Magic Academy Light Novels/Anime owe nothing to Harry Potter.

I know that sounds absurd at first, but it really isn't.  

Otaku Media is a niche subculture in Japan, and their relationship with taking influence from the west is complicated. In the formative years of the subculture in the 70s and 80s a lot clearly was taken and that's why Star Wars and Superman references never feel out of place in Anime.  But by the late 90s the culture started becoming increasingly insular, the thing Miyazaki said that got mistranslated and misquoted as "Anime was a Mistake" was all about how annoyed he is at modern Anime refusing to be influenced by stuff other then prior Anime.

Harry Potter did not invent the concept of fantastical magic themed Schools or using one as the setting for a Fantasy story.  Western Fantasy Novels with such a concept can be traced back to the 50s.  The late 90s saw an increase in such concepts because using even normal school as a setting only became it's own genre in the prior decade.

But since some of these Magic Academy Anime are technically not Magic at all but nominally some sort of SciFi ability, I could add the X-Men comics to the list of things that were kinda this Genre long before Harry Potter.

The one Anime that I do view as maybe explicitly Harry Potter influenced I like is, Little Witch Academia, but maybe not even LWA since two of the Pre-Potter magic School franchises from that video were about specially All Female Witch Schools.  Still LWA is distinct from the Light Novel trend I'm principally talking about.

My agenda here is NOT about trying to destroy the legacy of Harry Potter because of the now exposed bigotry of She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named.  I'm not even a fan of this genre of Anime, I've yet to get through a full cour of a single show where this is it's main genre.  However I will recommend while on that subject Chivalry of a Failed Knight since it has an explicit Trans character. 

Rather the agenda of mine this post does fit into is my desire to draw attention to how much modern Anime has it's roots in a lot of obscure forgotten 90s Media that was popular within this subculture in Japan but didn't get localized for the West or directly adapted into Anime till 10-20 years later if at all.  Like YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at The Bound of This World.  

And while I still am far from an expert on that subject I've already found one such piece of hidden Otaku Media that is in fact a Magic School setting before Harry Potter.  Lunar: Sanposuru Gakuen (Lunar: Walking School) released in Japan in January of 1996, almost a year and a half before the first Harry Potter book was published.  This instalment didn't get a Western Release but it was part of an already popular series.

Even before that there was a Shoujo Manga/Anime series called Akazukin Chaka.

However these kinds of hidden pieces of the puzzle of Anime History are not of interest to Mother's Basement when he makes multiple videos on this genre calling them "Anime Harry Potter knockoffs" for clicks.  He's even aware of the differences like the Academy and Magic's existence not being an in-universe secret, and the lack of anything like the house sorting system.

However there is another piece of this puzzle that even these more Normie observers of Anime have less of an excuse to have missed.  Final Fantasy VIII released in February of 1999 but was in production already before Final Fantasy VII was even fully released yet and thus also before Harry Potter.  And just look at it's early Cut Scenes.  It's a Fantastical Academy and the unforms are clearly way more similar to what we've come to expect from LN based Magic Academy Anime then the more generic Harry Potter robes.  

Meanwhile the Japanese Translation of the first Harry Potter book wasn't published till December of 1999, Final Fantasy VIII was almost a full year earlier.

Update July 30th:  Low and behold like right after I made this Reign of The Seven Spellblades starts airing, a show seemingly calculated to make this post age poorly.  But it really only proves my point more, that's what Anime actively trying to evoke Harry Potter looks like, it exposes how not like HP at all the swarm of shows preceding it truly are, all while still managing to be better then Harry Potter in the way only an Anime version of it's premise could be.

Wedding Peach had an All Star writing staff

[Update December 8th: I'm now worried the entire premise of this past was based on misinformation.  Regarding Terada's perceived connection to Zelda]

Zelda is the title character for a reason.

Here's the in-game opening story description for the original NES Legend of Zelda.

LONG AGO, GANON, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, STOLE THE TRIFORCE OF POWER. PRINCESS ZELDA OF HYRULE BROKE THE TRIFORCE OF WISDOM INTO EIGHT PIECES AND HID THEM FROM GANON BEFORE SHE WAS KIDNAPPED BY GANON'S MINIONS. LINK, YOU MUST FIND THE PIECES AND SAVE ZELDA.

And here's the more detailed version in the Instruction Manuel.

A long, long time ago the World was in an age of Chaos. In the middle of this chaos, in a little kingdom in the land of Hyrule, a legend was being handed down from generation to generation, the legend of the 'Triforce'; golden triangles possessing mystical powers.

