Paper Moon

The danger of leaving long thinky-thought comments in my livejournal is that you get me going all thinky-thoughts in response.

phoenix_z's comment here actually got me thinking about the third reason that I can't stand Madoka Magica, and that is because of the squickish combination of an all-male writing and directing staff plus an aggressive marketing campaign targeted toward an older, male audience. And if anybody reading this is serious about defending the notion that this show has some sort of Message about... I dunno, magic as false empowerment or whatever, then I think it's important to start asking questions like:

If Madoka Magica is meant to deconstruct the notion that magic can be empowering to little girls, who exactly is this message aimed at? (The answer: Adult men. Madoka Magica is absolutely not being promoted in any media outlets targeted towards girls or women. It's being promoted strictly to an adult male audience.)

Is there something maybe a bit problematic about an adult male writing staff sending the message that magic falsely empowers little girls to an audience of mostly adult men? (Answer: Yes.)

If we can really buy the idea that Madoka Magica is intended to teach the lesson that real strength doesn't come from magic, then why isn't this message in a series for little girls marketed toward little girls? (Answer: Because that would actually make Madoka Magica an empowering deconstruction of the magical girl genre. But that's not what SHAFT is interested in doing. The creative staff's thought process seems to have started and stopped at "let's show how magic can be bad" without having considered any of the implications of who was writing the show or for what audience.)

If the show is intended as a general "magic can be false empowerment" message separate from a deconstruction of magical girl empowerment specifically, then that again brings us around to the question of why the creative staff thought that the best way to convey this message was to show a bunch of vulnerable moe little girls being tortured and terrified week after week in a show that is aggressively marketed toward an adult male audience in the first place. (Answer: Because fanservice, that's why.)

This. This is why I can't stand Madoka Magica. It's not that I don't like the idea of deconstructing the magical girl genre period - in case that still needs to be clarified for anybody - but it's just that Madoka Magica is DOIN IT WRONG.

Eridan humping a buoy is clearly the most appropriate icon for this post.

PS - Once again, since I know that a lot of people on my flist enjoy Madoka Magica for a variety of reasons, if you like the show and all that's perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with that, you don't need to defend your enjoyment of the show to anybody, least of all to me. But I don't like the show and now I've said why.




Post-mortem, added April 28th: Since Google shows that this post is now being linked in several places where the shit that went down a couple nights ago is being dissected by curious gawkers, I feel like there are a couple of things that I need to clear the air about:

1. Yes, I deleted a fuckton of anonymous comments that were little more than one-sentence misogynistic insults. There was a pretty steady barrage of them for hours on end on Monday night.

2. I was in a very, very bad headspace Monday night after having dealt with an extremely trying day at work, and I was absolutely not on a mental state where I could have dealt with any of this well. Which is why I didn't deal with it well. ^^;; I accidentally deleted some actually substansive comments, was an asshole in response to some other coments, and generally behaved poorly. For that much I apologize.

3. Quite a few of the comments that I deleted said something to the effect that I was only angry about sexism in anime because I never had to deal with sexism IRL, and how very dare I etc. Well, guess why I was completely exhausted, angry, and in a very bad headspace after my day at work on Monday? I'll give you a hint: it starts with a "sexual" and ends with "harassment" and it is something that I had been dealing with for a long time at my school that kind of came to a head on Monday. To come home from that to face a string of anonymous comments accusing me of "not knowing what real sexism is" or not caring about fighting sexism IRL - not just sexism directed at myself, but sexism directed at my co-workers and female students that I deal with every day - was a huge fucking slap in the face. Which of course all fed into my reactions re: point #2 above.

