Evangelion jokes have surpassed entropy

[petronia]

I finished watching Madoka Magica: You Can (Not) Advance last night. Then I read all the meta and reaction posts canis_m linked, and all of the wiki, which inter alia demonstrates that one of the series' creative goals was to aid 4channers' battle against cognitive surplus (hard not to think of Jane McGonigal again). XD Not that multiple audiences and goals (more than one goal per audience segment!) are incompatible, or difficult for the series itself to juggle. The moe aspect passes me by, is all. I note it more as a visual language that attained standalone sophistication after I stopped watching anime omnivorously, so in a minor way it's like the culture shock of when I came into contact with ONTD/TMZ/Perez in 2008, after ignoring anything to do with celebrities for the better part of a decade. The line I'll always remember from Pattern Recognition has to do with the ability to unerringly parse fetish-foci without at all grokking the appeal XD although the character in question was thinking of baggy schoolgirl socks, this being the era of baggy schoolgirl socks, and I thought that was completely off-track.

Speaking of visual language, every aspect of this show is coded. And not in Utena's sometimes Lynchian-trolling way, but with purpose. By the by, apparently it is possible to watch Utena and be like, you know what, this is way too focussed on dudes and their feelings. Let's just not talk about male agency for a while, OK? OK.

It's not like the mahou shoujo genre hasn't been fucked with before, sure - *cough*Rayearth*cough* - but this pulls in learnings from the 15-year interim. Evangelion, Utena, and Haruhi, signally, but it's also willing to fuck with the history of moe both overt and covert. And, nigh Miike-esque, to play shiz straight to the most logical over-the-top conclusion. Take Homura's very realistic arsenal, for instance; when I realized that was happening it was like, did you see what I just saw happening?

Where I call total innovation is in the character of Madoka's mother, and then you have the teacher: viable adult women. Intuition screams that Madoka's mother is the real crux of the thing. We've recently... well, that is, not long ago in my flist/droll/thereabouts, debate flared up re: CLAMP's distressing inability to let adult female characters live fulfilled, or live period. This immediately felt systematic to me, rather than arising from CLAMP's internal preoccupations - you know when those didacticist ladies mean to pass a message on - and for some reason I just don't believe the unthinking trope(s)' persistence is fueled by: society tells us mature, knowledgeable women are fallen and evil, and we believe it. I think the question I would rather ask is: what else could we have done with the story here? And why don't we do it? Not rhetorically why, really why. What would we be otherwise saying that we aren't saying, that maybe our target audience (what audience?) does or doesn't want to hear? Compared to now? Madoka should answer this, to some degree, but I actually haven't parsed it yet. I do know I liked it, this otherwise option, even if the animators had to reach outside genre visually, to Misato and Ritsuko.

In the meantime, I am 1/3 way through the Dunnett, progress marked by an increasingly edgy sense of deja vu until it came to me: THIS SHIZ READS LIKE MIRAGE OF BLAZE. Not the first two Dunnetts (although, gawd, entire arcs of Mirage turn on the reader not having any idea why Naoe or Kenshin are committing the actions you see them committing), and not the really ridiculous Naoe/Kagetora bits, but maybe 70% of the actual wordcount of the Mirage of Blaze novels is just like this. The character types encountered, their motivations, their interactions and conflicts with yr protagonist, the no-win political and military SNAFUs. Even the narrative voice is similar, and the persistent feeling of not being able to pin motivations down properly, even when you seem to be told what those motivations are. Basically, you've got Christian knights in lieu of samurai, and the prose is much improved at the micro level.