One day, an evil army attacked this peaceful little kingdom and stole the Triforce of Power. This army was led by Gannon, the powerful Prince of Darkness who sought to plunge the World into fear and darkness under his rule. Fearing his wicked rule, Zelda, the princess of this kingdom, split up the Triforce of Wisdom into eight fragments and hid them throughout the realm to save the last remaining Triforce from the clutches of the evil Ganon. At the same time, she commanded her most trustworthy nursemaid, Impa, to secretly escape into the land and go find a man with enough courage to destroy the evil Gannon. Upon hearing this, Ganon grew angry, imprisoned the princess, and sent out a party in search of Impa.

Braving forests and mountains, Impa fled for her life from her pursuers. As she reached the very limit of her energy she found herself surrounded by Gannon’s evil henchmen. Cornered! What could she do? … But wait!

All was not lost. A young lad appeared. He skillfully drove off Ganon’s henchmen, and saved Impa from a fate worse than death. His name was Link. During his travels he had come across Impa and Ganon’s henchmen. Impa told Link the whole story of the princess Zelda and the evil Ganon. Burning with a sense of justice, Link resolved to save Zelda, but Ganon was a powerful opponent. He held the Triforce of Power. And so, in order to fight off Ganon, Link had to bring the scattered eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom together to rebuild the mystical Triangle.

If he couldn't do this, there would be no chance Link could fight his way into Death Mountain where Ganon lived. Can Link really destroy Ganon and save the Princess Zelda? Only your skill can answer that question. Good luck. Use the Triforce wisely.

What you'll notice is that while the player plays Link you are on a mission from Zelda, you are attempting to carry out her plan.  This is why even from the very first game in 1985 she had agency that Princess Peach Toadstool did not.  Now today Peach has become a character with as much agency as Zelda and that's great, I don't wanna a start a Catfight between Zelda Simps and Peach Simps.

In Adventure of Link this aspect of Zelda's role is gone but it's back in A Link to The Past where while you can read a backstory about both the distant and recent past, actual gameplay begins with the Player as Link responding to Zelda's call to adventure.

However in Ocarina of Time Zelda isn't who sends link on his quest and when you do get a mission from her it winds up being the McGuffin Delivery Trope which I hate when it's done for Video Games, I don't want to be told things would have been better if I did nothing.

I like every Zelda game ultimately, but the reason why I consider OoT overrated in the story department is because I care little about how much more cinematic things are like now in 3D if it lessens one of my favorites aspects of the classic games.

Skyward Sword's extreme linearity may be the opposite of the original NES Game in how you play but it was the first game (at least in the main series) since ALttP to bring back this aspect of it, Link is carrying out Zelda's plan, well you could get pedantic and say it's Hylia's plan but they are ultimately the same Entity, and Zelda proper is playing her part in getting the ball rolling.

And then Breath of The Wild is also very much back to the original premise.

Dystopian Science Fiction only reinforces the real world Status Quo

They establish the Evil Government or Empire in question as being obviously Evil to the audience by having it be nakedly and obviously oppressive in a way no current First World Nation is.  It doesn't matter how many Bread Tube Video Essays go on for hours about how it's a perfect allegory for the real world's problems, nor does it matter if that's what the author intended, the average viewer is at best going to see it as a "cautionary tale".

And that's the problem, scaring the public with the variety of different ways things could be worse creates hostility to the very concept of change.  In most of these stories the better freer society the rebels are fighting for is Liberal Democracy, the real world status quo.  The official full name of the Rebellion in Star Wars is "The Alliance to Restore The Republic", that does make it technically speaking a Reactionary Revolution not a Progressive one, the kind Edmund Burke would call a Reformation rather then a Revolution.  

We see how broken The Republic always was in The Prequels and Clone Wars, yet because The Empire is so blatantly worse people long for The Republic and are not even considering the idea of trying to build something new, or question the very concept of having a Galactic Government in the first place.  The only value I ever saw in writing more Star Wars post ROTJ is attempting to address this.  Instead the overarching narrative we're getting is that the New Republic's mistake was demilitarizing and refusing to take quick harsh action against the rising First Order, even though the message of The Prequels was that militarizing is exactly how The Republic became The Empire in the first place.

Andor is the first Star Wars project to actually really be this Genre.  Star Wars may have "always been Political" but the politics was set dressing and framing devices. The Empire was something our protagonists were under the threat of but never living directly under.  Andor is the first Star Wars project to be perceived as some groundbreaking Political Manifesto, but it's not.  The character in the second arc who's supposed to be the ideologue of the group never says a damn thing about the kind of society he wants to create, just a bunch of philosophizing about how highly authoritarian systems like the Empire inevitably destroy themselves, which isn't even true, Rome lasted Centuries.

