July 2020 - deus ex magical girl

Update on My Projects

I won’t deny that I’ve been struggling with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. For this volume, I had a lot of clear vignettes in my mind but no idea how they related to one another. So I’ve been writing disconnected scenes without really knowing what I was doing.

Fortunately, I finally had a breakthrough: I had a single plot point come to me that tied everything together, so I’m working on the book tonight and it’s flowing reasonably well.

On that note, I have no update on publishing. I haven’t heard back from any publishers to which I’ve submitted, so I will probably, in the next few months, give them up and submit to other places.

Crunchyroll on the History of Magical Girls

Yet another video on the history of the magical girl genre, this time from the YouTube channel of Crunchyroll, the streaming service.

Any of these are necessarily selective, though I find this one slightly more irritating than usual. When it comes to discussing Sailor Moon, it focuses on gayness while ignoring more sigificant accomplishments and also claims Sailor Moon basically introduced homosexuality to anime—a statement as ignorant as all the claims from a few years back that Black Panther was the first movie with black people in it. Crunchyroll also treats of Puella Magi Madoka Magica as the first self-aware or self-critical magical girl series, a claim so common yet erroenous that it’s produced a cottage industry of blowback.

The genre has always been self-aware and included some amount of self-mockery, so much so that self-awareness may be one of its central characteristics, but it has also seen deliberate deconstructions before Madoka. What Madoka accomplished that its predecessors didn’t is a complete reorienting of the genre toward uglier content and more nihilistic themes. Madoka, like Sailor Moon before it, turned the whole genre into its imitators.

Aside from that, well, whatever; a lot of commenters over on YouTube have complained that this video fails to mention some particular series or other, but since this is a half-hour, condensed discussion, a lot is necessarily going to get excluded.

In any case, collecting historical overviews of the genre is part of my schtick here, so I repost them as I find them.

It may or may not be coincidental that Crunchyroll has recently acquired the rights to Healin’ Good Pretty Cure, which I believe is the first Pretty Cure series—except the original—to get licensed in English (not counting the brutally localized Glitter Force adaptations on Netflix). To a magical girl fan, that’s significant, and I hope it means more Pretty Cure series will appear on the service in the future. Since I refuse to use pirate sites, I still haven’t been able to watch most of this magical girl mega-franchise.

At the time of writing, however, only episodes 13 to 17 of Healin’ Good are available, but a notice indicates that episodes 1 to 12 will appear later. This perhaps represents some problems with the licensing.

Movie Review: ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’

Sonic the Hedgehog, directed by Jeff Fowler. Written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller. Starring Ben Schwartz, James Marsden, and Jim Carrey. Paramount Pictures, 2020. Rated PG.

Sonic the Hedgehog is probably most memorable not for its content but for its disastrous roll-out, which will be the stuff of movie legend: Early previews delivered a weird design for the famous blue hedgehog, who had creepy, tiny eyes and bizarre proportions. After this received overwhelmingly negative responses from fans, presaging a bomb, the studio hastily redid the character model to bring it in line with Sonic’s appearance in video games and cartoons.

The original, disturbing design for Sonic the Hedgehog.

The end result was the—so far—highest-grossing movie based on a video game. At least part of that box-office success was driven by the goodwill of fans impressed that a studio had listened to their complaints.

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Television Review: ‘Miraculous Ladybug,’ Season 3, Part 2

Miraculous Ladybug, Season 3, Part 1, directed by Thomas Astruc. Written by Nicky Baker et al. Zagtoon, 2019. Rated TV-Y7. 13 episodes.

It had seemed, after the second season of Miraculous Ladybug made it from France to the United States, that the distributor had worked out the problem with the jumbled episode order. The third season of the show, however, tells us this is not the case: The episodes are crazily out of order here, which is a problem since this third season continues to develop a linear plot. Despite that, this is another strong season overall with only a few flubs. A viewer just needs to be willing to go with the flow, to assume that previously unmentioned plot points or characters will get their introduction at some point.

I earlier wrote about the first half of the third season and think this previous post only needs a slight update now that the third season is available in its entirety.

The beginning of this season’s second half is not encouraging: It’s a recap episode, and like all recap episodes, it’s pretty bad. However, after that and a few other weak episodes, things ramp up.

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Return of the Tropical Pedo Beams

In a recent post, I made the argument that artistic works should be judged, either morally or artistically, on their own merits and not on the reputation of the artist. reply to a recent post, a reader has made the following comment:

Y’know it’s also worth mentioning the same arguments people make about buying American apply here. For example, you limit your consumption to domestic goods only, you’ll never get a Lamborghini or a Rolex … or in this case Polanski’s Chinatown. How can you limit yourself like that? But I’m sitting here now and thinking about it, and it occurs to me the same problem sets in with both scenarios.

Choose to sacrifice for quality over principle, fast forward a couple decades and what have we got? No wholesome mainstream entertainment, no US manufactured goods, and yet no Lamborghinis or Chinatowns. All of our consumer goods are crappy and made by communists, and all of our books and movies are crappy and made by creeps and pederasts. Meanwhile both the American workers and Christian authors are on unemployment.

Maybe the real problem here is the Darwinism of the almighty dollar.

My initial reaction is to suggest that this is a false analogy. One question is ethical (how are artistic works to be judged?) and the other is economical. In both cases, the average consumer can’t be expected to vet the issues in question. Most people do not pay attention to where there goods come from, and most do not investigate the personal lives of the writers they read or the directors whose movies they watch. Nor am I convinced they should be expected to; indeed, before they days of the internet, such vetting was in many cases difficult if not impossible.

Traditionally, protecting locally manufactured goods has largely been the domain of governments, which have exacted tariffs or limited trade. Dealing with artists’ criminal behavior, like anyone else’s criminal behavior, has usually fallen to the same authority. I’m not convinced this is the wrong way to do things: In the latter case, the alternative is mob justice. In the former, I’m not sure home-grown efforts to buy local make a significant difference in the long run.

I might add, too, that protecting the populace from smut has also traditionally fallen to the government, but only partly. Only gradually did the United States decide that pornography was protected by the First Amendment (which, as written, was clearly not intended for such a purpose). This has been a disaster.

Anime Review: ‘Sailor Moon Super S’

The heartwarming tale of the original Brony.

Sailor Moon Super S, written by Yoji Enokido et al. Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Starring Kotono Mitsuishi, Aya Hisakawa, and Michie Tomizawa. Toei Animation (1995–1996). 39 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 936 minutes).

Available from Viz Media.

Sailor Moon Super S, the fourth series of the Sailor Moon anime from the Nineties, is probably the weakest entry in the popular franchise. Built loosely on the “Infinity” arc of the manga, it focuses on Sailor Moon’s daughter from the future, Chibi-Usa. A microcosmic coming-of-age story, this arc is arguably important to Sailor Moon’s overall themes, but that doesn’t prevent it from being uneven—the primary reason for which is probably Chibi-Usa herself, whose presence in Sailor Moon is, even at the best of times, redundant.

Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon finish their transformation sequences. — Chibi-Usa prepares to punish you, redundantly.

Chibi-Usa earned a lot of hate from American viewers back in the Nineties due to the DiC dub. She is more popular in Japan, which is unsurprising given that country’s obsession with cuteness, mascot characters, and little girls. She is simultaneously a sidekick to Sailor Moon and a miniature version of her (she is actually called Sailor Chibi Moon), but although she appears best suited to a peripheral role, she has a habit of upstaging the rest of the cast—and in Super S, she takes over.

This is her arc, like it or not.

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