I like when a Cool Intimidating Villain is Metaphorically Castrated in a sequel, adaptation, reboot or remake.

In the original 1997 TV Anime Revolutionary Girl Utena the character of Akio aka End Of The World is a very cool and charismatic villain, he needs to be for that original version of the Utena story to work the way it does.

But then Ikahara made a movie called Adolescence of Utena that was a reimagining of the entire premise of Utena but also maybe ambiguously a Sequel somehow???  Either way this more than any other Anime Film borne from a TV Anime it is not a stand alone work of art, every detail is wrapped up in the Symbolism codified by the original show.

In the movie Akio is no longer cool or charismatic, his first scene makes a Joke out of him and then later he’s presented as absolutely Pathetic.  And this was a deliberate artistic choice with deliberate meaning behind it.  VraiKaiser in their discussions of the movie breaks it down way better than I can.  

https://vraikaiser.com/2014/01/20/i-know-why-she-turns-into-a-car/

https://vraikaiser.com/2015/07/04/the-adolescence-of-utena/

Originally of course a good chunk of the fanbase had a negative reaction to this decision,
"how dare you take the coolness away from the cool character I liked". This sentiment was in Jacob Chapman’s review of the movie back when he was known as JesuOtaku.  However in this case continuing to feel that way has become more rare, WhiningAboutYuri on Tumblr was very critical of the movie but supported this specific choice.  And it wouldn’t surprise me if even Jacob himself has repented of that old bad take.

However The Joker is a different story, that character most people still want to see treated with respect.  JackSaint’s video on Suicide Squad’s take on The Joker argues that Leto’s Joker is supposed to be an uncool cringey edge lord, which is also independently hinted at in Josh McNamee’s Sixteen Attempts to talk to you about "Suicide Squad".  

It is a good idea to remind people that the real life Jokers of the world aren’t cool or charismatic but pathetic losers, and the same is true of Adult Men in positions of Authority who take advantage of teenagers.  That doesn’t actually make them not dangerous, but it does make them less glamorous.

However there is a certain kind of fan who identifies with such characters even if they would never approve of their actions in real life. And there is a not insignificant overlap between these fans and the kind who become Internet Neo-Reactionaries.

I’m not arguing the “cool” takes on these characters shouldn't exist, I do believe most people can separate fantasy from reality and those who can’t have deeper problems than how they read fiction.  I’m simply defending the innate value in taking that coolness away from them.  The intended message behind having a Pathetic villain is more potent when done with one previously seen as cool then it would be with one who was always depicted as pathetic.

Now for both of those examples I’ve already demonstrated that I’m far from the first to make this defense of them.  However as far as I’m aware I’m still the only person to read the Netflix Cowboy Bebop’s take on Vicious this way.  And even if I find out others have, I'm still confident I can claim to be among the first since I was reading him this way the day of the show's release. Largely because I was already familiar with the two above discourses, so I was prepared.  But if you’ve seen someone else talk about Vicious this way please link me to it because I would want read or watch it.

Netflix Vicious is entirely driven by how insecure he is in his masculinity, a problem that began with his daddy issues.  He is all through the show exposed to be a manchild who wants to be seen as intimidating far more than he actually is intimidating.  And the people who have that problem in real life who also watch Anime want to be like the Vicious of the original Cowboy Bebop or some other similar kind of Anime villain.  I’m not saying everyone who had a knee jerk negative reaction to this reinterpretation of Vicious did so because they are that kind of person, but I am saying this is why they should reconsider the value of this artistic choice.

Now it’s only with Ikuhara that I’m confident this reading was intentional.  Ayer and Leto have both said things that lead me to suspect that this isn’t what they intended.  With Netflix Bebop it does seem to be stated outright quite a bit that's what the message is, but you can never be certain with Netflix  But it doesn’t matter because the Author is Dead, this is a valid reading of the text whether those who wrote it like it or not.

And I want to see this done more.  As someone who’s devoted a chunk of their online identity to being a Star Wars Prequel Apologist I should show I’m not a hypocrite by saying I’d support Palpatine being given this treatment.  Of course I’m already Free from hypocrisy here, Batman is my oldest fandom and before I went full Weeb I considered The Dark Knight the greatest movie ever made. During the late 2000s and early 2010s I loved quoting Heath Ledger’s Joker to seem cool as much as anyone else did.  Yet I didn’t have a knee jerk negative reaction to Leto’s Joker, I didn’t in 2016 understand yet why I liked it, but I do think on some level this was always why.

In the context of Anime however I think the problematically Idolized Villain who needs to be taken down a peg the most is Light Yagami. And maybe to the fans of Netflix Death Note that’s why that movie works.  But the thing is there are lots of reasons I don’t like that movie, all three movies or shows I praised above have a lot more to like about them then just doing the thing I named this post after.

More importantly though the way in which Light Turner is Pathetic for most of the film functionally exonerates him of being fully culpable for most of his sins, his psycho girlfriend is the real monster and she is cool and charismatic (or at least the movie wants her to be).  The way the three villains above are Pathetic highlights how morally horrible they are.

But also the three examples I praised are not at their core entirely different characters from the prior versions that so many people found cool, we’re simply seeing them now from different angles, in different contexts.  They do act differently in ways that would make them hard to see as in the same continuity, but the most basic character description is the same, or at least can be.  Light Turner lacks any actual similarities to Light Yagami. I don't see him as a different interpretation of the same character, he simply is a different character.

Gnosticism in Anime and Video Games

TVTropes has a page called UsefulNotes/Gnosticism where it talks about Gnosticism and then lists examples of fictional stories that were or are thought to be influenced by Gnosticism.

As an Amateur Christian Theologian, I think it's a problem how often Gnosticism is defined based on it's mythological archetypes rather then the actual Philosophical/Metaphysical point.  If your view of the After Life is an intangible spirit realm where we are free of the confines of the Carnal Material World, you're a Gnostic no matter how Orthodox, Nicene and Trinitarian your Theology and Christology is.

One question that is particularly relevant to the accuracy of calling some of these fictional cosmologies Gnostic is, can you be Gnostic but not even nominally Christian?  According to Religion for Breakfast no one called themselves Gnostics in antiquity, and all the known specific groups we call Gnostics were Christian sects who identified each of these Gnostic Mythological archetypes with at least one person or concept in The Bible or some other Judeo-Christian source.  

However they are also the result of these Christians being influenced by older gentile ideas that in my opinion Christians shouldn't have allowed to influence them, Neopythagoreanism, Middle Platonism, Hermeticism, Hellenistic Mystery Religions and since they mostly started in Alexandria aspects of native Egyptian Mythology and Mysticism (thing is the "Proto-Orthodox" were also being influenced by at least the first two of those during this time period, simply to different degrees or in different ways.  The difference between whether you were called a Heretic or not was chiefly rejecting a Bodily Resurrection).  So you take the mythological archetypes that comes from those influences but subtract the explicitly Christian stuff, and you get a framework that can be compared to a number of fictional Fantasy/Sci-Fi cosmologies.

But going back to my distinction between Gnostic Mythology and the actual point of Gnosticism.  I don't think any currently existing "developed" culture is less inclined to sympathize with the point of Gnosticism then Japan.  Shinto Mysticism I actually view as fairly compatible with Stoic Metaphysics, and Stoicism was I'd say antithetical to all of the Non-Christian antecedents of Gnosticism, even if by the second century they were using a lot of the exact same Greek key words and phrases.

And so when I look at a lot of the Anime or other Otaku Media that has been or can be argued to resemble Gnostic mythology, I kind of feel like they're using the Gnostic Mythological framework to convey the exact opposite attitude.  

This is most explicit in SSSS.Gridman where the Sophia figure is trapped in an Idealized Platonic World of Forms and the Carnal Physical Real World is what she needs to return to.  But I think on some level the same is true of the use of Gnostic or Gnostic adjacent ideas in classics like Serial Experiments Lain or Revolutionary Girl Utena.  

I would not apply a Gnostic reading of any kind to most Isekai however, in modern Isekai the other world is just as much of a carnal/material world as ours, it's the culture being different that makes it often a world the Otaku/Neet protagonist feels more at home in then Modern Japan.  Sword Art Online does sometimes feel like it's making Gnostic Mythological references, but that isn't proper Isekai.

But in the case of Final Fantasy VII (and perhaps then every FF that's been argued to be Gnostic) I go back to what I said before about the Stoics and Gnostics being antithetical even in their use of a lot of the same terms.  I think every argument for Final Fantasy VII having a Gnostic cosmology is actually better explained by a Stoic reading, The Lifestream is the Pneumatic World Soul and Mako (like Mana in other JRPGs and Manga/Anime inspired by them) is a Pneumatic Substance.  The Physical world being Evil and Dirty couldn't be more the opposite of what a story like Final Fantasy VII is trying to say about Nature.  These are stories where the Spiritual and Carnal are in a symbiotic relationship with each other, it is Man's Sins (especially Capitalism) that create the problems.

The western world however has been very influenced by Gnosticism, for all the talk about the Gnostics as some minority the Roman Church persecuted into extinction, I'd argue they kind of indirectly won, all of Mainstream Christianity has become at least mildly Gnostic.  Gnosticism is essentially Platonism taken to it's logical extreme, and so that's why a lot of the Japanese media I just talked about and others get interpreted by westerners more Gnostically then I feel the Japanese could have possibly intended.