Breadtubers really love to argue that every fictional Dystopia is either Fascist or Capitalist or both and the Right Wingers interpreting them as being in any way Socialist are simply not getting them.  Unfortunately most Hollywood writers are relatively Centrist Liberals who do view Communism and Nazism as two sides of the same coin.  I like Divergent, I only saw the first movie but I found it more engaging then The Hunger Games.  However the society it depicts can't be viewed as Capitalist nor does it contain any of the things that animate actual Fascist movements.  Even watching it as a Communist I see it as what it looks like when Communism is tried but goes wrong, or at least what Liberals think it looks like when Communism is tried and "inevitably" doesn't work.  Of course when I first watched it I wasn't the Communist I am now as you can probably guess from my first post mentioning it on this blog.

Classic CyberPunk is often alleged to be where Capitalism will inevitably lead if we don't change course.  The problem is most viewers won't see it that way not because they are stupid but because CyberPunk is stupid, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Capitalism to think it would ever benefit the Capitalists to get rid of the Government.

Here's an informative YT video on George Orwell.

https://youtu.be/2Gz0I_X_nfo

The Anime 86 is more interesting then many other Dystopian shows because the Republic of San Magnolia actually claims to be a Democracy.  

I have now watched the Anime Psycho-Pass (only season one for now which I'm pretty sure was originally meant to stand on it's own).  And I'm going to Spoil it.

Princesses can outrank Queens

 So there's a YouTube Vidoe that fully breaks down the History of the title "Prince of Wales".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_AP3Z6KvkM&pp=ygUeaGlzdG9yeSBvZiB0aGUgUHJpbmNlIG9mIFdhbGVz

And one thing I realized is this is largely the origin of the use of the English Word Prince as we know it entirely.  And one major point is when certain Welsh rulers started using the Title it was due to it's connection to the Ancient Roman Imperial title of Princeps viewed as outranking the title of King.

On the show The Tudors set well after all that history you'll notice that a King can also be called a Prince even while they are a Ruling King.  Machiavelli's book titled The Prince was always intended to be about a status equal to that of a King not inherently lesser.

Princess is the feminine form of Prince, even though we all know that we fail to think of it the same since Reissuance Germany and Italy never had any ruling Princesses, all the states called Principalities always had male rulers. 

Yet at the end of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra the Queen Cleopatra is called a Princess by her handmaiden.  This was based on a quote taken from Plutarch's biography of Marc Anthony.

When translating The Hebrew Bible into English multiple words get translated "Prince", most notably Sar, Nagyim and Nasi, but the only uses of "Princess" in the KJV are the feminine form of Sar, Sarah.  However the use of "King" in these translations is more consistent always being a form of Melek.  Yet I remember being told once that at least Assyrian Sources definitely thought of Sar as being a higher ranked title then Melek.  In fact the oldest version of "King of Kings" seems to Sar Sarrani, the Melek version came later.  And none of these Prince words are ever used in The Bible with the meaning of "Son of a King".

And yet because Princess in modern dictionaries gets defined as meaning only a Daughter of a King/Queen or Wife of a Prince, lots of Internet Nerds get all pedantic about certain Nintendo characters being called Princess when they are also clearly presented as being the ruling Monarch.  Princess Peach/Toadstool, Princess Zelda in some eras of the "Timeline", Princess Daisy.  And I think we even see it beyond Nintendo in some other Video Game Franchises like Final Fantasy.

A lot of this could be read as just making fun of Nintendo's very make it up as they go world building.  The NES Games never thought about about how the world works beyond the handful of Sprites we actually see, and then later games with more needed worldbuilding didn't want to make the female leads of these franchises subordinate to someone else.  But I also think it's a little influenced by Star Wars where Leia was still called a Princess after her Parents were dead.

But occasionally someone says this with a more serious criticism in mind, that it demeans or infantilizes these characters who are actually Queens to call them the same title we do Disney Princesses.  But I say just remember how the English word Prince originated.  I would rather not see Zelda or Peach or Daisy ever demoted to being a mere Queen.

Sailor Moon has been very influential

Now you may be thinking, "Why are are you making thar the title of a post as if it's even remotely controversial, of course a show that founded a Genre and was one of the 90s' big three was influential".  But I think Sailor Moon's influence is wide enough that it's still underappreciated, that it has had an influence on Anime that are not at all the kinds of shows you'd expect to have Sailor Moon homages in it.

Take for example my favorite Anime Noir.  Noir is a show about professional assassins, it's a fairly dark show inspired by Film Noir and Luc Besson films.  One of the pivotal pillars of the Girls With Guns genre.  Not a show you'd at all think would have any reason to make overt homages to a show made for little girls in the prior decade.

Well it has a meta reason, Mireille Bouquet is voiced in Japan by Kotono Mitsuishi the voice of Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon herself.  But she's had a very prolific career actually so I don't expect casting in-jokes to be part of every Anime she's in.

