#13.5.18

People that completely disregard Mami’s entire character and reduce her to “1-dimensional and killed off for shock value”

People that completely disregard Madoka’s entire character and reduce her to “doesn’t do anything and has no development”

People who argue Kyoko’s sacrifice and sympathy with Sayaka made no sense

People who ask why Kyubey can’t time travel or rewrite the universe or whatever to end entropy itself seeing as how it can grant such powers to the girls, completely ignoring that Kyubey is a catalyst for these wishes to be granted and does not possess the ability to do such tasks itself

“Why did none of the girls wish to end entropy?”

Literally anyone who argues that they would be mentally stronger than the girls if were they in that situation

Pretentious IQ 300 Rebellion elitists who act like people that dislike Rebellion or can’t understand Homu’s actions at the end are literally too stupid to understand

People who dislike Rebellion or can’t get behind Homu’s actions at the end acting like people who do like Rebellion and can get behind Homu’s actions at the end are insane

I saw one guy say that Sayaka had a bad design and his argument was that he didn’t like the look of it. What. Dislike the look all you want but don’t act like the actual character design is objectively bad because here’s a spoiler: it’s a good design

People that praise Madoka as an excellent deconstruction of the magical girl genre

People that call Madoka “torture porn”

“Ma-DOH-ka”

“Kyu-bee”

Hitomi being portrayed as a cold, heartless bitch

This one isn’t very common, but I’ve seen some people argue that the ending to Rebellion isn’t really all that different from the ending to the original series, and that Rebellion doesn’t need a follow-up to answer its many unanswered questions. This one really threw me off because while the original series left unanswered questions, none of them really needed answers, whereas with Rebellion you’ve got way more questions that definitely need answering, particularly in regard to the stability of the new universe and Madoka’s form in said universe

People that think the Concept Movie is canon

People that somehow think Homura is heterosexual

Hello readers, I’m very sorry I’ve been MIA. School has been kicking my behind and life is just going on after it doing the same thing. My mental health has been sh*t for the past couple of days and I can’t be bothered to do anything apart from the things I’m expected to do. Hopefully there’ll be a new post at some point this week. I have a final on Tuesday, Wednesday and two on Friday which is just grand. I’ll try to be on and read a few of your messages if you want to pop by and say hello or something, or hate me for not updating. If you follow me on instagram you will know I have been absent from there as well. I apologise once again, I have a story in my inbox that I really want to get to but I just don’t have the time. You can send me requests if you want and I’ll try to get to them as soon as possible. 

FURRY IDOL I HATE HER SO FUCKING MUCH SHE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR WE GET A COMICALLY PISSED OFF FACE SHE’S TALKING ALL “I’M FUCKING PISSED MC’S A CUNT” AND SHE JUST STARES AGGRESSIVELY AT MC’S BROTHER FOR LIKE 10 SECONDS ALL PISSED OFF UNTIL AFTER THOSE 10 SECONDS SHE FALLS BACK AND HEARTS OCCUPY HER EYES AND THE BACKGROUND GOES ALL PINK AND LOVEY-DOVEY AND HER NOSE BLEEDS AND SHE FALLS IN LOVE WITH MC’S BROTHER PICK A FUCKING TONE YOU PIECE OF SHIT SHOW YOU CAN’T HAVE THIS GUY RIGHT HERE ABUSE HIS SISTER CONSTANTLY AND THEN ALSO HAVE AN ANGRY FURRY IDOL FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM AND HAVE HER NOSE BLEED AND SAY “S-SO HOT” LIKE IT’S A FUCKING COMEDY SHOW BECAUSE IT’S NOT THIS GUY IS EXTREMELY ABUSIVE AND AS AN AUDIENCE WE KNOW THIS TO COMEDICALLY FRAME FURRY IDOL FALLING IN LOVE WITH HIM IS FUCKING DISGUSTING AND OFFENSIVE I HATE THIS UTTER MISERABLE PILE OF SHIT THAT IS MAGICAL GIRL SITE

Anyway, I actually forgot that MC’s brother discovered the Mahou Shoujo Site. He already thinks that MC and Yatsumura are magical girls, and, with absolutely no evidence or reason to guess this, he assumes furry idol is one too. From there, we get “I might be able to use her”. I have to wonder what that fucker is planning, but nothing good I assume. And I don’t mean morally good either, I mean good from a storytelling point of view.

Furry idol’s stalker meanwhile is doing a typical stalker thing and acting like since MC’s brother interacted with furry idol, he “defiled her”. This is actually believable idol stalker behaviour. Good on you, Magical Girl Site! Wonder how quickly that’ll turn to shit. We’ve known about this character for like 4 episodes and he’s done literally nothing to affect the plot in any way. He just exists and is a freak.

