched into the shonen demographic, so it was far more ripe for a revolution. It might be that time for the magical girl genre just now, so that's why Madoka was both acclaimed and imitated.
I must wonder if the MG genre was in a rut when Madoka aired.
The media empire came after the gacha game with like a billion different nerdbait waifus, that's how.
For a few years in the early 00s, visual novels basically were what light novels are now with constant anime adaptations, aiming at turning them into larger franchises and many of them had hentai elements that were removed by the adaptations or PS2 ports. Fate was just a particularly successful one, with a setting big enough that spin-offs worked, leading to Zero and then more Ufotable Fates adaptations, with other games also coming out around that time and eventually Fate Grand Order which made it even more popular.
I've never managed to grasp the appeal of mobile gatcha games.
I've tried several of them and even discounting the gross monitization systems, they all seem so boring to play.
They do nothing for me.
Same, that said Fate Go was more talked about on Twitter than Fortnite last year so you can imagine how big it is.
Depends on the game really and your interests. I currently play Dx2, which is a gacha for the SMT series. It basically scratches that itch for more smt while waiting for SMTV. The other is Fate Grand Order, which i started recently. And I legit play it for the story, and the combat aspects. It helps that it has fairly frequent events that they put more effort into then some other games.
I gotta say, I'm enjoying they hell out of these games.
Sony is making bank from FGO. It helps that they generally put more effort in to their gacha then other companies do.
The successful ones have large casts of characters, allowing the player to make their own parties with their favorites, and there's always new content in the horizon, keeping people looking forward to it. I think the basic concept outside of the Gacha elements could have worked for some kind of Pokemon clone with people (like an RPG with hundreds of recruitable human characters, each one with their own stock lines and a side-story), but somehow the idea just seemed to be overlooked until it became a hook for the "free to download, pay for chances at content" model.
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