Now I have a unique history with both Anime as a whole and Sailor Moon in particular, Sailor Moon is one of the few Anime I'd already partially watched even before I watched Noir.  But the emphasis there is on partially, I don't think I'd properly watched the actual first season finale of Sailor Moon till I was already using MAL.  And that's the thing, that first season finale has the Sailor Moon moment that I suspect Noir was referencing in it's penultimate episode.  So when I finally completed the Dark Kingdom saga, I watched a certain scene play and was instantly reminded of Noir. 

So since I'm talking about such late in the story developments, I have to put a Sailor Warning here before going further.

Mystery Box Storytelling can be good, J.J. Abrams is just bad at it.

Now I know the first response is gonna be that Abrams coined the term so how can he be the one doing it wrong?  Did he identify a type of storytelling but not fully understand it?

I myself in the past have sometimes gone along with those saying Mystery Boxes are inherently bad because that's how you get Disney Star Wars.  And I still agree that it shouldn't have been the approach taken to Star Wars, that the Original Trilogy was Absolutely not Mystery Box storytelling.  Abrams problem seems to come from him seeing it everywhere.

But since I think this particularly is done badly by it's very name it's perhaps necessary to define it.  It's not any Mystery at all, it's certainly not twists where we weren't expecting there to be one, nor even any twists where we were expecting there to be a twist, and it's not anytime a character isn't named in the very first scene they appear in.  

A Mystery Box is something the story presents as being an unanswered question early on and builds up to revealing, possibly for quite a long time relative to the story's total length.  But I would also argue it only truly exists in serialized storytelling and doesn't include any question both asked and answered in one self contained Episode or Movie.

I feel bad about claiming I agreed with Mystery Boxes being inherently bad in the past because I've absolutely loved plenty of TV Shows and Anime that Absolutely did this, and specifically enjoyed engaging in that mystery speculation.  And that includes ones where the answer to the Mystery can be considered disappointing because it was either very obvious or not something I never had a fair chance at solving in advance.  Because I truly believe in the adage that it's about the journey rather then the destination.  But the thing is I can hold the view that the answer to the mystery doesn't really matter and still enjoy engaging in all that speculation and coming up with theories of my own anyway because it simply is fun.

There is no actual tangible rule that explains what the Mystery Box stories I like did differently from Abrams.  The closest I could come to is saying the good ones don't have that as the only thing going for them, they are stories where I was actually invested in the characters and so the investment in the Mystery is about how the Answer is relevant to them, or at least they think it is.

But the thing is that's subjective, plenty of the shows I'm about to talk about loving are hated by others, and plenty of people like Abrams's Star Wars Movies, even Rise of Skywalker, I know because depending on my mood I've been one of them.  Yes I just admitted that the last part of the title of this post is Subjective, in fact it's a subjective opinion I have based on very limited information because his Star ____ movies are the only Abrams things I've seen, I haven't watched any of Lost.  Maybe it's really more Abrams being bad at explaining it in that Ted Talk people meme on then actually bad at doing it, artists are like that sometimes.

My favorite Live Action TV show and my Favorite non Japanese TV show was Pretty Little Liars, it's Mystery is ridiculously convoluted and ultimately doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and I don't care, I enjoyed every stop of the ride to get there.  It means way more to me then any Star Wars does, even The Prequels.

But the Mystery Box approach is also core to Twin Peaks and Game of Thrones going back to it's books.  Deliberately withholding information is Absolutely vital to what they were doing.

But what I'm most into is Anime.  Right now the most well known Mystery Box style Anime is Attack on Titan, and I enjoyed the first "Three" seasons of that show.  I stopped enjoying it during the "Final" season but not because I found any reveals bad or disappointing, everything about the show had changed basically which isn't inherently bad but I just wasn't into it anymore.

However my personal Favorite Anime of all Time is Noir.  And it too had a Mystery Box, who killed Mireille's parents and why does Kirka have their Watch.  If you think you've solved that mystery from just the information I provided you in that sentence you are correct, the answer is that simple and obvious but it didn't matter, I still love the scene where it was revealed and love that they pretended it wasn't obvious.

Witch Hunter Robin, Madlax, El Cazador de la Bruja are other fairly obscure 2000s Anime I enjoy in part for their Mystery Boxes.

Even Revolutionary Girl Utena and Neon Genesis Evangelion are Mystery Box shows, the objection you may make to why they are not, are equally applicable to The Force Awakens as far as the people who still like that movie are concerned.

Basically the Mystery Box is one of story telling devices that people insist on claiming is inherently Bad and then come up with endless excuses why the ones they like don't count.