Update September 26th: It's occurred to me that I should explain the Final Fantasy VII part a bit more.

The Gnostic Reading of Final Fantasy VII in large part revolves around equating the Lifestream with the Gnostic Pleroma.  The Lifestream and Pleroma have in common being both the source and destiny of each individual Soul  However the Gnostic Pleroma is distinctly outside the physical world, the physical world is basically a prison to the pieces of it stuck here.  The Lifesream however is the World, it and the physical Earth are intimately connected, they form a Symbiant Circle what happens to one will effect the other.  It is quite literally the Soul and Spirit of The Earth.

The World Soul is a concept in a few schools of Greek Philosophy, but it is the Stoic Version that has all the same similarities to the Lifestream the Pleroma has but also is part of the world rather then separate.

Basically Gnosticism has more in common with Scientology then it does the Lore of FFVII.

Further Update October 14 2022: I just obtained Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250 by George Boys-Stones and chapter 8 talks about the World Soul and Nature.

Much of the thesis of the chapter is that while Middle Platonists and Stoics agreed on the World having a Soul, for the Stoics it was a pretty natural product of their Metaphysics as it's virtually synonymous with their God, while for the Platonists it kind of didn't fit so well and proved awkward.

So to Middle Platonists the World Soul was a lesser god at best, and to Plutarch it was actually Evil, but in-between it was also presented as a sort of force without much will or agency of it's own.  

But reading this has only strengthened my Stoic interpretation of The Lifestream and Final Fantasy VII.

I also view the Original Pre-Romanization Stoics as having been the Communists of the Hellenistic World.  And so here's a good Marxist Analysis of Final Fantasy VII.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EWCLHkqRQNkPHiCAYcIUrJ3twpAmD2o

A Guide to Anime Films

I'm into Anime in large part for the serialized content, however films have been both more "respectable" and more profitable for most of modern history, on both sides of the Pacific and in terms of both Live Action and Animation.  That means theatrically released Anime films frequently have more budget to work with, and less time constraints placed on their production, which allows certain technical advantages. So for many newcomers movies may be where they want to start.

Again as a consequence of my watching Anime mainly for the serieses and sagas, most of the films I have seen are in some way tied to a series.  Of Anime movies that simply are stand alone (or were until they got a sequel), I've seen a handful of Miyazaki films, two non Miyazaki Ghibili films, Akira, Barefoot Gen, Project A-Ko, Metropolis, Kara no Kyoukai, Maquia, A Silent Voice, Your Name and Weathering With You, Vampire Hunter D, a couple mostly now forgotten Fantasy films from around 2010, and one that's basically a more serious take on the premise of Chunibyo, and some more obscure ones slipping my mind right now.

However Anime films that are tied to TV shows come in many forms in terms of how accessible they potentially could be to someone not already into that series and capable of standing on their own.

A note, Anime database websites like MyAnimeList define "Movies" based on how they are released not runtime, so theatrical shorts are classified as movies but feature length OVAs and TV Specials are not.  My mind still prefers to define a movie mostly by runtime and if it wasn't in theaters just call it a TV movie or Direct to Video movie.

First you have the franchises that are largely negative continuity or flexible continuity or at least highly episodic and long running enough to begin with that I generally think the actual first TV episode is almsot the worst first impression because of the early instalment weirdness.  So for these shows one of their ambiguously canonical films probably is the best way to introduce it's cast of characters to someone new.  These are shows like Lupin The Third, Pokémon, 90s Sailor Moon, PreCure and Detective Conan aka Case Closed.  

Sailor Moon R: The Promise of The Rose is all of the core appeal of Sailor Moon concentrated into a well paced easy to follow but highly emotionally dense film.  For Pokémon the Third movie Spell of The Unown is the very best, but ironically one of the few that does something which might be a problem for a viewer who hadn't followed the show up to that point, but maybe not, I think Pokémon fans reading this can guess what I'm talking about without me needing to spoil it.  The first two Pokémon films are perhaps in different ways trying too hard to be "cinematic".  The other Pokémon movies I'd rank as above average are Heroes Latios and Latias, Destiny Deoxys, Ranger Temple of The Sea, The Power of Us and Secrets of The Jungle, but most are perfectly good at what they're meant to be.

Detective Conan/Case Closed is the franchise I have been most obsessed with recently, and so in part thinking about it's movies was what inspired me to write this.  Every movie is in part designed to work for newcomers while also doing something special for fans, that's why at the beginning there is always a brief summery of the show's premise.  But some I consider more recommended for this purpose then others.  The actual first movie The Time Bombed Skyscraper could work well enough with it's cold open basically being how an average episode ends.  The third movie The Last Wizard of The Century is probably the best of them (that seems to happen a lot with Anime, it's like the opposite of how Hollywood franchises are perceived).  Movie 4 Captured In Her Eyes is interesting in how it's cold open is actually a flashback to before what happens in the premise summery segment making it perhaps by default the most chorological movie.  Of the three movies that feature the show's Arc villains, movie 5 Countdown To Heaven is the best executed in how it utilizes them given that they're not allowed to change the status quo, and also of all the movies I've seen the best for getting to know Haibara Ai (called Vi Graythorn in the Funimation Dub). Movies 7-18 do not have Dubs yet and so I've only seen four, of those movie 8 Magician of The Silver Sky is the most interesting, it breaks from the usual formula in a way that allows it to recreate the vibes of the tv show better then any of the others, and it's simpler plot makes it easier to watch Subbed.  

Movies 19-23 are currently the only movies easy to watch legally in English, Subbed or Dubbed, with all of the BangZoom releases purchasable and rentable on Amazon Prime, while prior movies either were never officially released over here or were only via now long discontinued localizations.  These movies and some of the ones preceding them are often criticized by longtime fans for being too much like over the top modern American Superhero movies and thus allegedly less intelligently written then the first 9 or so.  I can't entirely say I disagree since I don't feel like recommending any of those as much as the early ones I just listed, but I do enjoy all of them just fine and I didn't list all of the first 9, their basic appeal is still the same in my view, they've changed similarly to how the show has changed, but the movies were always a good deal more action oriented then the show.  Zero The Enforcer is the only one I can even come close to saying I dislike.

A second type of Anime tie in movie is a kind some less episodic shows have, that may start out feeling as stand alone as the above mentioned movies, but during the last act there will be an increasing amount of plot relevant fan service only followers of the show will get.  There are two main examples that come to mind, A Certain Magical Index: The Miracle of The Endymion, and Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale.  I enjoy both movies, Endymion I give a 10/10, but watch the series first, actually for Endymion there's kind of two series you need to have followed.  However for people becoming fans of those shows know that they are like the above movies in how they won't actually effect the status quo of the show and rarely if at all be acknowledged.

The third type are movies that are sequels or continuations, or sometimes even specifically the Ending, or a Coda to the show's ending.  Type 2 films have a chance of being satisfying to a non TV show viewer because by the time the stuff they won't get factors in they might have gotten invested enough to just roll with it. But Type 3 are explicitly not stand alone works on any level. Char's Counterattack,  The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, End of Evangelion, The Conqueror of Shambala are probably the biggest examples, I also like the Gundam 00 movie and Code Geass R3 Lelouch of The Resurrection, and most recently we had the Sailor Moon Eternal movies which picked up where Sailor Moon Crystal season 3 left off.  Maybe some of these can overcome their continuity lock out issues simply by being good, but being good on it's own is not the barrier breaker some people want to think it is.

Type four would be Recap movies, these are basically a chunk of a series, ranging anywhere from 8 episodes to 25, trimmed down and reedited into a film length, some may try to do a whole show in one but most go for 2 or a trilogy.  There may be some genuinely newly animated material in a few select scenes or as a framing device.  These almsot always fail to be satisfying movies on their own, or even give the fans interested in that concept what they want.  The only definitive exception is the Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Trilogy which were longer then most and in a unique situation.  I have seen some people speak highly of Macross Do you Remember Love but I haven't watched that one yet.

Type 4b is when the story of a show is fully remade as a movie, or the source material re-adapted, A lot of the movies that fit this category I haven't seen yet even when they exist for a show I like, but the Rebuild of Evangelion films are the most notorious.  The Sailor Moon Eternal films actually also fit this category in relation to Sailor Moon SuperS and the first 6 episodes of Sailor Stars from the 90s Anime.  In the re-adaptation case sometimes the movie version came before the series, but usually the movie still winds up feeling like it should be the less definitive Anime version like with Clamp's X.  Detective Conan/Case Closed Episode "One" The Great Detective Turned Small is basically a remake in the show's modern style of the first episode and a half of the series, but it also starts a little earlier and then ends a bit like a Recap episode.

I wanted to say those 4 categories covered everything, however Crossovers like Lupin The Third vs Detective Conan or the PreCure Allstars films are difficult to categorize, they are often structurally similar to Type 1 but it's hard to imagine seeing any appeal to watching a Crossover movie if you aren't already a fan of any of the parties involved.

And then there is the very unique case of Adolescence of Utena.  At face value it is Type 4b, the fan theorizing that it's actually a sequel on some cosmic time loopy metanarrative level also exists for the Rebuild films but for those films that theory doesn't effect what you think they mean nearly as much.  But beyond all of that is how the Utena movie is even more abstract in it's Symbolism then the TV show titled Revolutionary Girl Utena, to the point where you really need to have seen the show to have any hope of deciphering what's going on in the movie, and even for those of us who have seen it it isn't easy.

