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.
Both of these, perhaps not coincidentally, are self-published comic books. The former looks like a children’s book but was written for adults, and the latter was written for children but is arguably not suitable for them. Bone begins by introducing a trio of cartoon characters who would be at home in a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, and then after allowing them a variety of funny antics, drops them into a sword-and-sorcery epic complete with battles and death and sacrifice. Amelia Rules! is an emotional roller-coaster that swings wildly back and forth between gut-busting comedy and heart-wrenching tragedy. Most impressively, it is entirely successful in its transitions.
I won’t claim it is the only way to write a story, but I prefer stories that move through the following three phases:
- We laugh at the humorous antics of the characters
- The characters reveal an unexpected depth behind the slapstick humor
- We share the characters’ sorrows
These three phases are not necessarily clearly defined. Fone Bone is still funny even when the world is ending, but the story at that point unquestionably has a more serious tone than it did in the beginning.
My theory is that characters are most likely to become endearing to us when we laugh with them. Once they have made us laugh, they have opened us up and created in us a kind of affection for them. Then we are more ready to cry with them when hardship strikes. The stories I like best start out very funny and become more serious over time, pulling the reader gradually from one mood to the next. If this is done well, the reader does not even notice the shift until after he has read the last page.
In my opinion, the magical girl genre is particularly well suited to this. For evidence, I turn to the Lord of the Rings of the genre, the source from which all other titles in the genre have sprung, at least since the nineties—Sailor Moon. Anyone not blinded by fannish love can easily see numerous flaws in any version of Sailor Moon, whether it be the poor artwork in the manga or the clunky animation in the TV show, or the nonsensical plots or crummy action sequences. None of that matters, however, because Sailor Moon itself is bigger than any particular version of it.
Sailor Moon works, as you can tell by talking to any of its fans, because its characters are endearing. And they are endearing because they are a bunch of goofy airheads who can make anybody laugh. By making us laugh over and over again, they prepare us to feel for them when they face real danger, and to cry when they die.
This is also the source of my objection to the recent crop of magical girl stories that are nothing but darkness and blood. The problem is not that they depict being a magical girl as suffering; being a magical girl has always meant suffering. Heck, that’s just the nature of being a protagonist: the hero has to die, to lie in the belly of the whale, before he can rise again from the dead and have kingdoms given unto him. Sailor Moon, in fact, has to do this repeatedly, even endlessly, because her battle against the darkness is the very engine that moves the universe. She dies that we may live, and she does it over and over again. None of this new breed of suffering magical girls suffers as much as Sailor Moon does—but Sailor Moon also knows how to laugh.
My problem with the “grimdark” magical girl shows is not that they make the girls suffer, but that they don’t know how to crack a smile. They don’t laugh, or if they do, it’s a nasty, adolescent snigger—the kind of laughter that comes from a Kentaro Sato manga—rather than an honest, genuinely mirthful belly laugh.
This goes back to something I’ve attempted to articulate repeatedly, such as in my essay on The Powerpuff Girls. The magical girl, and especially the magical girl warrior, is an attractive figure partly because of the sharp contrast between her hyper-feminine appearance and the violent action in which she engages. But there is also a deeper, more fundamental appeal: the need we have to see innocence defeat evil.
For this reason, although it is appropriate to challenge the magical girl’s innocence, I believe it is contrary to the very nature of the genre to undermine it completely. Sailors Uranus and Neptune may be battle-hardened, world-weary, and morally conflicted, but they have not lost that which is essential to them as magical girls.
Even the grimdark versions seem to realize this. The creator of Puella Magi Madoka Magica has said he was writing the story against his own nihilism (and thus I believe some other bloggers are wrong-headed to interpret that title in the light of the rest of his work), and Magical Girl Raising Project confirmed that there was a real magical girl in the city as long as the one innocent girl was still alive. These darker stories are perhaps tearing at the heart of the genre, but they haven’t yet ripped it out.
It is up to the reader to decide if I am succeeding or not, but my goal in Jake and the Dynamo is to capture this theory of mine, to make you laugh hard in preparation to make you weep, to invite you to enjoy the girls’ antics so that you can more deeply experience their sufferings.
I want to break your heart.
