Lurv wrote:
But a crack fic where Kyubey interacts with Akio and/or Anthy could be amusing. emot-tongue

Akio (eyeing Kyubey while coming by Anthy's mini-farm where she keeps her pets): Anthy . . . is that what I think it is?
Anthy (narrow-eyed smile):  Yes, brother . . . I've found just the right creature to lay Chu-Chu's eggs for him.

The movie is going to come out in a couple of weeks is anyone planning to see it?

Atropos wrote:

gpink wrote:

The movie is going to come out in a couple of weeks is anyone planning to see it?

I wanted to get tickets in NYC, but it seems I waited too long

I think they added a second showing for New York City.

Yeah, crunchyroll's standard quality is pretty good.

Sometimes I forget how awesome it is the JO does spoiler free reviews.  Some wouldn't care, because the show has been popular for a good amount of time and video reviews are hard to keep spoiler free, especially because JO tries to talk about something unique or un-tread by previous reviewers.  I was able to use her review to convince another friend of mine to give it a shot.

I don't much think of SKU as a magical girl anime myself, although it kinda is. When I think magical girl, I think of cute/pretty witches, and... um.

Not that all the witches in Madoka are cute.

I used to just think of cutsey stuff when it came to magical girl anime, but SKU and PMMM have made me change my mind. Sure, a lot of stuff in the genre is cutsey stuff, but that doesn't mean that all of it is. Even Sailor Moon had its dark moments. (Or at least if you watched the Japanese version and not the censored to hell English dub.)

I actually got my mom to watch PMMM with me last December and even though I told her that it had a dark storyline, she thought it was going to be mostly cutsey. So, I guess she was a little surprised at how it turned out. My mom also liked Madoka's parents a lot, especially because Madoka's mom is kind of like her.

I wish I could get my dad to watch the series with me, but he refuses to watch past the first episode. Right now I'm trying to get some of my friends to watch the series with me, but we're always busy with school.

Got two of my little sisters to watch it, now I just gotta get Toe to finish it. We've watched I think 5 episodes, but every time I ask if she wants to finish it she says no because she's into other stuff right now

My parents don't wanna watch anime with me for some reason, but Mom recognizes Madoka now from my toy being everywhere... She was on the computer the other day and then she said, "Meduka!" but I don't know what she was doing on there!

Last edited by Dognog (10-09-2012 02:32:17 PM)

I think this news will bring joy to you all:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 … r-3rd-film

Ikuhara, Ikuhara . . . you'd better do a good job on Penguinbear (and insert SKU elements in there while you're at it).

I'm seriously considering driving to NY to watch the movie, I want to see it in theatre that bad. I'm so so soooooo ecstatic that they're making another anime the only way I'd be any happier is if Sayaka/Kyoko actually became a thing (keep on dreaming ) seriously though, why won't they show it in Toronto

People have been telling me for a year that I need to watch Madoka, so today I finally marathoned the show.  And I... well, I liked it.  I mean, in terms of its presentation, the charisma of the writing, and above all the way it inhabits its genre, this is clearly one of the best anime I've seen maybe ever, and it deserves the acclaim it's gotten.  But then you get past that, into characters and especially themes, and I discover that I have reservations about it after all.

Madoka gets compared to SKU a lot.  Personally, it reminded me of the three-way hybrid of Eva, Sailor Moon, and Persona 4, but SKU is the show it gets compared to, plus we've all seen it, so let's use that as a reference point.  Here is what bothers me most about Madoka.  Madoka and SKU share two central themes: the power of miracles and the power of friendship.  In SKU the power of miracles is pretty nebulous and probably illusory.  Utena wins because she rejects the power of miracles, the floating castle and the rest of it, in order to help her friend, even if all she could do was give Anthy a chance to revolutionize her own world.  This is a powerful way to end a show because it makes a powerful statement: miracles are things we have to create for ourselves, and all we can do for a friend is to love them and try to set the stage for them to make their own miracles happen.  It's resonant because it's true.

Spoilers follow.

Madoka is different -- but crucially, it's similar in one respect, which is that miracles are ultimately illusory.  You actually can get a miracle, but it is the monkey's-paw kind of miracle that ultimately backfires, and it creates as much grief as it does hope.  This is a great idea because it means magic has consequences, which is exactly what makes this show such a successful deconstruction of magical girls.  But then look how the show ends.  Unlike Utena, Homura and Madoka each win by finding loopholes in the miracle rulebook.  Time travel can magnify the impact of one person's wish; and then if that person makes exactly the right wish then she can cancel out its negative consequences and also create positive ones.  I thought that letting the protagonists circumvent the rules like this undermined the show's tragedy.  (So you're saying that all those people died or became witches because the magic system doesn't work the way we thought it did, and you actually can get something for nothing, you just have to wish in a different way?  Sucks to be them!) 