You can't Deconstruct the Magical Girl genre because there is nothing wrong with it.

You can parody the formula and the tropes, but there is nothing morally wrong with it to truly deconstruct.

Western Comic Book Superheroes abound in Deconstructions because there is something fundamentally wrong with that genre, with it's complex relationship to violence and state power and fictional billionaires, no matter where you fall on the American Political Spectrum there is potentially something for you to find wrong with that genre.  

Individual Magical Girl Warrior shows may sometimes have their own problematic elements, but the core of what the genre is has nothing you can criticize.

Madoka Magica is confused with a deconstruction not just because it's dark.  It's also attempting to be a meta commentary of some kind, referencing earlier works in the genre in ways kind of comparable to what Watchmen does with Superhero Comics, but it's also similar to the way George Lucas was quoting earlier works in Star Wars.  And as I talked about once before this is really the first time one used the term "Magical Girl" in universe.

However the thing about a good Genre Deconstruction like Watchmen is none of it's individual elements were unprecedented in the genre, it's only the way they are put together to draw a different kind of complete picture that makes it unlike anything that came before.  There was in fact no shortage of prior Superhero Comics that had been dark and gritty and/or dealt with similar political themes and social issues.

With Madoka however what makes it so dark in the unique way it's dark (Magical Girl shows had done "dark" stuff before) is tied to what is unprecedented about it.  There is no prior precedent for the monsters the Magical Girls are fighting being all former Magical Girls.  There was also no prior precedent for the wish granting element.  Even before the moment said to be when the show "reveled itself" it had already established a mechanical distinction from prior works of the genre in how the Grief Seed system discourages them from working together as teams.

You might cynically think this all means Madoka was trying to be a Deconstruction but failed because the Genre is Deconstruction proof.  But no I don't think even that has truly happened to this Genre yet.  If Madoka Magica is Deconstructing anything it's the ways one might criticize the genre.

To a certain extent Madoka also plays out like a Greek Tragedy where a tragic fate befalls various characters because they have a tragic flaw.  But none of these tragic character flaws are because of the characters being like a traditional Magical Girl.  I recently watched ClearAndSweet's Youtube videos on Madoka (a series that isn't done yet) and what they've been stressing is how their flaws are all ways in which they fall short of being a traditional Magical Girl.  The title character is the one who is cut out to be a Magical Girl show protagonist but she is being kept from becoming a Magical Girl.

At face value Mami seems like an ideal Magical Girl, her death however is what is commonly misunderstood.  The show definitely at first tricks us into thinking she died because she finally found happiness like what Whedon loved to do on Buffy.  But what the show actually does explicitly say is that her death was the result of refusing Homura's help.  Her stubbornly writing Homura off as an enemy is something a proper Magical Girl Heroine would never do, Usagi is defined in certain seasons by her refusal to write off any fellow Senshi no matter how antagonistic they're currently being.

Each of the four lacks something different.  And the thing is Magical Girls with these kinds of character flaws can be supporting characters in a traditional Magical Girl show, I could probably compare each of them to an Outer Senshi or PreCure Sixth Ranger.  But the key to their ablity to overcome those flaws is the inspiration and example and emotional support that comes from the lead Magical Girl, who for most of this show is being held back.

Another thing that often defines Deconstructions is that they are supposed to be more "realistic" takes on their genres.  Madoka is the exact opposite, and I don't mean by that anything about how it uses it's supernatural elements, I mean how even Madoka's mundane slice of life scenes do not feel like they are happening in the real world.  Sailor Moon mostly takes place in a specific district of Tokyo, you can travel there and visit Rei's shrine or the park where Nephrite died.  So when the Supernatrual stuff happens it feels like it's disrupting a realistic reality.  Mitakihara city however feels like it's made up of elaborate Theater Stages.  Sailor Moon has been adapted into Live Action already and I think it can be again even more faithfully, but Madoka is a story I feel can only work in Animation, how unreal it is is largely the point.

Madoka is definitely not saying Magical Girls would be a bad thing in the real world, it's saying you need to contrive a world much more dystopic then ours for things to go nearly this badly and yet they are still able to set things right in the end.  Madoka is neither a Deconstruction or a Reconstruction, it's a rejection of the very idea of deconstructing this genre. 

Madoka Magica is a show that can work for someone who has no prior experience with The Genre, SFDebris reviews of the show document that perspective well.  But the perception of it's relationship to the genre has (I think mostly in The West) been clouded by how many people watched it who usually wouldn't watch a Magical Girl show, too many people watched it for the darkness not the light at the end of the tunnel.  But in Japan the show was originally marketed without putting the darkness up front, it was marketed to traditional Magical Girl fans, not to edge lords.

Madoka isn't the only show that gets called a Deconstruction of this genre, people also call Utena one.  Utena I do not consider properly part of the genre at all.  It's related, related enough that it's among the earlier shows Madoka is referencing and related enough that any fan of the genre should see it at some point.  I would not ultimately call Utena a Genre Deconstruction at all, what it is working to deconstruct is The Patriarchy, and the values of the Magical Girl Warrior which Ikuhara and Enokido kind of helped build in the first place are one of the weapons they are using to do that.

I don't like to dwell on the negative but I guess I can't close out this post without clarifying that I am anti-Rebellion.

I've seen over half of Cutey Honey Flash now

I made a post about this Anime before I saw any of it yet.  Perhaps you can say I should have finished the show before making the follow up, but right now after finishing episode 23 I want to chronicle how positive I currently feel about the show before it's third "season" has the chance to potentially spoil it.

The first arc, which was the first 13 episodes, I already had a positive opinion on, but had few specific thoughts to analyze, it simply was about what I was optimistically expecting when I made the pre-viewing post.

I then waited awhile before returning to it, and watched the next ten episodes and it's movie in the last couple days.  I knew the movie premiered the same day as episode 18 aired and so decided to watch it between episodes 18 and 19 even though I expected it to not really matter much like the Sailor Moon, Pokemon and PreCure movies.

So far the movie is the only thing about this Anime I'm willing to call a disappointment.  It's not bad, but I was watching this show under the meta knowledge it was something made to fill Sailor Moon's void, so I was expecting it's ambiguously canonical filler movie to at least feel on par with the three Sailor Moon movies even if it wasn't as good as they were.  Instead it's something that could have been a two part episode of the show, except it'd be disappointing then in a different way because there is literally nothing else in the second arc that I consider skip-able.

The second arc revolved around the character of Seira Hazuki/Misty Honey.  This is the first incarnation of Cutey Honey to include any kind of "Evil Counterpart" or sister for Honey.  And I also feel this story-line is the only time I've seen the Dark Magical Girl Rival trope play out in a properly Shoujo Magical Girl Warrior show, so that makes it quite interesting to begin with and in my opinion pretty damn well executed.  And I was more then satisfied by the Yuri Bait it inevitably provided.

This show as I was hoping lacks the overbearing Otaku pandering style fan-service typical of this franchise, but it is still Sexy in the way a lot of Shoujo Anime are.  Seira in particular is quite shockingly in my strike zone.

I talked before about the creative staff this show shares with the 90s Sailor Moon Anime.  It might be the most important staff position not held by a Sailor Moon alumni was the Musical Composer Sahashi Toshihko.

The 90s Sailor Moon Anime had an iconic theme song and some other good insert songs like Ai No Senshi.  But the actual score was mostly forgettable elevator music, even the people least forgiving of what DiC did are inclined to admit it gave the show better Music.  But the Music on Cutey Honey Flash isn't just better then that Music but actually very good.  And oddly enough I think perhaps musically anticipates Sailor Moon's future.  One of the songs used for Transformation scenes sounds to me a lot like the Sailor Venus transformation theme on PGSM.

This show is also interesting to compare to Utena.  For one thing the classic 70s Cutey Honey Manga and/or Anime is clearly among what Ikuhara wanted to homage, that teacher who nags Utena in the pilot is clearly based on Miharu Tsuneni.  This version being designed to be a more Shoujo incarnation of Cutey Honey is almsot built around playing strait the same tropes Utena was deconstructing.  And yet it was airing for the same number of episode at close to the same time, it started out a few weeks ahead but had more weeks off allowing Utena to catch up and then pull ahead.  So it's kind of the perfect case study to watch along side Utena.

TV Anime Writers and Directors

As I've said I want to start talking on this blog about how I think Directors often get too much credit and we should maybe start paying more attention to the writers.

The thing that makes TV Anime a particularly interesting medium in this case is how there are usually less writers then directors.

The "Series Composition" credit seems to be the writing equivalent of being the Series Director, it's a job that in theory could be done by someone not writing individual episode scripts at all, but it generally doesn't play out that way.  Usually the writer with that credit also writes more episodes then anyone else and that includes the first and last episodes and a number of the other most definitely not filler episodes in-between.  And there are usually only 4 or 5 writers in total, often only 3 who could be said to have written a significant amount.

However there are usually between 7-10 Episode Directors, and the first and last episodes usually don't have the same director.  And the series director probably actually episode directs less Episodes then he would have if he weren't the series director.  And no director even comes close to directing as many episodes as the "Series Composition" person usually writes.

Some shows fail to give a Series Composition credit, at least on the main English language Database websites (MAL, ANN and AniDB), but it's often easy to guess who was serving that function by looking at what and how many episodes the writers wrote.  Like Sukehiro Tomitia for the first season of Sailor Moon who I've already talked about.  He also seems to be this again for the Black Moon saga, but for the Doom Tree Saga I would argue the most important writer was Shigeru Yanagawa.

