Little Witch Academia, directed by Yô Yoshinari. Written by Yô Yoshinari and Michiru Shimada. Music by Michiru Oshima. Studio Trigger, 2017. 25 episodes of 22 minutes (approx. 9 hours and 10 minutes).
Today is Walpurgisnacht, the second most important day in the magical-girl calendar, so now is a good time to discuss one of the most popular cute witch franchises of recent memory, Little Witch Academia.
This title first made its appearance in 2013 and 2015 as a duo of short films that were generally well received. The original film once had its home on Crunchyroll (if memory serves), but a quick check reveals it is there no longer.
The concept was adapted into a 25-episode television series in 2017, and it found a home on Netflix shortly thereafter, where it still resides. A mostly pleasant and sometimes silly coming-of-age story, Little Witch Academia is basically “Trigger does Harry Potter.”
I have sometimes referred to the work of Rawle Nyanzi, a blogger and indie author whose name I frequently misspell. He and I have often traded thoughts on magical girls and other matters related to Japanese pop culture. So, today, I’m here to plug his work.
He has recently released the first volume of Shining Tomorrow. I believe Nyanzi has previously described this as a magical girl project.
Here is its blurb:
FROM YOUNG ELEGANT LADY … TO MASKED FURY!
Irma wishes to be the perfect girl: chaste, feminine, and generous. But when a giant monster stomps through her hometown, her plans crumbled right along with the stores and apartments.
In the chaos of acrid smoke and panicked civilians, the private military company Shadow Heart snatched her friend out of the crowd and took her captive.
Now Irma must pilot the Grand Valkyur, a mechanical titan of steel more powerful than any weapon made by human hands. With a brilliant sword that could cut any matter and gleaming armor that could withstand any weapon, the Valkyur challenges all who dare to fight it.
But piloting the Valkyur means using violence — and to Irma, violence is men’s work.How can she rescue her friend without betraying the feminine elegance she prides herself on?
I see there’s been a fair amount of traffic (for me) in the last hour or so. If you’re watching the site constantly breaking and unbreaking right in front of your eyes … sorry about that. I’m running maintenance and trying to figure out how many extraneous things I can remove without destroying anything.
Pardon the brief update, but I’m currently working to strip a lot of JavaScript and CSS out of the site, which is time-consuming, though it should in the end make this ridiculously heavy site much lighter. Please notify me if you see that anything is broken.
A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.
She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.
For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?
Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)
I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.
But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.
Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.
Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.
So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.
Although I follow his close associate Jame Rolfe, whom I’ve often found insightful if vulgar, I haven’t paid much attention to the so-called Nostalgia Critic. For whatever reason, whenever I’ve started one of his videos, I’ve found it annoying.
Because I wasn’t minding him, I discovered only three years late that he produced a review of Sailor Moon. As soon as I realized this, I decided that, of course, I had to watch his review and post it.
Then, about halfway through his video, I exclaimed, “I can’t post this!”
However, after further consideration, I have decided that, though his methods are crass, I think he discusses things that are worth discussing. So I have decided to post his video here even though some of his humor violates my vaguely defined rules for acceptable content. Viewer discretion is therefore advised:
He mostly discusses the DiC English dub of Sailor Moon, and he appears to be familiar only with part of the first season, though his discussion does, curiously, range for a moment into the third season, which he compares against the Japanese version even though he otherwise leaves the Japanese version unaddressed.
A few comments of my own: First, though his methods are tongue-in-cheek and crude, I think he is right to address the sexualized obsession with young girls that characterizes much of Japanese pop culture, even if I think he over-interprets this particular franchise and uses it as an excuse to make ribald jokes.
Second, I think he needs to watch the Japanese original in order to appreciate the franchise. He spends much time complaining about Sailor Moon’s unlikable personality, which is not unreasonable, but I think he should see the character as played by Kotono Mitsuishi, whose fantastic voice performance makes the whiny, lazy, and cowardly heroine remarkably endearing.
Third, his complaints about the show’s sexual elements, if not exactly misplaced, are at least too facetious and improperly contextualized. I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it is worth pointing out that Sailor Moon and her compatriots wear miniskirts and go-go boots for the same reason that female Star Trek officers in the original series wore them: Because these were at one time emblems of women’s liberation. That may be hard to appreciate in an age where the burka is a symbol of feminism, but it is a fact nonetheless, though such a symbol was arguably anachronistic already by the time Sailor Moon made its appearance.
Also worth noting, the animated version of the franchise, which is the only one the Nostalgia Critic discusses, varies considerably from the manga version. Both certainly have sexual content, but of a markedly different character. The upskirt shots, the emphases on the characters’ legs, and the panty peekaboo are exclusive to the anime, apparently because most of the people working on the anime were men and because they wanted to appeal to a male audience.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m aware this site is too clunky and heavy. That’s partly WordPress’s fault, but as with all things WordPress, they have apps for that.
