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.
