The other day, I posted a link to Christopher Kinsey’s discussion of how the magical girl genre has grown darker and more adult in recent years. Shortly thereafter, senpai noticed; that is, Rawlye Nyanzi took up the subject and gave his own speculation.
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.
Discussion
Whether Nyanzi is right about the cause of the new trend in magical girls, I do think what he is describing will become a more common theme in anime over the next few years. Recently, a lot of American weeaboos were incensed while watching Darling in the Franxx because it ultimately delivered the shocking message that (gasp!) getting married and having kids might be okay things to do. That anyone was actually offended by such a mundane message shows that the world has gotten really weird lately, but if you’re one of those weird people appalled by marriage and reproduction, I would recommend not watching anime because I predict that there will be a lot more of that.
Nyanzi has an interesting hypothesis, and I won’t state flat out that it’s wrong. I will, however, reiterate my own thesis: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the huge slew of dark titles has made its appearance after 2011, when Puella Magi Madoka Magica appeared, just as it’s no coincidence that Wedding Peach, Tokyo Mew Mew, and similar titles appeared through the mid-nineties and beyond. Sailor Moon hit the genre like a sledgehammer, and everything else fell into its pattern. Madoka was another sledgehammer.
On Pandering
We might also note that the struggle between darkness and light (to put a dramatic spin on it) has characterized this genre from the beginning. It’s mostly been little girls’ entertainment, but it’s often if not always had an uncomfortable edge. This is the genre, after all, that introduced the “panty shot” to anime. It also accepted a great deal of influence from Cutey Honey, which, whether we consider it a magical girl title or something else, definitely didn’t have innocent young girls as its intended audience.
Magical girls should be noblebright and aimed squarely at middle school girls. Switching from feminine mysteries of growing up fantasies to a masculine cosplay fetish has introduced seriously dystopian and dyscivic aspects to the genre.
— PulpArchivist (@ArchivistPulp) April 9, 2019
That tweet above, from the venerable Pulp Archivist in response to Nyanzi, expresses a sentiment I agree with (though he uses more ten-cent words than I usually do). But things are also not quite that simple: to some degree, the genre has been a male cosplay fetish for much longer than the last decade. This has really come home to me as I’ve been exploring Revolutionary Girl Utena; that was the first of the “deconstructive” magical girl shows, made by a director dissatisfied with Sailor Moon. Thus, it was either ahead of its time or an anachronism depending on how you look at it: It was the first of its kind, but it also evoked the anime of the seventies. To me, what is most striking about it is that it has overt feminist themes—and yet its crew is a giant boys’ club.
I think this is not uncommon, either: There are a lot of women working in manga, but in anime, it’s mostly dudes, and the work they produce reflects that. Just look at the difference between the manga version of Sailor Moon (made by a woman) and the anime (made by dudes). I’ll let you guess which one has panty shots. You can see something similar in Utena in the difference between the manga (adapted by a woman) and the anime (made by dudes). I’ll let you guess which one is obsessed with lesbians.
What I’m saying is, it may be no surprise that this genre has gravitated over time to the interests of the people producing it, especially since the peripheral fandom of older males was known of long before the shows explicitly catering to them got made.
On Deconstruction
Anyway, as I’ve said before, I think grimdark is a natural, perhaps inevitable direction for a genre to take, and I say that because we’ve seen it in so many other places, where the formulas get established and then (arguably) get stale, and then the deconstructionists come along. Deconstruction works as well as it does because it’s easier to destroy than to build: It’s easier to mock Sailor Moon with a parody or tear it apart with a grim version than it is to make a new Sailor Moon. That’s also probably why so many deconstructions have, admittedly, some high artistic value: The deconstructionists don’t have to create very much, so they can focus on honing their craft instead.
The big difference between the post-Sailor Moon magical girls and the post-Madoka magical girls is, I think, in the understanding. Whether you love it or hate it, you cannot claim that Wedding Peach didn’t understand Sailor Moon; it understood it perfectly and sought to recycle its formula. The same goes for the other magical girl action comedies that came out through the nineties and into the two-thousands.
By contrast, many of the series that have come out after Madoka have imitated its atmosphere without grasping its formula, which is no surprise because Madoka is considerably more subtle and complex than most anime series can manage. Most subsequent series have missed the Faustian element, that the girls suffer for their own decisions, and they have also missed the fact that Madoka doesn’t leave everything destroyed, but puts it back together in the end.
From what I’ve seen, the only series that has successfully mastered Madoka’s concepts well enough to build on them and ultimately rebut them is Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. For that reason, I once naïvely hoped that Yuki Yuna would be the close of the post-Madoka era, but that was not to be.