For Sailor Moon S things are a bit different.  Tomita seems to no longer be obviously the most important writer, Megumi Sugihara wrote the most episodes for S at 10 episodes, but still not as many as Tomita wrote for prior seasons.  She had been around since season 1 but not quite from the start of it.  S had more writers total because of the newcomer, Youji Enokido who wrote 9 episodes, which began with the Jupiter and Venus spotlight episodes of the first cour, but would then include the HaruMi origin story episode.  Tomito did write the first and last episodes, but S is structured so different from season 1 that even that doesn't mean as much, the last episode of S is literally filler.  Tomita wrote 7 episodes total.

Three of Sailor Moon's writers including Tomita would leave after S to go work on other projects, to some extent I think they were writing less during S because they were doing the prep work for those projects.  The one I talked about in the Cutey Honey Flash post was the lead writer of Gundam Wing, if you've ever felt like Wing is the most Shoujo esque of all Gundam shows, that's because it was written by someone who spent most of the 90s writing Magical Girl shows.

Sailor Moon SuperS is the first season to actually have a Series Composition credit, which is given to Youji Enokido. Kind of surprising as he was the complete Newcomer for S, Megumi had seniority but I guess you can't have the lead writer of a show for girls actually be a girl.  Enokido also wrote the Screenplay for the SuperS movie, Black Dream Hole (the first two movies were written by Tomita).

Megumi and Enokido both left Sailor Moon after SuperS creating a situation where Sailor Stars the last season had no writing staff overlap with the first 3 seasons and two writers who had no prior Sailor Moon experience at all.  If you think Sailor Moon's quality went down hill it was definitely the writing staff that changed more then the directorial staff, the Series Director of Stars had been part of the Sailor Moon directorial team since Goldfish Warning!.  But I don't think the Stars writers are overall inferior writers, they were just at the time less experienced, some of them I know went on to write stuff that can compete with the early seasons of Sailor Moon (Doki Doki PreCure has the same Series Composition writer).  When Sailor Moon started Toei hired some pretty experienced writers and directors because they kind of wanted this to become one of their most important shows.  But once those writers wanted to go on to other things they were replaced by relative newcomers.

The first 6 episodes of Sailor Stars I feel would work really well edited together into a 2 hour movie. What's interesting here is each one has a different director, but it was all written by two writers, the only two Stars writers who were veterans of SuperS, so ideally placed to write that season's epilogue.  Though they had no experience writing the Outer Senshi since Enokido did their episode of the Special, in which case they did surprisingly well.

Megumi doesn't seem to have done much after leaving Sailor Moon.  Enokido while doing SuperS wrote 4 episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, all of them from the first half of the show.  I at first thought the only reason he had writing credits in the Rebuild films is because the first two redo/remake stuff from his episodes.  But then he also has a credit in 3.33 which has no connection to any episode he wrote.  So either their credits by default list everyone who worked on the original or they did consult him on something.

The first thing Enokido did after he left Sailor Moon was be the head writer of Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Yes I'm applying my maybe we give directors too much credit idea to even the most revered work of one of Anime's most worshiped Auteur Directors.  Utena definitely looks the way it does chiefly because of Ikuhara, and the basic idea of it's story started with Ikuhara.

But there is a segment of the fanbase who thinks Utena is the only (completely original to him) Ikuhara show that's great and are not so infatuated with his over hyped 2010s stuff, like WhiningAboutYuri on Tumblr, and that could be largely because the 2010s shows had completely different writers.  I personally enjoy his 2010s stuff, and probably consider Penguindrum more rewatchable then Utena.  But Utena is the only Ikuhara show I'd ever really call a must watch show.  And YuriKuma's final act frustrates me, on a list of Yuri shows it'll always fall below Citrus and Strawberry Panic in my rankings.  Of course even with Penguindrum I'd have preferred a happier ending.

And also on Utena Ikuhara was never even an Episode Director.  So he was at the top of the pyramid but there was a lot of delegating.  It was a collaborative effort on every level.  It's almost like when that one comedian makes fun of Steve Jobs getting all the credit for the iPhone.  Enokido may well have done more writing then Ikuhara did directing.

Enokido wasn't Utena's only writer.  One I already made a post about due to my love of some of his other work.  But a lot of the other writers seem to have Utena as the only Anime they ever worked on.  Including the person who wrote most of the Nanami episodes, how is it that person hasn't gotten more work when they're obviously a comedic genius?

Enokido however had the Series Composition credit and wrote 20 episodes, just over half.  They include the first five, episode 7, and 9, the two not as filler as you think recap episodes, the episodes that start and end the Black Rose saga, the start of the Akio arc, and The Barefoot Girl which if I recall is the one with the leg message scene, and almost all of the final Apocalypse Arc.  And he wrote the Screenplay for the movie.

Enokido would have a lot of post Utena work, but not always stuff that is still well known.  He wrote 5 episodes of RahXephon, a show often compared to Evangelion that in my opinion is far better.  Maybe that's partly because Enokido wrote more of it then he did Eva.  He also wrote Redline which seems to be a popular racing movie.

But perhaps the most notable thing Enokido has done in the last decade is Stardriver.  I haven't seen Stardriver yet mainly because it lacks a dub, but at this point I doubt it ever will get one so I might as well just give in and watch it subbed.  I've seen it described as like if Eva and Utena had a baby who grew up to do musical theater.  And I feel like Musicals are maybe extra difficult to consume through a language barrier?

Stardriver's director is the same series director as Sailor Stars, who had been an episode director on Sailor Moon going back to season 1 and also worked on Cutey Honey Flash.  He then worked on Fun Fun Pharmacy and a number of the shows that proceeded Pretty Cure in it's time-slot, and did episode 8 of the first season of Pretty Cure.  His visual style is certainly an interesting one to combine with the writer of Utena.

Gen Urobuchi is a rare example of a writer who's name gets mentioned as much or more then the directors of the popular shows he wrote.  But sometimes his association is with the source material rather then the Anime directly, it varies.  I find it interesting how many of his shows have Yuki Kajuria on the music even though nothing else connects them, maybe they just naturally go together.

All that is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are plenty more Anime where I think the writer is more why I like them then the director.  I'll likely make more posts on this subject in the future.

One detail I'd like to point out before ending this post is that the two most popular up and coming Female Anime directors of the last decade also had female writers on their most notable work, who also wrote plenty of stuff directed by men.

Update 01/14/2020: Turns out according to AniDB two of those Utena writers who have no other credits are actually Non Deplums of people who were still working on Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey Flash while Utena was in production.  Maybe there was a legal reason for that.  One is the Director of Sailor Stars and Stardriver, and he also directed Utena episode 9 under that pseudonym.  However there are still two Utena writers about whom we have no other information.  And my mind is starting to wonder if one of them is really Megumi and that's simply been kept a secret all this time?

The writer of Noir

I've been becoming one of those who thinks that for both American movies and Anime we perhaps sometimes give directors too much credit (or blame) and the writers not enough credit (or blame).  And I have brought this subject up before, but I figure the best way to properly introduce this idea to my blog would be by looking at the writer of my absolute favorite Anime, Noir.

Noir is a good example for this subject not just because it's my personal favorite of an entire medium.  You see while I like every aspect of Noir considering how it was handled perfect for what Noir is, I would have guessed even before checking the credits that the writing is the chief thing that sets it significantly apart from other Bee Train shows.  And the credits verified that, it has the same director as several other Bee Train shows, and Yuki Kajiura does the music for most of them, but this is the only Bee Train show written by Ryoe Tsukimura.

And Tsukimura is the only writer, a lot of other shows I've looked at there is usually one writer who does the most but still some separate writers for individual episodes.  But as far as ANN is aware Tsukimura single handedly scripted all 26 episodes and has the Original Concept credit, and his name is on the Copyright.

Looking at his other work, of what I've seen already it's all stuff I also like, but mostly not stuff I would have guessed had the same writer.  He was the head writer for Tenchi Universe (and worked on two other Tenchi projects), and while I'd observed before it kind of being similar to Noir in how it is structured as a 26 episode show, the nature and genre of the story in question is different.  Tenchi and El-Hazard get dramatic but they also have a lot of Otaku style humor that is absent from Noir.

What does perhaps anticipate the nature of Noir more is that he scripted 6 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Two of them are two of the key Juri and Shiori episodes, (their Black Rose episode and the first Ruka episode).  What perhaps shows the level of trust he had was that he's the only person besides Utena's head writer (who may be the subject of a future post) to write any of the final Apocalypse Arc, the two prater about the final Duel with Touga.

So in the future I want to watch some of his stuff I haven't seen yet.  Perhaps UFO Princess Valkyrie would be a good introduction for me to the Magical Girlfriend genre.

Update:  Well before that I decided to watch one mid 90s Hentai OVA he's credited as writing.  And there is a character in it who is absolutely the prototype of Shaoli from episodes 15 and 16 of Noir.

2022 Update: If you do want to learn more about Noir's Director check out this cool video from Trixie The Golden Witch called The Anime Director I Admire The Most.

November 2025 Update: I'm disappointed to have learned about a Blog Ryoe wrote in 2022 where he expresses that not intend the main relationship of Noir to be read romantically blaming that on the director and saying the last episodes was greatly changed from his script.

