yanno by all means get what you want outta whatever you want but when the creator of a cartoon explicitly aimed at college-aged guys (check the timestamps–when a show airs at bleary-eyed-o'clock it is not a show for children but for people who’ve refused to grow up & been allowed to persist in doing so) says he wrote it ‘cause he got paid to write a story about little girls dying violently & then he calls those little girls “self-righteous, like terrorists” when asked why he wrote it the way he did, i’m just saying you can get something meaningful out of that story, if you feel you can or you must, but perhaps defending it as anything like a feminist narrative is barking up the wrong fucking tree
let’s not mince words here. a show like puella magi madoka magica only exists because in the world of japanese cartoons the bronies won; their ability to waste money–owing to their antisocial behavior–is immense, their disposable income is desired enough by marketers and makers, many of whom exhibit the same problems that riddle supercomix (when the machinery of corporate entertainment allows aggressive control freaks to meet people who never learned how to love anything but a particular type of story, perversion of all kinds is practically inevitable), and they are aggressively reactionary enough to muscle out everyone else. including, you’ll notice, the audience grouping that just so happens to be who these stories are about. they may exist in the narrative but the narrative isn’t allowed to be for them. these guys won’t let it.
if you think the cultural narrative this creates does not end horribly you are wrong.
i mean you can like whatever you want but if you’re actually going to argue your appreciation makes this context irrelevant or nonexistent as a shaping influence on the narrative you’re liking, if you think “because [character] i am allowed to ignore the ethical conceits that informed the craft that went into it”, your behavior choices are dangerously short-sighted.
the single worst critical stance to take is “why can’t i just enjoy something thoughtlessly” or “it’s just a story”. stories have structure. structures have weight. structures play off embedded perceptions and what’s commonly referred to as “willing suspension of disbelief”: that mistaken choice on a consumer’s part to forget that what they are consuming was made by someone else’s hands, and that those hands are not their own.
if you let yourself forget that you’re a fool.
Ran across this in my likes and since @nostalgebraist brought PMMM up a while back, thought I’d reblog it. I’m not sure this post has any information not available on the other posts he reblogged but the comparison to bronyism is interesting. Though presumably the demographic factors disfavouring a younger audience are more severe in Japan.
Thanks. I remember someone making a similar brony comparison to help illuminate Hayao Miyazaki’s negative remarks about the anime industry – it went something like “to understand what the anime industry is actually like, imagine a world where bronies (otaku, in this analogy) took over the animation industry to the point that almost all animated TV shows were like sexualized, grimdark versions of MLP: FIM aimed at college-age viewers.”
And when you put it that way, it makes it look like the whole way we engage with anime in the west is missing a lot of context (cf. Japanese people who find it weird how many western fans cheerfully identify as “otaku,” when in Japan it’s [apparently?] much more of a negative term, and self-identifying as it is a much more extreme / anti-social gesture, like proudly calling yourself a “creep” or something). The whole idea does make me kind of want to disengage from anime culture entirely.
OTOH I’m not sure I understand why Madoka is an unusually bad example of this? If we’re looking at people who watch and enjoy lots of anime – stuff that is, to a greater or lesser extent, transmissions from the world where bronies won – should they have to avoid Madoka in particular? After all, someone who has seen Madoka has probably seen a lot of other anime as well. (I can see the point about Madoka being worse than “ordinary” magical girl shows but most western fans don’t just watch ordinary magical girl shows)
From their blog it seems like OP knows a lot about the Japanese anime industry so I imagine there is a distinction they know about that I am missing
It should be noted that a lot of it isn’t that otaku creators muscled out other kinds of creators – it’s that the otaku dollar is strong enough that consumption is influenced very heavily by a certain demographic, and that anime targeting other things are not as well rewarded. There’s still a diversity of creators in the shadows, making manga occasionally, but for various reasons the studios call the shots as to which mangaka get anime and which don’t (Japanese business is overall very conservative, even its creatives are no exception) and they of course decide to go with what they THINK will earn them the most money.
Madoka has left a nasty, vile taste in a lot of people’s mouths because it takes a a genre that was for young women/girls – mahou shoujo has typically been defined by, well, shoujo tropes – and turns it into one targeted at adult men. And then an entire succession of copycat “grimdark/’sexy’ magical girls” came out. You have to understand… you might not be aware of it but Madoka was really the tipping point in the MARKET for “magical girls gets almost entirely replaced, as a genre, by this new version that caters to adult men.”
So why are people most angry with Madoka?
“Because it was the last straw.”
This is very interesting! Thanks.
(via 2centjubilee)
