A Visual Montage of Magical Girl Evolution

This video by VirgoX Flow is an unusual depiction of the history of the magical girl genre. Foregoing commentary or discussion, it simply shows excerpts of major titles from 1966 to the present day, so the viewer can easily see how the style in art, the themes, and the appearance have evolved over time.

This video also shows me just how many series I still need to see. Yeesh, so many magical girls and so little time …

Smack My Witch Up

Unfortunately, I’m still so busy with work that I have had little time for anything else, which is why there hasn’t been much content here.

However, Rawle Nyanzi, who often plugs my stuff and whose stuff I often plug, has begun toying around with animation and has created an animated short entitled “Time to Smack a Witch!

This short video looks like a cut scene from a side-scrolling beat-em-up video game from the mid-Eighties, complete with the beepy music. It has no dialogue, but it’s amusing and easy to follow. It’s only flaw, were I to offer criticism, is that is opening credits are way too long for something that looks like 8-bit Theater.

A Comparison of ‘Smile Pretty Cure’ and ‘Glitter Force’

Don’t you cry tonight.

A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.


She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.

For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?

Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)

I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.

But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.

Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.

Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.

So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.

Magical Girls and Suffering Well

A fellow calling himself Exclamation Point, who makes pretty good videos analyzing anime, has recently uploaded one entitled “How to Suffer Well: Sympathetic Characterization in Madoka and Magical Girl Site.” From the title, I assumed he was going to use magical girl shows as a jumping-off point to discuss Stoical philosophy. I was wrong, but I think the video is still worth watching.

My opinion about “dark” magical girl shows is less positive than his, though, perhaps ironically, I think I enjoyed Magical Girl Site more than he did. His point in this video, which he makes very well (and then drives into the ground) is that the suffering in Puella Magi Madoka Magica stems directly from the characters’ decisions, and has consequences that fundamentally change their world, a world that is worth preserving. In Magical Girl Site, by contrast, life just sucks and then you die: The heroine is not at all responsible for all the bad things that happens to her, and she has no reason to preserve anything because everything is miserable.

He makes a good case, and I think what he says could apply not to Magical Girl Site only, but to the whole slew of “lesser” dark magical girl shows that have followed in Madoka’s wake without understanding why Madoka works. Magical Girl Site is just one particularly extreme example, one where the flaws especially stand out because it’s trying especially hard to be on the edge.

I basically agree with him, but I might point out that there is, at least, an improvement to the heroine’s life by the end: She’s got away from her abusers and found friendship, and has concluded, contrary to what she had been told and believed previously, that she is not in fact unfortunate.

Exclamation Point’s reply to me after I say that would no doubt be to point out that the heroine’s just going to die anyway within two years or less so her happiness is temporary and therefore pointless. I might then answer by way of rebuttal that all temporal happiness is temporary—and I might add that the story isn’t over yet by the time the first season ends, so it’s possible that the girls might find a way to foil the shortening of their lifespans.

On Female Armor

I recently stumbled on this video, a thoughtful discussion of the use of armor shaped to the female body, as frequently seen in anime and other fantasy works. The practicalities or impracticalities of such designs are of course interesting to me, since magical girls wear armor on occasion.

The topic, as the host acknowledges a few times, is perhaps over-generalized, since he is discussing a wide range of history with a lot of different armor designs. But it is an intelligent discussion nonetheless.

A few added notes on things the video mentions in passing but does not have the chance to discuss in depth:

  1. St. Joan of Arc, one of the few real women known to have worn armor, apparently did so for purely practical reasons. At her kangaroo trial, she was accused, among other things, of being a transvestite, but she in fact wore men’s clothing on the road and while imprisoned because it was a guard against potential rape. She wore armor on the battlefield for reasons even more obvious. These were understood at the time as acceptable reasons for a woman to dress as a man.
  2. I have been told, though am unable to confirm it from personal experience, that molding plate around each breast separately, as is popular in fantasy armor design for women, is impractical because it would inhibit normal movement of the arms. So although the video defends sculpted breasts on women’s armor plate, it might in fact be unrealistic—unless the breasts were sculpted on top of a cavity that allowed movement. That would, however, require a design very different from the body-hugging plate we typically see in fantasy art.

The Problem with Streaming

Whither Big Tech?

For many reading this, the issue of problems with streaming video is likely an old subject, but it is one that has recently come home to me, so I’d like to talk about it—with the caveat that I’m no expert in internet technology. There is a real benefit to owning physical copies of content, and that benefit has become increasingly clear to me in recent days.