I’m still tweaking, but I’ve installed several new plugins for caching, lazy load, image compression, and stripping of unnecessary code. It’s improved the site’s speed considerably, though I’m still registering as sluggish on Google’s Speed Insights. However, my ad-blocker now shows less than half as many trackers as I had previously, which is a considerable improvement. Getting rid of those has been a goal of mine.
I’m aware that many or most of my readers use mobile devices, so I will likely install an AMP version of the site in the near future (and for those who don’t know, AMP is Google’s stripped-down, mobile-friendly version of HTML, which WordPress supports via a simple plugin); the only reason I’ve delayed this is that my comment system, Disqus, supports AMP but requires extensive setup to make it work. It will take me some time to figure it all out.
I know I haven’t posted much lately, but as this has been Holy Week, and I’m Catholic, I’ve been quite busy. I’m also finishing up Dead to Rites, and I’m in the oh-my-gosh-I-have-to-get-this-thing-out-of-the-house-I’m-so-sick-of-it phase of the writing process. I tend to hit a period of malaise and despondency as I’m finishing a project, but this one has gone more smoothly than the last. Although crafting the final chapters was like pulling teeth, my editor only asked for minor alterations, and I was able to move forward on her requests without the lengthy period of blockage I had with the first novel.
Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites
Phase:Proofing
80%
I just finished the grueling and monotonous task of running the book through a spelling and grammar checker. I didn’t do this with Jake and the Dynamo; since I use so many made-up or foreign words, and since I write complex sentences the average grammar checker can’t handle—as well as a slew of sentence fragments in dialogue—I’ve inadvertently trained myself not to see the red and green underlining. I was subsequently embarrassed to find typos in the final draft of my first novel that a spellcheck could have caught, though the book had seen an editor and proofreader even after I had edited it extensively.
With this in mind, I put Dead to Rites through the checker, and it was as agonizing a process as I had envisioned, but it also caught several typos I might have easily missed while proofreading, mostly in the form of missing letters in some of the more exotic names. It also highlighted idiosyncrasies of my writing style, especially my bad habit of starting sentences with and, so this will give me opportunity to vary my sentence structure more as I make the final edits.
Only two steps are left in my editing process: I am going to do my customary search and replace for common grammatical errors, and then I am going to print the whole thing and read it through with a red pen to find any mistakes, overused words, or loose sentences I missed while reading on the screen. After that, it’s off to the publisher to go through a professional proofread before it sees print.
My editor wants a couple of characters’ motivations clarified. I’m still figuring out how to do that, but I don’t think it will require more than a few sentences, and I’ll determine where to insert those as I’m doing the read-through of the hard copy.
I mentioned before that my next project was Son of Hel, an action novel about Santa Claus and Krampus. I’ve realized, as I’ve begun working on Son of Hel, that it will require considerable research to do it justice since I want to combine together all the Christmas folklore I can find. But I also want to publish two novels this year, so I think my next book out will actually be Rag & Muffin, which is already complete in rough draft form.
I’m continuing to make the final edits on Dead to Rites, the second book in the Jake and the Dynamo series. Meanwhile, our interior illustrator, Roffles Lowell, is hard at work making the illustrations.
After we saw the final version of the paperback, Lowell suggested some changes for this version that will make the pictures sharper in black and white, but as you can see from this picture above, he has all-around stepped up his game.
This image depicts an early scene, in which Dana Volt and Jake’s girlfriend Chelsea square off in the virtual-reality fighting game Magical Girl Rumble. Chelsea plays as Sword Seamstress while Dana plays as Pretty Dynamo. And I must say that Dana looks great in her skater outfit.
He looks at the subject from a different angle and makes an interesting observation: Japan is facing a devastating population winter. That is, the Japanese are not reproducing at replacement rate. And that means that the traditional target audience of magical girl anime is not getting replenished.
Nyanzi writes,
Remember that child-focused anime aren’t only trying to sell themselves, but associated merchandise as well. Before, they could aim at parents. Now, since there are way fewer parents and way more childless adults (who have way more disposable income), magical girl anime no longer have to be child-friendly. There’s no money in the children’s market anymore because there are too few children.
He also points out that there were grimmer magical girls even before the most recent spate. He gives My-HiME as an example, but we could easily refer to others—and even some of the great classics have their dark elements. Let’s not forget that Sailor Moon was forced to watch all her friends die and that the girls of Magic Knight Rayearth were tricked into committing a cosmic mercy-killing.
