Month: October 2018

Happy International Cute Witch Day

Once again, it is Halloween, the second most important holiday in the magical girl calendar. Tonight, magical girls can go abroad without calling undue attention to themselves.

This year, I am dedicating International Cute Witch Day to Little Witch Academia. I much enjoyed the short film (it came out in 2013) some years back, but I admit I’ve not seen the widely popular television series that came after it and became available in the U.S. last year. It’s on my list.

art from Little Witch Academia

For some reason, I barely remember what the short film was about, though I remember enjoying it. It was was an obviously Harry Potter-influenced story of quirky girls going to witch school, and it had some high-flying broom scenes with the kind of creative yet jerky animation for which Studio Trigger is known.

art from Little Witch Academia

Speaking of Trigger, I finally got around to watching Kill la Kill about a year back, and it completely blew my mind. It might be the best skewering of the magical girl genre I’ve ever seen, because it not only mocked it mercilessly, but unlike the slew of grimdark shows we’ve had lately, demonstrated in the process that it actually understood what the genre is about. So I trust the studio to know how to handle magical girls.

screenshot from Little Witch Academia

If they could do magical girl warriors so well, they could probably do cute witches well, too, and the popularity of Little Witch Academia tends to confirm that.

Screenshot from Little Witch Academia

That Creepy Feeling: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 14

The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas.

—Herman Hesse, Demian

Revolutionary Girl Utena, episode 14: “The Boys of the Black Rose.” Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Character designs by Chiho Saito. Be-Papas, 1997 (Nozomi Entertainment, 2011). Approx. 24 minutes. Rated “16+.”

Watch for free.

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We return now to our irregularly scheduled, leisurely walk through that trippy classic, the Evangelion of magical girls, Revolutionary Girl Utena. This series of posts was on hiatus because of issues with my DVD player, both its increasing unwillingness to play DVDs and my sudden, inexplicable inability to take screenshots from it.

I’ve turned instead to the free and legal upload on YouTube from Nozomi entertainment. This is less than ideal, as it means a downgrade in picture quality, and I also see that they’ve cut out the end-credits animation, the bastards. But I will tolerate all of this for your sakes. Don’t ever say the Deej didn’t do anything for you.

The previous episode was a recap of the first arc, with a few tantalizing details thrown in. This present episode is the full-on start of a new arc, and thus it gives a lot of new details … creepy, creepy details.

Continue reading “That Creepy Feeling: The ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’ Rewatch, Part 14”

‘Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites’ Progress Update

Featured image: “The Magical Girls!” by Smeoow.

According to my arbitrarily set goal, I am not “finished” with the writing phase of Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Writes, which is to say that the draft stands at 90,000 words. The story is not finished, however, so I think the final draft will be considerably longer.

I hope to have a review post up by tomorrow night. I was thinking of working on it today, but ended up working on my novel instead, which isn’t exactly a bad thing.

Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites
Phase:Writing
Due:5 years ago
100%

The Joys and Frustrations of Online Marketing

I wanted to spend the day writing, but I’ve instead spent the last four hours in deep frustration while trying to set up social accounts and improve my SEO. Priorities, I guess.

I’m posting this, admittedly, partly because I’m cleaning excess plugins off this blog, which is much heavier than it has a right to be, and I want to test if my Open Graph and Twitter Cards are still functioning correctly after I’ve tossed out huge chunks of code.

I’ve set up an account with Mailchimp, which often gets recommended for both author and business promotions, but after going to all that trouble, it appears that Mailchimp’s only method of plugging into the blog is to create a popup window that appears over the content while you’re trying to read, and there’s no way in hell I’m being that annoying on purpose. So for now, email subscriptions are still through the default widget in the right sidebar, which claims—to my shock—that I have over 1,600 subscribers, indicating either that I’m somehow doing something right or that I attract a lot of bots.

I’m also trying to find new social media buttons better than my current ones; the ones I use now are unobtrusive but blocked by ad-blockers, which probably means they’re adding unwelcome trackers.

The image at the top of this post is from 2004’s Uta Kata, a magical girl title I don’t happen to be familiar with; it’s the only one on this list I don’t recognize. I might have to see if I can find it.

I’ve Been Added to the Official Database of Oklahoma Authors

The Oklahoma Department of Libraries maintains several information databases, including one of Oklahoma authors. I was recently added, so you can check out my profile and add meta-tags to it if you like.

Sooner or later I should make a table on here of all the social media and similar places where I appear, mostly because I won’t be able to keep track of them otherwise.

Making Goofy Title Graphics because I Can

Laughing through Sorrow: A Meditation on the Magical Girl Aesthetic

I have a theory that I have a hard time explaining, one I have held for years and have constantly struggled both to articulate in essays and to encapsulate in my fiction writing. A recent Amazon reviewer of my novel Jake and the Dynamo has, I think, captured it well:

There are times when the laugh lines come so fast you can’t catch your breath and other times when the insight is so deep you can feel it all the way inside you. The author is very familiar with his source material and understands the consequences of its tropes far more than the creators that develop it. Jake is very identifiable and you really feel for him. The central magical girls—Pretty Dynamo, Card Collector Kasumi, and Grease Pencil Marionette—are deep and well-drawn. You feel their triumphs and their pain. Things you took for granted are exposed from entirely new angles. But it is also rip-roaringly funny.

