An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Benefits Package – Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. Spoiler Review

I enjoy the Magical Girl genre. I really do. But between dubious choices and disappointing outings, that hasn’t shown much in this year’s Magical Girl May, has it? Well, to avoid going out on a sour note, I’ve sourced just the girls for the job. Sure, the service involved is something a little different, but it’s still deeply tied to traditions. A sterling aesthetic that can blend its genres and deliver – it’s time for Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.!

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Magical Girls Broken – Twin Angels Break Spoiler Review

It’s Magical Girl May, so you know what? Enough of this half-counting nonsense. Arjuna and Magikano may show up on lists of technically magical girl shows, but they’re not in tune with the core of the genre. Twin Angels Break, on the other hand, is about as core a Magical Girl show as you could hope for, with all the tropes of a post-Sailor-Moon action Magical Girl outing on full display. After how the last couple of weeks have treated me, that’s good enough in my book to be worth a watch.

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Which Witch? – Magikano Spoiler Review

Well, once again my duties have brought me a show that’s old enough to vote and it seems like barely anybody cared about the first time around, but heck, what have we got here? Some cute witch girls on brooms, some dated moe, an even more dated poppy love song that could have gone with anything for the opening? You know, against all sane expectations, I’m going to choose to be hopeful. I don’t expect this show to be good, but I will entertain the premise that it could be, and that if it isn’t good per say it may at least decline to hurt me. I know that isn’t much, but it’s still optimism. Show me what you’ve got, Magikano!

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You Are What You Eat, and the Menu is Evil – Earth Maiden Arjuna Spoiler Review

If you’ve been around the blog a little, you might have an inkling of how I feel about message fiction.

Now, I’m no enemy of messages in fiction. Some of the true all-time greats in anime, as well as genre fiction in general have had, if not a dedicated message they were trying to get out, at least a distinctly message-like slant to their existences. These are pieces that know the best way to convey the message is to let the fiction shine, delivering a compelling story with interesting characters colored by the lens through which the world is seen in order to communicate on a deep level. In some cases you might not even realize you’re looking at message fiction until you find yourself introspecting on the topics of what you just watched or read.

But then you get the other and all too common sort of message fiction, that sees the fiction as the vehicle for the message, that treats the viewing experience as a school lecture, and the author is the “teacher” attempting to hammer some lesson home to students because it will be on the final exam. These can come in many forms from the obnoxiously preachy to the hopelessly saccharine to the “scare ’em straight” comical absolutism of hellfire preachers and those annoying D.A.R.E. rallies that most Americans my age had to sit through.

I don’t hate message fiction absolutely. But I do hate when the message decides to stretch the fiction on the rack until its limbs look like something Junji Ito would have night terrors of, ties the writhing and tormented fiction into knots to hold millstones of judgmental morality in place, rides the fiction and its millstones down a hill of broken Aesop summations like some stone-wheeled go-kart, and cheers at its first place finish over a field of inanimate straw men while the tortured fiction unmercifully expires beneath the weight of the message’s arrogant grandstanding. When message fiction is bad, it’s pretty much the worst, and it doesn’t matter what the message actually is.

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