Moving on, this episode’s probably the most plot heavy so far. We’re introduced to another Magical Girl who wakes Shioi, MC and Yatsumura up from their comas (by slitting her wrist with her stick and making them drink her blood which heals them – that is the power of her stick and she mentions that she’s got experience with self harm so it’s no problem – edgy as fuck) and this Magical Girl tells us she got her powers from a different Magical Girl Site with a different admin (voiced by Kizuna Ai!). We then learn that there are a bunch of Magical Girl Sites, each with their own admins, and we get a little montage showing some other magical girls and site admins, including the site admin we’re most familiar with straight up killing a magical girl for no real reason. We also learn about the Tempest – when it arrives, the world will end, most everyone will die, and everyone else will be taken to a new world or something. However, if a magical girl gathers enough negative energy to fill up her stick (their hidden purpose) and gives it to the site on the day of the tempest, she’ll be unharmed. The problem is of course that excessive stick usage means damage to the body and can lead to death. This is actually an interesting idea conceptually, having the girls be effectively forced to kill each other via a system that exploits them and punishes them for not reading into the exact details. The problem is that I can’t fully appreciate it because I’ve seen a much better dark magical girl show do a similar thing, except done much better.

Perhaps it’s annoying for fans of this show to see it be compared to Madoka so often, but the comparison’s kinda necessary. Madoka sure as heck isn’t the first dark magical girl anime, but the magical girl genre as a whole was a lot less popular than it was in the past, and everyone had the notion that most if not all magical girl shows were incredibly light in their tone. Madoka comes out of nowhere advertising itself as light in its tone, but surprises everyone with a dark twist in episode 3 and shocks the entire anime community at large, bringing magical girls back to greater prominence again. And thus magical girls are revitalised, and many works attempt to recapture that dark nature in a typically light-hearted genre that made Madoka so successful.

Long after Madoka finished airing, a neat little mangaka made his own dark magical girl manga, which he made a spinoff of that became this anime. My headcanon is that he was inspired by Madoka, and thought he could make a better dark magical girl anime than Madoka. He’ll take a magical girl and make it even darker than Madoka in order to surpass it. Because he doesn’t understand why Madoka was a success. As far as he is concerned, Madoka was good for being a dark magical girl story, so all he needs to do is make an even darker magical girl story. He’s like an edgy 13 year old that thinks his stories are deep and profound because they have abuse. Unfortunately, like many edgy 13 year olds, this mangaka is a horribly bad writer.

At least, that’s what I think.

On the topic of his horrible writing, my biggest problem with this show is its tonal inconsistency. While browsing r/Anime’s episode 6 discussion thread to see what everyone is thinking of the show, I saw one general sort of comment popping up – you know how we all think it’s so dark and tryhard edgy that it becomes funny? Some people think that’s intentional. And, sorry, I don’t buy it in the slightest. The writers try to put actual comedy into this. There is intentional comedy in the show that is very obviously intentional comedy, such as the love thing between furry idol and MC’s brother. If this entire show was some meta thing that wanted to be funny by being tryhard edgy, I think it wouldn’t have comedy that so was obviously intentional. It’s probably hard to wrap your head around how this based on my poor explanation, but I think if this whole narrative was some intentional meta-comedy that viewers will perceive as unintentional comedy, it wouldn’t have comedy that was so obviously intentional in the first place.

Maybe I’m just an idiot though, and the intentional meta-comedy has flown right over my head, and the writers are laughing at me as I unjustly shit on them.

Solid episode overall. 10/10 show.

And here I thought Lisbeth’s only character was “jealous when she sees Kirito with girls”! Turns out her other prominent character trait is my favourite trope in anime – non-consensually fondling people’s breasts! What an incredible character. Truly, Lisbeth is best girl.

You know I didn’t notice until now but during Lisbeth’s first meeting with Kirito when she thinks he’s poor as fuck, she says “metal prices are through the roof right now”. Does SAO have a dynamic economy like real MMOs? Can a player singlehandedly destroy said economy like in real MMOs? That would be fucking awesome to see. It’s a shame that SAO has so many cool ideas it doesn’t do anything with.

Anyway, like the first hour and so of this movie is generic recap shit, alternating between Kirito and some other cunt recapping and the girls recapping while swimming. The girls specifically only talk about Kirito and how much they love Kirito. Some incredibly good characters in this bitch. All in all, that first hour or whatever is a complete waste of time.

Afterwards, we get like maybe half an hour or so of a quest. Basically, Yui wants to see a whale, so they take a quest that’s rumoured to have a whale. We meet an NPC called Narrek, and Leafa doesn’t shut up about his name. This gives away the obvious twist that Narrek is actually the Kraken. Because anagrams are fun. They could’ve just had Leafa say “what a weird name” and we wouldn’t think much of it until rewatching and being like “ah that’s what she meant” but no. Instead she calls as much possible attention to it and gives away everything. Because fuck the audience, that’s why. The actual quest is boring as fuck. We see them fight one mob, Leafa almost dies and is saved by Kirito, reminding her of a time in her childhood where she almost died and was saved by Kirito. What solid development. Afterwards is a slide show until the fetch quest item is grabbed (btw when they got the quest Kirito called it like “a quest to retrieve an item” which isn’t gamer lingo at all c’mon Kawahara Kirito would call it a fucking fetch quest) and when we return to Kraken, Asuna says not to give it to him, looks at the bottom and sees it’s an egg, they fight Kraken and can’t win, then they’re saved by Leviathan, which I didn’t know was a God. They ride home on a whale and all in all, nothing’s been accomplished and I totally wasted my time.