4. I realize now that there are a lot of flaws in my arguments. Damned if I was going to admit to any of that on Monday night though. There's nothing quite like being inundated with a flood of misogynistic trolling to convince oneself that she's completely in the right and that everybody arguing against her is just part of the shitlicking internet hate machine. ;)

5. I still do not like Madoka, I still think that it's ass, but I truly honestly am completely fine with other people liking the show and I can't invalidate anybody else's lens for viewing the show, whether they see a progressive and empowering reading in it or not. This was my position from the beginning - if you doubt that, just read through the comments on my first post about Madoka - albeit it was a position that I admittedly forgot to uphold when I started responding to the comments here (see point #2 above). But it was also originally the reason why I confined my venting about the show to my own journal and never posted my personal frustrations with the show anywhere where people were squeeing over it. But just as y'all have every right to love and to interpret the show however you wish, I also have the right to really dislike the show from my own pespective, and yeah, I don't appreciate complete strangers coming into my journal - on a two-month-old entry, no less! - and trying to argue with me about how my reasons for disliking the show are TOTES INVALID. I never confronted any of you in your spaces with arguments as to why you were WRONG WRONG WRONG to enjoy Madoka and I would have appreciated it if y'all had extended the same courtesy to me.

6. Yes, I like a lot of animu and manga that is intended to be moe or marketed toward a male audience or is full of sexism and/or fanpandering. I can find empowering storylines in male-oriented, fanservice-laden media and that's exactly why I understand how some people can see the same in Madoka. But I'm honest about the fact that I like material with significant flaws or problematic aspects. Madoka fandom, on the other hand, has so far exhibited an extremely depressing tendency to flip their collective shit whenever somebody points out that there could be something sexist in the source material. No, I am not talking about just my post here. I've seen some pretty epic fandumb from Madoka fans on tumblr and in some locked posts on my flist before, and this is not okay.



7. Having said that, though, the main argument in this post - the one that quickly got lost in all of the derailing and cluelessness in the comments - is not that "Madoka is sexist because it was written by men," but rather that the idea of Madoka as a deconstruction of the idea that magical girls are empowering is problematic because it was written by a staff composed entirely of men, and not just any men, but a couple of notoriously sexist men at that. (Seriously, don't any of you follow Gen Urobuchi on twitter?) It would be like if Dave Sims and Frank Miller got together and said "Let's make a cartoon that deconstructs the idea that Wonder Woman is empowering to women because she's actually totally not." There's nothing inherently wrong with that concept, but people would be right to side-eye it if it was being written and produced by two of the most notoriously sexist men in the comics industry. Maybe they're not the right people to be doing that show because their negative attitudes towards women will show through in the final product. And I would argue that the same thing happened with Madoka: Urobuchi and company's neckbeardy attitude toward women showed throughout the series, whether it was the fact that Sayaka's confrontation against the creepy men on the train was presented as evidence that she was turning evil, or the idiotic "Joan of Arc saved France because QB granted her wish!" stuff, or the pancake-faced moe moe character designs, or the very ending in and of itself. Although in the end this is a moot point because I think the series finale made it very clear that Madoka *isn't* intended to be a deconstruction of the idea that magic is empowering to girls. But at the time that this post was written, that was the concept that the series was getting the most praise for, and that was why I wrote this response.



8. Final concluding link, for those of you to who may still need it: The FedEx Arrow and How To Deal With It. Extremely relevant to this post, I swear.

9. Okay, no, one more bit of snark. I'm still amazed that anybody would hold up Madoka's mom as an example of how awesomely feminist this series is when Heartcatch Precure just finished airing on TV. Career women with significant relationships with their magical girl daughters are NOT unique to Madoka, people! They're a fairly common fixture of magical girl shows already. And why are we lavishing praise on Madoka for having great mother-daughter relationships when only ONE of the five girls has a mother who appears onscreen and two of the five girls have mothers who are tragically dead? Just for a quick comparison, Heartcatch Precure has four magical girls, all four of whom have living mothers who appear onscreen and who have strong relationships with their daughters, and three of the four mothers have careers outside their homes. Just saying. Madoka's mom is great and all, but stop fucking upholding Madoka Magica as being the greatest portrayal of mother-daughter relationships in anime when so may other magical girl shows DO THAT BETTER.