A few years ago, out of nowhere, the “long lost” English dub of the famous 1982 magical girl series  suddenly appeared without fanfare and without explanation on Amazon. The show had, when translated, been repackaged as a series of “movies,” each consisting of four episodes. Because there were a lot of episodes, there were a lot of movies, and Amazon had foolishly priced them like movies instead of like a TV series, so watching the entirety of the translated Minky Momo could cost a few hundred dollars. I did not watch the entire series, simply because it was ridiculously expensive, but I did watch a fair amount of it, and I had to fork over a lot of cash to do so.

The ability to purchase Minky Momo disappeared as suddenly and soundlessly as it came. The titles are still up on Amazon’s site, but now have the message, “Our agreements with the content provider don’t allow purchases of this title at this time.”

More recently, the same thing happened to . Previously, this series was available at no extra charge with an Amazon Prime membership. Now, it is no longer available. I feel lucky that I saw it before it disappeared. I don’t usually manage to hit the windows of availability like that. It still annoys me, though, since I went to all the trouble of writing reviews, and now the material I reviewed isn’t legally available. A quick search didn’t turn up any news items explaining the end of the show’s availability.

Screenshot showing Lyrical Nanoha unavailable on Amazon Video

To Amazon’s credit, the situation is not as dire as I originally supposed. Nanoha, which was previously free with a Prime membership, is no longer accessible at all, but I can still watch the Minky Momo videos I personally purchased; I’m just unable to purchase new ones, and so is everyone else.

In a sense, I have no cause for complaint, because I can still get access to everything I have directly paid for. But if Amazon goes under (unlikely at the moment, but possible in the future), stops offering streaming, or decides it can no longer host Minky Momo at all, then there it goes, gone from my collection, and there is nothing I can do about it.

It’s for this reason I’ve had a preference for iTunes, even though it has its own issues. When I buy videos from iTunes, I can download the file and keep it myself. Some years ago, I was watching My Little Pony; after a silly controversy, one of the episodes was taken down, censored, and uploaded again, but by the time that happened, I already had the original version of the episode, so I was able to keep it, and neither iTunes nor Hasbro could do anything about it. However, if Amazon or another streaming service decided for any reason to censor content, there would be nothing anyone could do to about it, because the content is not on our own devices.

The very concept of content streaming implies a lot of trust, and big tech companies have adequately demonstrated in recent days that they do not deserve to be trusted. The move toward streaming and data “in the cloud” looks like the setup for a high-tech version of  in which content, even of classical works, can be easily molded and censored to meet the demands of the Party. For the moment, that still sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but in another ten years, it won’t.

And it is not as if there is no precedent. Years ago, I discovered that a middle school English textbook I used had silently deleted all references to smoking from a supposedly complete copy of , a shameless and inexcusable act of censorship. Recently, Sony has gotten into gamer news for censoring eroge games out of Japan; I admit I want those games censored or not published at all, but I also admit that if Sony can censor those, it can censor other things. Then we have Funimation, which has been caught at least twice inserting hamfisted political commentary into English dubs. We have Crunchyroll accused of something similar, though the accusations in that case are more dubious. Even if Crunchyroll is (so far) more professional in its handling of translations, its recent decisions and the antics of its staff inspire that same lack of trust.

Amazon’s catalog of available anime—or at least the anime I’m personally interested in—appears to be shrinking rather than expanding. At present, my plan is to finish up  (still available though the other Nanoha titles are not) and then drop the service like a hot rock. For a little while, Amazon was looking to be a serious contender in the realm of anime streaming with Amazon Strike, but that died quickly. Apparently, anime streaming is the one type of business Amazon can’t completely take over.

Perhaps the problem is that they formerly hosted Minky Momo. According to Japanese legend, Minky Momo is a harbinger of disaster, so maybe she doomed Amazon Strike from the beginning.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 8

The adventure continues as we approach the end of the Prague levels. I’m taking a little time to relax here before making a final push on this section of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo.

Ben Wheeler Reviews ‘Jake and the Dynamo’

Davidson balances that sweet, sweet line between humor, loli grimdark, and character drama to make for an enjoyable and gripping story. It has all the best parts of the light novel genres without any of the bad … namely, isekai.

Ben Wheeler, in the guise of the Reading Rainbow Emperor, has got his hands on Jake and the Dynamo. He has given it a glowing review, as you can see in the video above, but does not shy away from some pointed criticism.

I think the best part is where he quotes from the book and trips over his tongue as he attempts to read Sukeban Tsubasa’s dialogue. He also admits that Tsubasa is his waifu … so I wonder what he’ll think of the reveal of her identity in the next book?

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 4

Been a while since we had one of these, so here I go, in honor of the new Tomb Raider … I guess … a game based on the original tomb raider.

Public Service Announcement

So I came across this little gem today. It goes on a little too long and falls a tad flat at the end, but on the whole, I think it’s kind of clever.