Spring 1997 Anime Season, and I ramble off topic about Dub voice actors

April 1st 1997 was the day the Pokemon Anime premiered on Japanese TV.  The following day, April 2nd, was the premier of Revolutionary Girl Utena.  April 3rd was the premiere of Maze, a show not nearly as influential or culturally important as those two shows but when I first learned of it I was indeed surprised to learn that stuff like that already existed in the 90s.

Another Anime to debut on April 1st was Shin Tenchi Muyo aka Tenchi in Tokyo, the 3rd TV Anime of the Tenchi Franchise, but it seems it's not one of it's more well regarded installments.  Another Anime to debut on April 3rd was Hyper Police, which shows Monster Girls in Anime are nothing new either.

April 4th saw the premier of the third season of Slayers.  Another Anime to debut in April of 97 was a Space Opera re-imagining of Moby Dick called Hakugei Densetu.  And that's less then half of what debuted that Spring.

I suppose to some people this justifies their complaints about the state of modern Anime, today we don't even always get one game changer a season, while this season had two back to back.  The thing is not every season of the late 90s looked like this one, Summer of 97 premiered nothing we still care about, and the Winter of 97 is most notable for two installments of much older franchises, neither of which is at the forefront of that franchise's legacy today.  A Speed Racer Reboot and Cutey Honey F which Toei had put in Sailor Moon's old time-slot after it ended.

What was going on in Western Entertainment media at this time?  Well on the WB the premier of Buffy The Vampire Slayer about three weeks earlier.  The fact that Buffy's feminist credentials have been called into question so much lately is not helped by the fact Utena had finished airing before Buffy was half way through it's second season.  Wrestlemania 13 was on March 23rd, arguably the beginning of the Attitude Era.  The Star Wars Special Editions were playing in American movie Theaters.  And sadly also Biggie Smalls passed away, Pac and Big never lived to see Pokemon, that is truly tragic.

So on both sides of the Pacific times were changing.

I'd made a post earlier this year about The Dark Age of Anime, this season can be argued to be the beginning of that age, or you could say it began when Sailor Moon ended a few weeks before, but I'm now willing to consider Pretty Sammy equally a part of the Golden Age of the Magical Girl Warrior.

I do not consider Utena properly a part of the Magical Girl Warrior genre, it definitely makes itself a relative of the genre, Ikuhara' Sailor Moon work was very much his training ground for Utena.  But the Magical Girl Genre is most certainly NOT what the show is deconstructing.

I suspect a ReDub of Utena may be inevitable.  There are many reasons for Netflix to consider Utena the logical follow up to ReDubbing Neon Genesis Evangelion, even though I personally would prefer they focus on making Dubs for stuff that got passed over originally.  Like Rose of Versailles which it would benefit people to see alongside Utena, or Gunbuster which should be a necessary companion to Eva.  But in the context of my drawing attention to Magical Girl stuff this month I'd say please finally Dub the Pretty Sammy TV Anime, even though it is sad we can no longer do it with the Classic Tenchi Dub Cast.

I am perfectly fine with the Utena Dub and can't understand why it's so often trashed even by other Dub defenders, nothing seems to have been censored out of it?  You certainly can't improve on Crispin Freeman as Touga, Lisa Ortiz as Shiori is one of the best vocal performances in the history of mankind, and the way Saionji's voice sounds to me like a Vincent Price impression yet I'm unsure it was intentional is endlessly captivating.  I get that on a Meta level some people might have trouble with Utena sounding so obviously like Misty, but I love it.  I'm very much not a fan of Misty but it was never the Actress's fault, so I enjoy hearing Rachael Lillis as a character I can respect.  The only voice in the existing Utena Dub I can kind of understand not liking is Juri, and I guess sometimes one being weak is enough to drag the whole thing down, but Juri is only important in like four episodes, the same episodes where Lisa is killing it as Shiori.

Still I can accept a New Dub, but please at least try to keep Freeman and Ortiz, they're still working and cannot be outdone.

If a ReDub happens, I feel the need to recommend Cherami Leigh for Utena Tenjou.  In Digibro's recent Utena Video he talked about how Light Novel Heroines are often very powerful but always second to the male lead, and how Touga views Utena as that but she isn't.  So that creates a pretty strong Meta Value to Utena sharing a voice with Asuna Yuki of SAO.  And then Leigh has also done Magical Girl stuff including the OG Minako Aino.

If I had to cast someone new for Saionji it'd have to be the current Aniplex voice of Shinji Matou from their Dubs of UFOtable's Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel, Nasu has admitted in interviews that character was partly based on Saionji.  And speaking of Fate/ Voices maybe Kari Walgren could be the one to finally do Juri justice?

Wasn't this post supposed to also be about Pokemon?  Speaking of Dub voices, how come Crispin Freeman was never in Pokemon?  He was clearly working in the same circles as some of the Pokemon voices in the late 90s, Utena being not even the only time he worked with Lillis, and he also worked with Ortiz in Record of Lodoss War.  The first roles that pop into my mind as ones that could have been Freeman roles were the ones done pretty darn well by Dan Green, but it's still something I notice.  [Update: Apparently he helped write some of the Pokemon Dub Scripts, that's interesting].

In completely different ways Utena and Pokemon both revolutionized Anime for decades to come.  So it's fascinating how just the month of April 97 became so important.  Now nearing the end of the Spring Season of 22 years later their impact is still being felt.

And the more obscure stuff that aired at the same time is also interesting, mostly stuff I haven't watched yet but I'm thinking of trying them out.

Update January 2020:  The Eva ReDub was a trainwreck, but it's not the fault of Netflix or anyone else on our side of the Pond.  It was Ano's own people micromanaging it obsessively like they did the 3.33 Dub.

Looking at how the 20tens Ikuhara shows were dubbed I think it's safe to say Ikuhara wouldn't be like that.  Of course those 20tens Dubs seem to be Texas based which wouldn't make my proposed Utena ReDub cast likely, they're all in LA as far as I can tell.

It's hard for me to truly settle on a 3x3

I made one recently, based mostly on the mood I was in at the time.

I simply really like too much stuff to easily settle on 9 shows to call my definitive absolute favorites.  On MAL I've given out 66 10 out of 10s so far.  Digibro has completed almost three times as many shows as I have but has given out less then half as many 10s.

For one this was a 3x3 of just TV Anime, no movies otherwise Nausicaa would certainly have had to be on it.  I was working on a 3x3 of just movies at the same time I worked on this, but I couldn't settle on one, and had trouble finding the right size images for some I knew I wanted to include.

Index and Railgun was something I'd only just recently discovered when I made this, a year from now will it still be so dominant in how I think about Anime?  I have no way of knowing.

Code Geass is perhaps the opposite problem, I feel the need to include it for how important it was to my early history with Anime, but it's been awhile since it'd really been an active part of my fandom.  Maybe that'll change when I can finally see the new movie.

My mind also continually changes on whether I prefer Fate/Zero or Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works to be my top installment of the Fate/ franchise.

And am I overrating Smartphone just a little bit because of how much I feel the community at large underrates it? and because I wanted to include something recent? Is it even really my favorite Isekai?  The fact that I only have 12 episodes to go on is what holds it back, but my other top Isekai is also only 12 episodes so far, No Game No Life.

And one show missing from the current 3x3 is a show that had once temporarily topped even Noir as my absolute favorite, Revolutionary Girl Utena.  It remains what I consider the most important Feminist Anime.

The Lupin The 3rd franchise is also missing, it's provided 2 movies that would be likely to make a 3x3 of just films, and a miniseries that is perhaps the 2nd best Feminist Anime, and plenty else I've enjoyed. 

When I made this I felt the need to limit myself to only one Magical Girl show, but I certainly feel like the Magical Girl genre currently makes up more then just a 9th of my interest in Anime.  I wound up settling on Nanoha at the time I made this.  For awhile I was considering Yuki Yuna Is A Hero my favorite, but before I watched that I would have said Madoka Magica which played an important role in my becoming more of a full time Anime fan.

And then there is Sailor Moon, it's very important to my history with Anime, and in theory certainly should be a favorite.  But there are currently so few single installments of Sailor Moon I'm willing to give a 10, currently I only give the first movie at 10.  All of the main arcs have me too much thinking about how the different versions have their own different imperfections.

Thing is I can basically say the same thing about Pokemon, where on MAL I only quite give a 10 to the 3rd movie.  Yet for both Pokemon and Sailor Moon it'd be highly rare of me to rate anything below a 6, and fairly rare for one to get below an 8.

There is also a genre completely missing, and that's the Yuri Genre.  Now Yuri content exists in arguably almost everything on that 3x3 or that I've talked about at all so far in this post.  But primarily Yuri shows like Citrus and Strawberry Panic and others have trouble earning a perfect score or competing with my long time faves, but they are still pretty important to me.

And that's just scratching the surface of shows I feel are quite important to defining what kind of Anime fan I am, yet that I have trouble definitively calling better enough then other shows to make them undeniably an absolute favorite.

Could Buffy reclaim her throne?

Noir was my original favorite Anime, it had been temporarily dethroned by Utena for over a year at least, but once I did a more recent revisit of Noir it took the position back and now Utena doesn't even make my 3x3.  I still love Utena, it's a fantastic work of art and I don't think anyone should be allowed to claim to be an expert on Feminist Film theory if they haven't watched Utena (and I suppose that includes anyone wanting to discus how well Buffy holds up as a Feminist show).  But it's just not for me re-watchable enough to keep calling it a personal favorite.

