One topic I talked about on this blog a few years ago is how as someone who was an American Comic Book Nerd for ages before Anime took over my brain, the Anime that to me have a similar appeal to my favorite DC Universe stories are the not the ones explicitly drawing on American Superhero aesthetics like My Hero Academia and One Punch Man but rather shows like Code Geass, the Raildex franchise, Detective Conan/Case Closed, and I’d now add Durarara! which I watched this year, twice now.
However starting with the Fall of last year a new Superhero Anime has entered the fray, Shy who’s second season is currently airing.
While HeroAca and OPM put the aesthetic trapping of American Comic Book Superheroes onto a show that is essentially a conventional Battle Shonen, with Shy it is the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre putting on Western Superhero clothing. That actually works far better because the Magical Girl Genre has its origins in part in western Superhero influences.
Naoko Takeuchi has admitted to being partly inspired by Wonder Woman in creating Sailor Moon, something the recently re-adapted final arc makes more obvious with the Bracelets plot point. But there’s also the additional indirect influence from how the Transforming Tokusatsu Superhero genre was inspired by Shazam and the 60s Batman show and so forth.
So Shy kind of winds up feeling like the Genre returning to its roots in some ways.
90s Magical Girl Warriors like the Sailor Scouts and Wedding Peach wear costumes that fit in with how we typically think of American Superhero Costumes from the Golden, Silver and Bronze ages in that it would not feel inaccurate to describe them as some form of “tights”.
Today however your default parody of a standard Magical Girl is more likely to be wearing a frilly or fluffy dress of some kind and that is largely the influence of Pretty Cure which in Japan has long surpassed Sailor Moon as the most popular Magical Girl franchise, (but it's Anthology nature means no single team has had as many canonical adventures as the Senshi).
And so Shy wearing a Western Superhero style costume coincidentally looks more like a 90s Magical Girl then any new Magical Girl Anime we’ve seen in 20 years.
But Shy is not completely removed from the subsequent history of the Magical Girl, it definitely shows some influence from the Post Madoka era of the genre, with what the villains are doing reminding me of Daybreak Illusion more than anything else.
The main difference between Shy and other Magical Girl shows, in fact the main reason it’s probably not officially going to be considered one, is that there are Male Superheroes. Of course the Nanoha franchise also had males who had essentially the same abilities. The British Superhero keeps reminding me of the antagonist of Superman Vs The Elite for some reason.
All of this kind of makes Shy the antithesis of how I’ve been thinking about the 2008 OVA School Days: Magical heart Kokoro-Chan.
As one of the very few American Otaku who loves School Days both unironically and not because I view it as some kind of “deconstruction” I was very curious to see what it’s take on the turn the little sister character into a Magical Girl spin off trend would be. And what I got kind of confused me.
First it starts off by also having a sort of Sentai parody, which would be cool enough. But then we get to this classroom scene where everyone starts talking about Superheroes. And Makoto and Sekai started saying things that sound like J. Jonah Jamenson, in my head I was like “I dedicated one of the most overly long posts on my blog to defending you two and this is how you repay me?”. Then Setsuna starts talking and I think “finally my Waifu will bring some sense to this” and then she starts spouting a “Superheros cause Villains” monologue.
Basically this Magical Girl Parody decided to have the metatextual commentary of a Western Superhero Comic. In Magical Girl shows and Super Sentai the villains come first and the heroes are a reaction to them, the exact opposite of what Setsuna just said.
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