If I break it down, I think that fundamentally what's not working is the tension between Madoka accepting or not accepting the contract.  All the force of the narrative compels Madoka to accept the contract.  When so many people sacrifice so much in a story to keep X from happening, then it is a rule of plot that X has to happen if it possibly can, because otherwise it's an anticlimax and it feels hollow.  But all the force of the theme, the theme of the power of miracles, compels Madoka to refuse the contract, because the power of miracles is a phony power that is designed ultimately to perpetuate grief.  There is no good thematic reason for certain miracles to be A-OK.  Thematically, it would be better for Madoka, like Utena, to reject the power of miracles and find another way to help her friends.  So the plot and the theme are at war in the last couple episodes, and the plot wins at the considerable expense of a theme that made the plot powerful in the first place.

As for the power of friendship, it's not so much that I think Madoka compromised itself as that I liked SKU's take better.  In SKU, self-sacrifice is powerful, but it can't save someone by itself.  (Anthy is the most notable of the characters who discover this.)  But in the thematic universe of Madoka, you actually can outright save someone through self-sacrifice.  It doesn't always turn out the way you hoped -- though sometimes it does -- but you can do it.  There's nothing wrong with that theme except that I don't think it's true.

I spent this post criticizing Madoka mostly because you guys have already covered a lot of the things I liked about this show.   I like it.  It's a good show.  I laughed and I cried.  But the ending felt false to me, and false in a way that tarnished the brilliance of the genre deconstruction.

For me, the reason why I'd rank PMMM a couple notches under SKU, is that I find SKU to be better presented than PMMM - both character-wise and plot-wise.

I've since covered my gripes with PMMM's character presentation upthread – how I find the way the facial expressions and body languages are presented to be less detailed/realistic than what’s in SKU.  However, I don’t think I’ve yet covered my problems with PMMM’s plot presentation.  So, I’ll do so here.

SKU and PMMM are both Shoujo Fantasies; as such, both will contain fantastical elements that deviate from proven reality.  That said, SKU presents the fantasy elements in a way that I find to be more “relevant to real world” than what I’ve seen from PMMM.

This difference can be best demonstrated by how the two shows handle their endings:

SKU – Utena “seemingly, realistically forgotten” by everyone but Akio and Anthy.
None of the Student Council and Black Rose students outright say or do anything to say an “enchantment-amnesia” (as so many fans had insisted happened) took place.  Unlike in Mikage’s case, no buildings/settings changed when she was gone – another strike against the enchantement amnesia theory. There’s even a Shadow Girls Speech alluding to how the cast are processing Utena’s vanishing: “Wasn’t she that so-and-so who use to do what-and-what?  Well, not like it matters.”  Utena is being “forgotten” in such a way that most real life people are forgotten once they change school/work: by being out of sight.  No longer in the here and now, she quickly got put out of most people’s minds, even while the “changes” she’s made on the students still is apparent – much like now Juri’s sister still lives, while the name of her savior is forgotten by the Arisugawas.  I find Utena’s ending a realistic take on how even the best people get forgotten by our real world, and thus seem relevant and real to me. 

PMMM – Madoka “definitely, magically forgotten” by everyone but Homura
Madoka is erased from existence in a new world she sacrificed herself to create.  Even her mother is shown to have completely forgotten about her.  While tragic and dramatically effective upon first viewing, such an ending ultimately rings hollow to me because this kind of “magical forgetting” is not known to take place in our real world.  Ultimately, this ending, much like Penguindrum’s, is irrelevant to how things happen in the real world, and thus feel irrelevant to me.

Last edited by gorgeousshutin (04-02-2013 12:18:01 PM)

Mmm hmm, shutin, I think that speaks to what I said above about self-sacrifice.  Part of Madoka's self-sacrifice is that everyone but Homura forgets her.  That element is necessary to bolster what PMMM is trying to say about friendship.  If everyone remembered the great hero Madoka who saved magical girls from becoming witches, then you could say, "Madoka never outgrew wanting to be glamorous and admired."  So she has to be forgotten, and she has to enter the contract knowing that she'll be forgotten.  That's important and it makes PMMM a better show on its own terms.  The problem -- I agree with you -- is that neither "saving magical girls from becoming witches" nor "being magically forgotten by everyone" is something I can connect to the real world.

(Of course, you're right, polecat, that maybe this did happen in the real world and I just don't know about it because of Madoka's incredible sacrifice.  John 3:16!)