So could the same happen with Buffy?  Now that I'm revisiting my Buffy fandom can she take her former throne back from Pretty Little Liars (hence forth called PLL for short) as my favorite Western TV Show?  If it does it would be largely on the strength of how much it ended better.  But comparing their first 4 seasons PLL was absolutely much more consistently great then Buffy was.  In fact with PLL season 4 was the best season, how often does that happen?

Now PLL was still good all the way to the end, even it's finale episode has material that will probably stick with me into Eternity.  But the moment a certain change happened in season 5 it started losing something, and then in the middle of season 6 it makes that massive mistake it never fully recovered from that I've already talked about more then I feel I'm qualified to.

What I'm about to say probably makes me unlike most Buffy fans, but the last 3 seasons rather then the first three are what I'm most nostalgic for.  Dawn is my favorite Buffy character, Spike my favorite male character from the show, and the Magic Box was a more natural base of operations then a school library.  Now character wise neither Glory, the First or Caleb were the best Big Bads, but the Big Bad was always a plot device first and a character second.  Remember as I've already shared I used to be a major Spawn shipper.  And I've seen the MOTW Superhero show in a High School setting done as well or better by Magical Girl Anime and Smallville.

Season 6 was probably my favorite season of the show.  And season 7 I think was one of the most successful final seasons in TV history, in-spite of how it kinda does some things I think a final season shouldn't do.

The Gift was a good episode on it's own, but in an awkward situation because of the first season being only 12 episodes where it has to be both the 100th episode and a season finale.  What I want from 100th episodes and season finales are inherently not the same, a good 100th episode should be almost more about past seasons then the current one which is why it's convenient when they fall exactly in the middle of season 5.

But back to season 7.  My first instinct would always be to advise someone NOT to introduce new regular/recurring characters during the last season, winding things down is not a good time to suddenly start whole new character arcs.  The one exception could be a final Big Bad, but they should be introduced early in the season and connected to earlier story-lines somehow.  Buffy season 7 clearly goes against this a lot between the Potentials, Principal Robin Wood, and waiting till the last 5 episodes to bring in Caleb.

Now Buffy season 7 does still demonstrate why I feel this way, which is why it fails to outdo season 6.  The Potentials I'm particularity mad at since I think they ruined what Dawn's role in the finale season should have been.  And as for Wood, he is a very interesting character who's background was a neat idea to add to the lore, but being in only one season limited the ability to flesh that out.

But over all season 7 was a pretty solid final act for the show in-spite of all that.

For finale episodes, my advise tends to be focus on being a good season finale first, and if the final season works as a final season it should naturally make a good finale episode.  And Chosen mostly does just that which is why it's a great series finale.

On the subject of bringing back characters we hadn't seen in awhile, I believe final seasons should try to do that, but the finale episode should not, it should just focus on ending the story-lines of the characters who stuck around to the end.

Now you might think Angel's involvement in Chosen violates that rule, but he's an acceptable exception because he was only at the very beginning, and being the lead of a spin off meant that in the fan's minds he was never completely gone.  You might also think Faith's involvement cuts it close but coming in five episodes from the end proved enough to reintegrate her.

PLL's final season and final episodes both do these things I said you shouldn't do, and doesn't make up for it as cleverly as Buffy does.  Again I always enjoyed the show, but it's last 2 seasons were deeply inferior to the first 5 and also certainly don't make as satisfying an ending as how Buffy ended.

Thing is no single episode of PLL ever got as bad as some of Buffy's low points.  And I'm not sure if any of my favorite episodes of Buffy can beat my favorites of PLL.

One thing both shows have in common is that some of my favorite episodes are their Halloween episodes, might have something to do with the weird fact that I was born on Halloween.  But comparing them, PLL's Halloween specials win out with their epicness, the one that's a back door pilot for the failed spin off is the weakest of them but still pretty good.

It's hard for me to pick a single favorite episode for either.  But for PLL Shadow Play is a strong candidate and for Buffy it would probably be Once Moor With Feeling.  Comparing a Noir Episode to a Musical probably doesn't seem fair, but I think PLL wins here because for Buffy's my favorite character was kinda sidelined while on PLL Spencer was the focal point of this episode.

PLL never had a Musical which is a shame.  And Buffy never had a Noir Episode, the Buffyverse did it's Noir stuff on Angel, where again I'd say no single episode of Angel is as good at being a Noir as Shadow Play is.

The Seventh Episode factor

I'm really annoyed that TVTropes has changed the name of the Seventh Episode Twist trope to Mid-Season Twist and thus changed most of the examples so now even most Buffy ones are not the actual Seventh Episode.  The importance the Seventh Episode often has on Buffy and many other shows is a totally separate kind of importance from why the halfway point of a 20-26 episode show is important.  Calling it a "twist" was always misleading I suppose as they aren't usually twists per se, though neither frankly are most midway point episodes.

Since I've had Buffy on the brain lately for the first time in a awhile, let me break it down.

Now the Seventh Episode is often not vital to the "plot", most Buffy examples actually don't feature the Big Bad, they're usually introduced in episodes 3-5 and may reappear in episode 8, but their plot-line mainly kicks off in the second half.  Rather it's important to the emotional Story, the Character Development and the Themes.  Often I've noticed it having a tendency to be important to that season's romantic story-line(s).  Sometimes episode 14 has a similar Romantic significance, which could be because it's a multiple of 7 or maybe a reference to Valentines Day.

Season 1 Episode 7 was the episode titled Angel.

This episode features the Big Bad, but it's importance is still more like what I just laid out above, indeed it's named after the Love Interest.

Season 2 Episode 7, Lie To Me.

This one again features the Big Bads, but that's because Spike and Dru are more directly linked to the Romantic Story-line then most future ones will be.  In the way the show is interpreted by The Passion of The Nerd's Episode Guide, this episode contains a vital mission statement to the show's moral philosophy (which in my current opinion is very toxic).

Season 3 Episode 7, Revelations.

This episode is again a vital escalation in the Angel story-line of the season.  But it's also vital to Faith's story-line, her trust issues in general and putting her for the first time in conflict with Buffy.  Perhaps the Faith importance is consistent with the romantic importance, depending on how you interpret things.

Season 4 Episode 7, The Initiative.

This one is important to the Big Badish story-line but mainly because season 4 was inherently different from most seasons in that regard.  It is still the real beginning of season 4's romantic story-line.  And the introduction of Spike's new status-quo, who has been and will be important to romantic story-lines.

Angels Season 1: Bachelor Party.

It's the first Doyle centric episode.  And it ends with the set up for the first full crossover story-line.

Buffy Season 5: Fool For Love.

The beginning of the end of Buffy's current relationship and a vital stage setter for what will dominate her love life for the rest of the show.

Angel Season 2: Darla.

The romantic story-lines of this season are all about Darla.

Buffy Season 6: Once More With Feeling.

The Musical Episode, while the romantic story-lines come up, this is perhaps the least directly about those so far.  It makes itself a turning point for every story-line, but chiefly is where the Scoobies finally learn how Buffy really feels about being brought back to life.

Angel Season 3: Offspring.

Darla shows up pregnant, do I need to say anything else?

Buffy Season 7: Conversations With Dead People.

This more then any other is the real beginning of the final season's arc.  It's romantic importance is there, we learn something about what's going on with Spike.  Like the Musical it tried to make itself important to every plot, though it's strangely the only episode of the entire series Xander isn't in.

Angel Season 4: Apocalypse, Nowish.

The introduction of the sorta Big Bad.  And it's a turning point in the romantic story-lines as well.

Angel Season 5: Lineage.

Important to Wesley's romantic story-line, since it's mainly a Wesley episode over all.  Given earlier patterns I kinda wish episode 8 had been this season's episode 7.  Both Angel Season 5 and Smallville season 2 named their 7th episode Lineage, this one aired a year after that one.

So, that is the list of episodes that TVTropes page used to talk about for Buffy and Angel, though what I said about them is kind of different.  To what extent this happens outside the Buffyverse is hard for me to objectively determine.  For example the extent to which I used to see it on Smallville I think may have mostly been my looking for it.

But I think a factor in why Noir so quickly sucked me in as the first not a kid's show Anime I watched was in how the way it was structured happened to echo Buffy(Like how Episode 5 was the formal introduction to the antagonist force.), though having 4 more episodes to it's total length kind of made the 16/17 significance happen twice, the other being 20/21 which was the same number of episodes from the end as 16/17 would be in a 22 episode show. 

Episode 7 of Noir was The Black Thread of Fate.  The Soldats were to my recollection not relevant at all.  The most important thing about this episode is how it's the first time we see definitive evidence our protagonists have come to actually care about each other.  A brief throw away scene is also when we see Chloe for the first time, it feels like an after credits scene yet that's not where they put it.  Also the title of the episode echoes the title of the show itself, Noir being the French word for Black.

On Madlax episode 7 was the first part of a two parter and the point at which the seemingly two different shows we were watching begin to come together.  I feel like episode 7 of El Cazador de la Bruja can also fit this pattern.

Witch Hunter Robin would have fit if only they switched episodes 7 and 9.

Episode 7 of Code Geass begins with our first flashback and ends with Zero's first defeat, episode 7 of R2 was Lelouch's Achilles in his Tent moment.

Lupin III Part IV has two episode 7s due to two intended episodes becoming OVAs in Japan but being added back to the series for the Adult Swim airing.   It's the order without the OVAs that makes it kinda fit.