I am still grasping at the proper words, but what I think I want to say is that the grandest or saddest stories should begin with comedy. I take my influence largely from comics, so if I were to name the comics that best capture how I believe stories should be written, I would point first to Bone by Jeff Smith and Amelia Rules! by Jimmy Gownley. Continue reading “Laughing through Sorrow: A Meditation on the Magical Girl Aesthetic”

Over Here Promoting Myself like a Narcissist

So Jake and the Dynamo just appeared in the pages of the October 22 issue of Publisher’s Weekly. Before you tell me that’s awesome, just know that I payed to be there.

Some of the venerable old book-related publications have pay-to-play schemes for indie authors, and there’s still an active debate over whether they’re quite ethical, or worth the money. There’s also the question of whether any actual readers pay attention to Publisher’s Weekly. But so it goes.

I haven’t been posting enough lately because I was on a spiritual pilgrimage

I had a four-day weekend, so I took the time to do something I should have done a long time ago: I made the journey to the golden city to pay my respects to the King.

The grave of Elvis Presley

That’s right. I was at Graceland, baby. Thank you. Thank you very much.

And while it’s important to pay homage to the king, it is also necessary to pay proper respects to the gods. Thus, I made sure to visit the Temple of Bass Pro:

Pyramid-shaped Bass Pro shop in Memphis

In addition to this grand, central temple that dominates the city’s skyline so as to lift men’s minds to higher things, I also visited this humble streetside temple, which is, I believe, dedicated to the trickster god Coyote:

Coyote Ugly on Beale Street

And I did not fail to see the King’s impressive holdings of animals in his magnificent stables:

Entryway of the Memphis Zoo

Most spectacular, of course, were the giant pandas:

Panda Ye Ye eating bamboo

I must also note something else about this journey to the great city. Here I am standing along a row of temples in the downtown area:

The author standing on Beale Street

Although I now work as a librarian rather than an archaeologist, I still habitually dress for the field. Thus, my right hand there is resting on the utility knife I usually carry on my pocket. I note that I was able to enter all of the places I went on this trip, even the King’s residence, with this knife visible on my person.

By contrast, about a year ago, I visited a presidential library where a security guard told me I would have to turn in my knife at the front desk and then retrieve it again when I left. Instead, when he wasn’t looking, I slipped the knife into the inside pocket of my bomber jacket as a small, humble way of raging against the machine and sticking it to the man.

So I can carry a knife while visiting the King, but not while visiting a president. And that is why monarchy > democracy.

Rachael Lefler Asks, ‘Have We Seen the End of the Magical Girl Genre?’

In light of Magical Girl Site, which I will be discussing at greater length in the near future, I recommend a reading of this essay, “Have We Seen the End of the Magical Girl Genre?” written by Rachael Lefler and posted at Reel Rundown. She discusses the increasingly grim tone of magical girl anime in the aftermath of Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

I think this is a thoughtful essay worth reading, but I disagree with her premise. She thinks the disappearance of lighter and happier themes in anime (which have not actually disappeared, incidentally) is due to politics: that is, the world has grown grimmer, and therefore our entertainment has grown grimmer, magical girl anime included.

I disagree with this for a few reasons. First. the world is not actually a more terrible place than in the past. That kind of myopia is common to every age, but it is false in every age. Bad stuff has always happened, and many more catastrophic things have happened in the past than have happened in our lifetimes. To support the view that this is myopic, I note that Lefler’s evidence that the world has gotten worse is very much centered on America, which is not the source of the anime she is discussing. (She does, however, note Japan’s concern over a declining birthrate—and this has become a discernible theme in anime lately.)

Second, the hypothesis she rejects almost out of hand, that grimdark magical girl anime is largely due to the influence of Madoka, would be in keeping with other patterns of influence both in this genre and elsewhere. The magical girl genre previously fell into the pattern of Sailor Moon because of its influence, so we should not be surprised that it has now fallen into the pattern of Madoka—though often with Madoka’s atmosphere and without the elements that actually make Madoka work. In a similar fashion, American comics fell into the pattern of Watchmen.

Third, lighthearted anime most certainly still exists. Moe and “healing” anime are definitely still things. In fact, we could probably make a stronger case that plotless, saccharine, slice-of-life CGDCT is eating the medium alive, than that grimdarkness is.

Fourth, this is not an unusual pattern for a genre. The move from clunky but sincere to more expertly crafted but sincere to snarky and insincere seems to be the typical process of growth, flourishing, and decay.

I don’t think it’s due to a change in the world at large, but an evolution in the genre itself, that we see all these deliberately miserable magical girl titles. The question on my mind is whether this genre is vigorous enough to survive the current trend. It survived Revolutionary Girl Utena, just as the mecha genre survived Neon Genesis Evangelion. It remains to be seen if magical girls are tough enough to survive Puella Magi Madoka Magica.