So I will need to dash about in horror for a bit and get some fresh air, which I've been very short of this past week. XD;

Comments

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

I just don't believe the unthinking trope(s)' persistence is fueled by: society tells us mature, knowledgeable women are fallen and evil, and we believe it

Yeah, and that's the "unthinking" part, right? It's not necessary to actively believe something in order to perpetuate it. All that's necessary is laziness, or failure to even notice the trope, or priorities that lie elsewhere. In part the "absent mother" trope has got to be fueled by the "absent parent" trope that proliferates in fairy tales and childrens'/YA/shoujo/shounen fantasy, because it's just easier in terms of narrative to orphan yr underage protagonist who's having dangerous magical adventures that a conscientious parent might object to. If mothers get erased more than fathers, well, according to every culture ever, mothers are supposed to be more involved in their childrens' lives*--esp. the lives of their girl children, in the case of girl protagonists--so until recently the simplest way to remove a mother without characterizing her as the worst kind of wretch (a neglectful mother) is to let her R.I.P. while the dad can just be off at work or war or holed up in the study or whatever. More contemporary narratives of this type can have both parents benevolently busy/distant with work--in effect, Mom becomes another Dad, as Madoka's mom is basically a salaryman (though she still maintains that mother-daughter bond, eh, props to her). But mom-working-outside-the-home is a relatively recent phenomenon in the media-producing strata of society in N. America, let alone Japan. And we still grow up with these narratives of dead mothers, so that's what we're used to and it takes an effort to, like you say, imagine alternatives.

...But is all this what you meant by "rhetorically why"? Idk it's no mean thing to untangle narrative convention from patriarchal convention.

Neither here nor there, but w/r/t Madoka's mom I've been mulling the fact that Homura's family background is a complete blank.

To me the most obvious story (surely this must exist somewhere) is the one where the magical girl protag finds out that--golly gee!--Mom was a magical girl, too. But the MadoMagi worldbuild made that impossible; it leaves "What happens to magical girls when they're not girls anymore?" unanswered.

Evangelion, Utena, and Haruhi, signally

Also: Card Captor Sakura, whose costume(s) Madoka's alludes to really strongly imo. Speaking of CLAMP and dead moms.

THIS SHIZ READS LIKE MIRAGE OF BLAZE

Lawling, way to guarantee that I will never read it.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

"Rhetorically": when I say "Why don't we do that?" I don't mean, "We should do that!" (although we should, definitely), I really am wondering why. XD; And where I think the conversation often doesn't go is, why are these stories/tropes appealing to the audience? Because there is an element of authorial laziness, often, in falling back on what works, but over the centuries "what works" has been Darwinian-selected for. And yanno, maybe it's Jung; maybe it's cautionary allegory, a la Red Riding Hood, that's kept its relevance for as long as certain uncomfortable truths remain. It's easier as a writer to absent the parents from the picture, but the pre-teen reading the story probably wouldn't wish otherwise. Every child knows parents are just obstacles to adventure. Similarly, if you're a 10-year-old girl identifying with Sailor Moon or other mahou shoujo trying to defeat an evil queen or witch, what does that actually represent to you? Does that resonate? Why does that resonate? My instinct is that trying to defeat an evil king or male sorceror would feel threatening to me in a very different way, or would have to me at that age. And I don't think it's because I had or was being fed with hostility toward mature women in general, or the threat of my future self, or my mother. I think it's because a man in that role becomes an animus figure, and immediately makes the baseline unconsciously pre-sexual. To have an all-female cast of both allies and enemies feels much more... pure, is really the only way I can put it. In the way that the same-age-group endless guy-vs-guy shounen fighting manga does. The mahou shoujo age is the age of greatest segregation in this sense.

On the other hand, I'm absolutely gagging for the story where the magical girl protag finds out that Mom was also a magical girl, and I really can't come up with a reason (good or bad) why that doesn't happen. Then again, I've never watched or read stuff like this at any age with the unconscious assumption that it'd be all over once the girl grows up past puberty, or starts liking boys, or is old enough to drink (which seems to be the cut-off line in Madoka!). XD;

[lazulisong.livejournal.com]

It's happened a few times - in Heart Catch Precure one of the girls' GRANDMOTHER was a Precure, lol. (I remember hearing a rumor there was a joke about someone's magical girl grandmother complaining about costumes these days but I cannot, for the life of me, remember which series it was.) And in Kaitou St Tail her mother was also a thief / magical girl. In both of these cases they were presumably given up when a dude was met with.

also, come to think of it, in Sailor Moon, SERENITY'S mother might be dead, but her human mother is alive and well. The Precure chicks generally have living mothers but their families are ... very much in the background? I think Tokyo Mew Mew's Ichigo had both living parents.

In Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, both Maron's parents were alive but they were separated (as part of a plot to keep Maron from her tru powrz I think - the explanation of that whole arc makes more sense if you're really drunk)and overseas -- and as soon as the main bad was defeated, they got back together but I don't remember if they became a real part of her life again. There the thing was explicitly that parents seperating = neglect, tho.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Glad to have input from someone who watches/reads a lot of these XD I mean, actually the trope of "girl's magic is inherited from mom/gran" feels familiar enough, I just can't seem to put my finger on anything.

[lazulisong.livejournal.com]

...the only magical girl besides St Tail that I can think of to have inherited power directly from a parent is Sakura Kinomoto, haha.

It's actually a more common trope in fairy tales and Western myths, especially of the older, less sanitized variety. The Goose Girl, the older versions of Cinderella, Greek myths.

There's a lot more focus placed on magical boys inheriting from fathers, which probably tells you something right there. Yoh from Shaman King. Daisuke from DNAngel -- although come to think of it both he and Satoshi inherit from female side of the family. Ryoma from TeniPuri.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Does that resonate? Why does that resonate? My instinct is that trying to defeat an evil king or male sorceror would feel threatening to me in a very different way

Whereas my feminist gut says girls defeating an evil male authority figure is threatening to Teh Patriarchy in a very different way. Maybe for 10-year-olds everything becomes unconsciously pre-sexual, but even if so I don't think that in and of itself accounts for the ubiquity of same-gender battles, and for younger kids--like, at the age at which a lot of (U.S.) girls absorb the Disney canon, or Japanese girls are reading Nakayoshi--idk that the pre-sexual aspect registers at all, even subconsciously. Both of my favorite films at circa age 6 were about female protagonists defeating evil male sorcerer-kings. Although in both cases the female protagonists had hooves XD; so there's that (making the characters into magical animals = useful method of defusing potential proto-sexual vibes, also of making the narratives seem more innocuous & less threatening to social order).

Anyway it's clear there's major discomfort with the idea of f vs. m battles in general, because boys/men aren't supposed to attack girls, and girls/women aren't supposed to attack men in any sort of effectual way--gawd forbid Molly Weasley would fight any of the innumerable dude wizards, instead she's gotta fight Bellatrix--but I think it's mainly the adult creators/purveyors of narratives who are uncomfortable with them.* F vs. f causes less discomfort, therefore it's standard. But there's a youth vs. age aspect to girl vs. woman/witch/queen that I don't want to dismiss.

being fed with hostility toward mature women in general

I'd say it's more about being fed pervasive anxiety about powerful mature women. Which is still around, at least in the world I live in. RE: Mom was a magical girl, the thing is, "magical women" isn't a thing. Quick, name some depictions of powerful non-evil magic-wielding adult women of childbearing age in mahou shoujo! *crickets chirp* OK, try visual media! They exist in fantasy novels and RPGs, but. These lists (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HotWitch) are ridiculously short. And if you think media have moved past stupid BS messages re: powerful women = evil, try watching Merlin. Or watching HRC run for President.

To go back to MadoMagi (w-which as we know isn't actually for kids ;;;) it continues to interest me that the "demons" in the Madokated universe are definitely not female...really I'm not sure whether they're meant to be gendered, but they're vaguely humanoid and not-female, which could mean default male. In any case, girls vs. impersonal evil of indeterminate gender is also an option, although frankly I'd like to see more girls vs. men in part because feminist revenge fantasies, I has them it's semi-taboo. I haven't seen Hanna yet, but even that is girl vs. woman, argh.