In Katana Maidens episode 7 is where the Avengers are finally assembled.  I think episode 7 of Darling in The FranXX's significance is self evident.   Episode 7 of Doki Doki Precure inspired something I did on Tumblr once.
http://jaredmithrandir.tumblr.com/post/139417960233/magicalgirlconfessions-doki-doki-precure-won
I love you Glitter Force but I hate how you screwed up the episode order symmetry here.

But let's take a look at Anime that is too old to be accused of doing this because Buffy did it.

If you view Misty as a love interest on Pokémon, then episode 7 was the real establishment of her character even though she'd been there from the start.  I also wonder if episode 5 being Ash's first Gym Battle could be compared to the significance I read into Buffy's episode 5s?

The fact that the classic Sailor Moon Anime fits this pattern more in it's DiC episode order I find really interesting. In that version episode 5 introduces Ami, episode 7 introduced Rei and episode 10 was the defeat of Jadite, all three things that could be compared to how Buffy seasons would be structured with episode 10s usually being semi-finales before a hiatus.  The Anime version connects Rei to the romantic story-line since she was dating Mamoru/Darrien briefly.  These episodes aired in English in 95, is it possible Joss had watched them?

The statement Joss once made about originally not wanting Angel to be a fighter makes me wonder if in general his role in the story was partly inspired by Tuxedo Mask (and the other part by The Vampire Diaries).  I've been thinking of doing a separate post on if Buffy could be considered a Magical Girl Warrior.

In the live action Sailor Moon series episode 7 is made an important development in the Tuxedo Mask/Sailor Moon relationship.  In Sailor Moon Crystal which more directly follows the Manga episodes 6 and 7 both are major Tuxedo Mask developments, and the end of 7 is when Sailor Venus first appears.

All I'll say about episode 7 of Utena is that when production issues delayed the intended episode 6 it was swapped with episode 8, another Nanami "filler" episode.  Which tells me Ikuhara or Enokido for some reason saw it as important that Unfulfilled Juri be the seventh episode not any other number.

Feel free to leave comments about what Episode 7s of various TV Shows or Cartoons you think are interesting.

Update 2022: The Seventh episode of Detective Conan was the first episode where Ran almsot figures out the truth, and it's pretty good.

Anime Deconstructions and Subversions

Digibro did a video awhile ago about disagreeing with certain Anime being labeled Deconstructions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT6EdojMvUs.

Watchmojo is dumb for labeling Gundam a Deconstruction because it was simply the creation of a new Sub-Genre.

Most of the Anime mentioned I'm not familiar with. I want to disagree with Digi mainly on Evangelion and Utena (Utena is complicated).  But I will also talk about him being right that Madoka isn't a deconstruction, but for the wrong reasons.

Digi recommends Miragephan's video Madoka Magica is not a Deconstruction.  I liked that video when I first watched it, but now I realize it's kinda lame and saying nothing more then it doesn't have enough deep Philosophical discussions to be a deconstruction.

I agree that Madoka isn't a deconstruction (so ignore my post from December 2015).  But a lot of people are coming at it from a place that IF Madoka is a Deconstruction that somehow discredits the Magical Girl genre.

Superhero stories became better then ever after Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns came along.  That process involved some stories being weak for being seemingly nothing but a pale imitation of them, but in the long run it made the genre better.  Because after the Deconstructions came the Reconstructions.

The Magical Girl Warrior doesn't have a truly great Deconstruction yet, and I think that is what is holding the genre back.

Now onto Eva.

First Digi is arguing Eva isn't a deconstruction by comparing it to Gundam is misguided because TVTropes has a whole page for when the original of a Genre seems like a Deconstruction compared to what came latter.  It's called the UnBuilt Trope.  A genre Deconstruction is a reaction to what the genre has become more so then it's originator.  Not quite every Genre creator turns out to be like this, but quite a few have, from The Three Musketeers to A Study in Scarlet to several Anime genre creators, the page even lists Gundam if I remember correctly.  And Hell I'd say the Kanto Era Pokemon Anime seems like a Deconstruction of Digimon and YuGiOh.

But regardless, since I just watched the Gundam movies, there is in fact only one scene where Amuro refused to get in the Robot.  The series may have had more, but the overall plot considered it necessary only once.  At the start Amuro jumped into the cockpit with no hesitation, like many old school protagonists he's set up as someone who naturally runs towards danger rather then away from it.

But the greater flaw with comparing Eva to Gundam in this context is Eva is more a Super Robot show then the genre Gundam created.  But Gundam did still influence Eva, and Shinji was clearly written to be a much more (in Ano's mind) realistic example of someone in Amuro's situation.

Digibro says a few things about what makes a Deconstruction that are literally the opposite of how I or anyone else would define one.

1. He says Eva (and Madoka which I'll get to again later) "do nothing that hasn't been done before".  In my opinion an attempted deconstruction that does something that hasn't been done before has cheated.  It's more of what you don't do that makes it a Deconstruction.

Watchmen didn't do anything that hadn't been done before.  The Punisher was already a vigilante actually killing criminals, maybe also Wolverine.  The Golden Age stories also had some death.  And the 70s were filed with stories bringing real world politics into it in a similar way.  In fact Alan Moore originally wanted to just use the Charleton characters and that is exactly why Rorschach is a right wing conspiracy theorist like The Question.

2. He says Eva isn't even really part of the Mecha genre because of how irrelevant the "Robot" is to the story's final resolution.

But again it is exactly the same in Watchmen.  The world isn't saved by the Superheros, it's saved by a Supervillian's evil scheme.

A Deconstruction is about saying the fantasy this genre is built on isn't the real answer, if anything it could be the problem.  And that is exactly what Watchmen and Evangelion have in common.

Evangelion like Watchmen has improved it's genre, without it we wouldn't have Pacific Rim.

Now on to Utena.

Utena is a Deconstruction, but probably not a Genre Deconstruction, and certainly not of the Magical Girl Genre.  The Magical Girl aspects of the story are if anything the one thing it's not Deconstructing.  If anything the world Ikuhara really wants to deconstruct is the real world.  But it can also be read as a deconstruction of Fairy Tale archetypes and high school set Shoujo Manga/Anime conventions.

Now returning to Madoka.

Digibro said Madoka didn't do anything that hadn't been done before, and that is very wrong.  No prior Magical Girl Warrior show was predicated on Wish granting or the girls finding out they become the monsters they are fighting.

Ultimately I would say Madoka isn't a deconstruction for the same reason Gundam isn't, it's the birth of a new Sub Genre.  And it may well already be no longer the best of that Sub-Genre.  I'm not sure anymore how much I agree with my past declaring Yuki Yuna to be better, but it's definitely close to being at least equal in my mind.

A good example of what a Magical Girl Deconstruction could be is the first episode of the original Kaitou Twin Angel OVA, but the second episode restores things to normal.

I enjoyed Digibro's video on One Punch Man "Is there value in subverting Shonen Tropes?".  And I think he should create an equivalent "Is there value in suberverting Moe tropes?".

Because I've seen a lot of people recently praise shows like Galcochan as being somehow subversive of "Cute Girls doing Cute Things" by being "Cute Girls doing raunchy things", though it's really more talking about them then doing them.

But like what Digi says about Shonen stories that duality has always been there.  In the pinnacle of the genre, Lucky Star, Konata is described by Kagami as being like a dirty old man.  Not to mention the entire premise of Akira Kogami.

My Feminist defense of "Cute Girls doing Cute Things" and Yuri Anime

 First I'm going to talk just about "Cute Girls doing Cute Things" for awhile.  Then talk about Yuri at the end.

I'm not really an expert on the genre, there are a number of important shows I have seen little or none of yet, Aria, Azumanga Dioh, Manibi Straight, Hidemari Sketch, Nichijo and Is The Order a Rabbit.  And the shows Digibro talked about in his How to Distinguish between Cute Girl Shows video.  All shows I intend to get to eventually.  Well Aria seems comparatively boring so maybe not that one.

This genre of Anime is in a similar place to Twilight in that I can't sympathize with the Feminist criticism as much as I maybe should, since I know the hatedom is truly driven by Misogyny and Homophobia, yet because Sexists always try to deny they're Sexists, they then use the Feminist criticisms as a shield.  The difference being I don't particularly like Twilight myself so have no personal investment in pointing this out for that one.

Before most Western Feminists even heard the term "Moeblob".  The outrage against these shows started among 80s/90s Nerds who missed the days when Anime (or at least the Anime that got localized in America) was dominated by hyper masculine shows, from Giant Robots to Shounon fighting shows.  Who are deeply offended by the very idea of men enjoying girly shows, even if they are ones technically marketed to men rather then women.  Who see it as an example of how modern society is trying to emasculate them in their paranoid minds. 

Before I became a full Otaku, most of the girly shows I liked were shows that were made for women at least partly, and are shows I still like to varying degrees.  From Buffy, to One Tree Hill, to The Vampire Diaries to Pretty Little Liars.  Before those I even recall being into Party of Five and Xena.  And of course one of my earliest exposures to Anime was Sailor Moon.  I've also genuinely enjoyed a number of Lifetime movies.  And all of this was stuff I got crap for on IMDB if it came up on a board where most of the visitors were typical male nerds.

And my favorite characters have always been female characters no matter how male oriented a show or movie is.  And not just because I found them attractive.  Even though I'm Cisgender, I have a tendency to relate and identify with female characters far more often then male ones in the fiction I enjoy.

And so Padme is my favorite Star Wars character, Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain are my favorite Batman characters, Donna Troy and Raven are my favorite non Batman DC characters.  My favorite Narnia character was Susan.  Even when I read Children of Hurin I liked Niniel the best.  With Pokemon it was weird at first that I didn't like Misty much, but then I got Lisa in the 3rd Movie, Domino in Mewtwo Returns, and in time May and Dawn, and Leaf in the games (I also like the Lass trainers).

I want to write a show that would be essentially the Western Live Action counterpart to Lucky Star.  And the thing is I wanted to write that before I knew Lucky Star existed.  Back around 2010-11, I started working in my head on a show that ostensibly had a Sci-Fi/Fantasy premise, but most of the scenes I cared about were just my characters, which were mostly teenage girls, talking with each other about random and often nerdy stuff.  So when in mid 2016 I discovered Lucky Star, and discovered there was an audience for doing that without the Genre pretense, I felt really liberated.

Digibro likes to compare the appeal of shows like Lucky Star to the appeal of Let's Plays, or at least Let's Plays with more then one person involved.  And indeed the above show I planned even included a few scenes of them talking while the others were watching one play a Video Game, even though I hadn't really heard of Let's Plays yet.

The first show I watched that could be considered a Cute Girls doing Cute Things show, isn't one strictly since it did have one prominent male character love interest, that was Engaged to the Unintended.  Later in early 2016 I watched Yuru Yuri, that show really helped me through some stuff.  Then later in the Summer of that year when I watched for the first time Lucky Star, I knew this was a genre I wanted more of.  Lucky Star remains the best in this genre to me.

Next in line was K-On, it is also really great but a bit too plot/story driven for my tastes.   The thing about K-On is it's only in the west Feminists (or anyone) complains about it, in Japan in-spite of being ostensibly marketed more to men, it was written and directed by Women and has a strong female fan-base.

These shows generally do not have what I complained about in my Anime Fanservice post.  Occasionally one will have a little early on while hooking viewers and then completely drop it.

I'm not the only male who's enjoyment of this genre overlaps with an ability to enjoy Girly Shows actually made for Girls.  I don't think it's a coincidence that the biggest advocate of K-On on YouTube was also once the original Brony, or at least the leading one on YouTube.  A number of Digibro's videos about K-On and Lucky Star are in my Kyoto Animation playlist.

Digibro made a chart called A Guide to "Cute Girls doing Cute Things".  And then a YouTube video explaining it.  A lot of the sub-genres in that chart fail to carry over all of the original appeal, in fact some unfortunately do become Fan Service heavy.  The first three categories are really the purest examples of the Genre.  Digibro also did a Podcast on his history with the Genre.

Some of you might be annoyed how often I'm mentioning Digibro.  Well in a lot of ways he's smarter at explaining things then I am.  Yet still I think there is a slight difference between what I look for in the genre and what he does, so I do need to say more then just "Watch Digibro's videos".

The reason I have come lately to mostly like these shows more then actual Shoujo Anime, is that unfortunately Shoujo Anime continues to be made under an assumption that a Het Romance is necessary for girls to care about it.  I have recently come to find most Het romantic fiction boring, and believe it or not so do a lot of women.

What I'm getting at is, these shows appeal to men who in some ways don't fit society's normal standard of masculinity.  So while these shows may still have problems, and some of the men they appeal to may still be sexist in some ways.  I think it helps far more then hurts that we have these shows.

I mentioned in a comments section once how these shows all pass the Bechdel test rather easily.  And then got responses that I was somehow missing the point of the Bechdel test.  I'm well aware that what the Bechdel test points out is only a symptom not the problem.  The way to pass that test without actually treating the real problem would be a story with like 30 characters but only two are female, and there is no reason to expect or be interested in those two characters talking to each other besides being the only representatives their Gender has, yet they are given a single scene together and it feels forced.  I don't know if such a hypothetical scenario has happened yet, but it's something I suspect will inevitably happen.

Shows that pass the Bechdel test not because of a single scene but because the show is entirely about women who's lives don't revolve round men, are worth celebrating even if they have other problematic issues.  So that we have an entire genre doing that on a regular basis, in-spite of being technically marketed to men, getting almost no credit for it from Western Feminists bugs me.

There is no point in individually criticizing a movie that isn't an ensemble and has a single male lead for not passing the Bechdel test.  The problem is films fitting that description have for decades been most of what Hollywood cares about producing.  Yet TheMarySue felt the need to do a whole article on Spiderman Homecoming not passing the Bechdel test, I still haven't seen that movie, there may be valid reasons to criticize it, but there is no reason to go in hoping it'll pass the Bechdel test.

In the past I've gotten criticized for expressing the above with the statement, "just cause a film has a male lead doesn't mean it can't pass the Bechdel test".   Yes it's hypothetically possible, but there is no good reason to expect it.  And as someone who wants more female lead films, I don't want them to have scenes where the male supporting characters get together to have a conversion that has nothing to do with the lead character I'm watching the movie for.  Still at the same time I enjoy many scenes that others criticize for being useless to the main plot, but those are usually scenes with female characters.  So I may not be the one criticizing a male lead movie for passing the Bechdel Test when it had no obvious reason to, but the criticism would certainly exist.

I think the existence of films with Female Leads that still fail to pass it are far more worth criticizing.  Like The Force Awakens and Rogue One, and I currently suspect The Last Jedi will continue this with Rey spending at least half the film on an island with Luke.  The Wonder Woman film passes it only because of the scenes on Themiscyra, but at least it has a good reason to have Diana mostly interacting with men for the rest of the film.  The new Star Wars films are giving their female leads mostly male support because they seem to think that's just natural.

In Anime this issue rarely happens, when Anime gives us a Superheroine, it also give her a lot of female support.  And if it's related to the Cute Girls doing Cute Things genre, it may well have no male characters at all.

I'm well aware that this genre is kind of driven by a non-sexual objectification, sometimes treating Cute Girls like Cute Animals.  And that is the main Feminist criticism I sympathize with.  But that's relatively harmless compared to most ways a show can be sexist.

The assumption that most of these characters are simply one dimensional doesn't hold up, at least not for the shows well known enough that they're the ones articles criticizing this genre default to singling out.  LadyGeekGirl has an article specifically singling out K-On as being a "Moeblob" show with no character depth, even though K-On has so much character development that they seem unrecognizable watching the pilot and finale back to back.  The development is just done subtly, rather then topping off every episode with a "what did we learn today" speech.  Fortunately AnimeFeminist has a good article praising K-On.

Yuri is ultimately a separate Genre though with overlapping appeal.  And all Slice of Life Cute Girls shows have Yuri shipping in their fandoms.  Main reason I want to separate it from everything I said above is that Yuri shows are more likely to include Fan Service.  But I'm not making a separate post because the Toxic Masculinity issue is relevant to what I have to say on both.

A warning before reading on, I will talk about some sexual content below.

Lots has been written online about why Yaoi and Slash Fiction would appeal to women besides the most superficial carnal appeal.  Lots of different appeals get discussed.  But with men the default is to just assume they only care about watching Girl on Girl sex, and most Western Lesbian Porn indeed only cares about appealing that carnal desire.

Digibro again has a Podcast on his personal history with the genre.  But later I'll get to the more insightful thing he said somewhere else.

A lot of the criticism of Yuri is the Purity fixation.  And I agree that that is a problem, but for not exactly the same reason.  If your going off only the most mainstream Yuri Anime, it's easy to think the Purity fixation is why actual Sex rarely happens.  However there are Yuri Doujins (the target audience writing what they want to see) like A Pure Heart (A Nao x Reika from Smile Pretty Cure Doujin) that are about rejecting the idea that Sex takes away Purity, that Doujin was deeply moving to me personally.

Now you can say the reason that happens in the Yuri Genre is because of the whole problematic "Lesbian Sex isn't real Sex because there is no Penetration" idea.  However the reason Lesbain sex has been thought of that way, is intimately related to how society often thinks of Male sexuality as inherently violent.  Digibro said in the PCP podcast on Porn that he used to be inherently turned off by Penises in porn because he thought of them as inherently violent, but that changed once he actually had sex for the first time.  When he said that I felt relieved, since I now knew it wasn't just me.

Just look at how many slang terms for sex, that were originally specifically about intercourse, are also inherently violent terms, Screw, Nail, Bang, the F word, ect.  Toxic Masculinity encourages men to be proud of that association, but for me it's inherently uncomfortable, and it seems like the only Erotica that's at least sometimes free of any violent subtext is Femslash Fan Fiction and Yuri.  And when violence does enter Lesbian Erotica it's always because of the need to have one of the women "play the man".

And this also reminds me of why I really feel that Revolutionary Girl Utena is one of the best nuanced works of Feminist fiction.  What a lot of people miss looking at it on the surface level is that it criticizes it's own Protagonist when her Princely ideal leads her to Toxic Masculine behavior.  Sadly this is also the main area where the movie sort of falters.

I shouldn't need to remove my own gender from the scenario for Sex to be non violent.  But the Patriarchy doesn't make it easy.  Interestingly, the one piece of Het Erotica I'm aware of that doesn't have this issue is The Song of Songs that is Solomon's.

So yes, these two genres aren't perfect, and I'd like to see them improved.  But "Cute Girls doing Cute Things" being rejected out of hand by many Feminists annoys me.