* I mean, I don't believe girl audiences prefer films in which forex fewer than 1 out of 3 speaking characters are female, either, and yet those are what they get.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Whereas my feminist gut says girls defeating an evil male authority figure is threatening to Teh Patriarchy in a very different way.

Sure it is. And actually I think F vs M is hard to write not so much because of what the heroine is supposed or not supposed to do, but because it's hard to get an audience to take a dude villain seriously if he's in real danger of getting his ass kicked by a girl. I mean, that's pretty much the bottom bar by definition, isn't it? So then you go back and work on the heroine, so this can't be a story about Usagi (who fights with trappings of femininity), it's got to be a story about, say, Alita. And even Alita's something of a beloved anomaly.

I'm really at the point where I think we (as a society, that is) need to work on perceptions/definitions of masculinity. All this work boosting girls and women and masculinity is still defined by avoiding being/seeming feminine, to the point that if everyone woke up tomorrow and decided female = good we'd turn around and decide male = bad. It's like lifting weights only with your right bicep.

Powerful mature women: if she's not a maiden, mother or crone we don't know how to label her. Not being able to classify something makes it anxiety-inducing, and if it's anxiety-inducing it must be evil. QED. It's funny that you mentioned Merlin, because I've started to realize in my readings and browsings that a lot of the stories/myths/imagery of witches, sorceresses, and evil women we have are 19th century interpretations of older traditions, and - far from being an era of increasing restrictiveness for women - it was an era where women were becoming much more active and participactory in public life, and what we get in poetry and literature of that period is the blowoff of masculine anxiety about that.

I'd also like to know more about the mechanisms of the Madokated universe. But then, the demons are pretty undifferentiated, unlike the witches - and mahou shoujo are allowed to defeat undifferentiated male minions, that's never the issue. XD; If they represented masculine internal hellishness the symbolism would be very different. It actually feels like the new universe has lost some aesthetic colouring. /rolls

MadoMagi is definitely not for kids XD at least, not in the Nakayoshi age group. I think it's appropriate for teens of the same age group as the characters... but on the other hand, it validates THE IMMENSE SUBJECTIVE IMPORTANCE of the emotional experience you're having at that age, and I have mixed feelings about that.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Re: purity -- I think this has a lot to do with not wanting to have to deal with gender issues. The fantasy is not having to think about it. By making everone the same sex you can talk about power dynamics without automatically being in conversation with however many thousands of years' worth of gender-related baggage. (Except not, because you can't really get away from it, but...). FWIW I get the same vibe off of BL.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

And, I mean, this has gotten really abstract XD; I enjoyed the anime - though, I could predict pretty much everything that happened between episodes 3 and 10, because I carried through my Dunnett-reading paranoid mentality of YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PUTTING TOGETHER CLUES - and I totally teared up when Madoka turned into Kanzeon-Mary and started saving girls throughout space-time. As someone else said it pulled together a lot of elements that in a normal, looser show I would either ignore or be irritated by, into a very strong whole.

I don't know that episode 10 felt like a tonal shift, per se, but up to that point I didn't understand how the series could be a Fandom, and after that it made more sense.

PS. THE MIRAGE OF BLAZE THING WAS A SHOKKU TO ME TOO OKAY. But it's like... it doesn't have the actual crazee parts of MoB, it's like how MoB is a perfectly non-crazee (and meticulously researched) historical/urban fantasy in some respects.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

I totally teared up when Madoka turned into Kanzeon-Mary and started saving girls throughout space-time

ehh, this was just where I was grinding my teeth. NO FUCKING GODMODING. And no erasing entirely justified rage and despair in favour of going gently into the night! >:E

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well but at that point GODMODE was the only possible solution - everything was leading up to it. Smash the system and all that. XD; But what touched me was the gesture of solidarity, pure and simple. I didn't see it as being erasure, but acknowledgement and validation, which to a great degree is what this particular mahou shoujo system is missing.