BHS Blogress Report: 2016, Week 40

• Tasakeru Book II Chapter 6: 1 page done
• Shattered Skies Chapter 20: 11 pages done
• Photo projects: Resumed

There's a bevy of news and noteworthy items from the magical girl genre this week, so in light of describing my continuing efforts to get over this bug I picked up, let's get into it.

First off: the concept trailer for the new Madoka Magica project was finally uploaded online in HD with English subtitles. Now that I've finally seen it, I'm more intrigued than ever for the next chapter in the saga. It's cryptic, of course, but from what I can see, it looks like Mami will have an important part to play, and that there's something out there that not even the Devil may be able to stop. There's also a new smartphone game coming next year (only for Japan at present, of course), so maybe we'll see more updates sooner rather than later.

A new TV anime called Magical Girl Raising Project just started this weekend. Based on a series of light novels, the series revolves around a smartphone RPG that gives one in a thousand girls the chance to become magical girls for real, and a longtime genre fan named Koyuki is the newest to get her chance. SPOILERS follow, so please keep this in mind if you're planning to watch.

Having seen the first episode, I'm afraid that MGRP will be dismissed as a rip-off of PMMM no matter what it tries to do. Like Madoka, it's a dark magical girl show, but unlike Madoka it seems to be making little attempt to disguise its nature. Like Madoka, it opens with a dark and ominous scene, the meaning of which is unclear, and which doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the episode... but MGRP's opening is a hell of a lot less subtle than Madoka's, which is a problem from the get-go. The surreality of that first dream sequence in Madoka is played up more than its darkness or violence, which helps to disguise what's really going on. MGRP opens on unambiguous shots of what are clearly the corpses of many, many magical girls, with an unidentified girl standing among them and having some kind of freak-out before killing a monster bare-handed... and then the tone switches to mostly light-hearted antics for the rest of the episode, until the last thirty seconds. To put this in perspective, it's as if Madoka opened with the infamous scene of Mami being eaten and went from there... it throws the ambiguity about the show's tone out the window right away. As a result, when the very, very Kyubey-esque mascot appears at the end and drops a line that implies he (she? it?) is up to no good, it's less an "OH MY GOD HE'S EVIL" moment and more "Yeah, yeah, curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal." At this point, I'd honestly be more surprised if he isn't a horrible monster.

That's not to say that MGRP doesn't have potential. I really like how the magical girl genre is already firmly established in this world... it was implied that there were such things in Madoka's world, but it was never really explored. Here, Koyuki knows all about them already: the tropes, the transformations, the conventions, etc., and she's even seen in a flashback watching something that resembles a Precure series. As a result, she becomes the most "traditional" of the many operating magical girls in her city, the closest to what people normally think of when they hear the term... cute, pink, frilly costume, cheerful manner, selfless motives. There's others that are more like witches, ninja, or knights, but she's a dyed-in-the-wool magical girl, and that sets her apart.

I also find myself intrigued by the character of La Pucelle, one of the veterans who offers to take Koyuki under her wing. La Pucelle turns out to be Koyuki's male childhood friend and fellow magical girl devotee, Souta. His enthusiasm led him to be bullied  as he grew up, and he had to indulge his passion in secret, but the game somehow sensed this and chose him despite his gender. As a result, he undergoes a Ranma-esque gender flip when he transforms... sort of like the anime versions of the Sailor Star Lights, but with some of the implications actually explored. If done well, La Pucelle could bring some much-needed diversity to the genre, not to mention a unique perspective. We'll see.

I also checked out ViVid Strike!, which is a complicated beast. It's from the makers of the Lyrical Nanoha metaseries, with the same director and most of the cast from last year's Nanoha ViVid! anime, which would seem to make it a sequel... but what's confusing is that both the show and the publicity material seem extremely reluctant to call this an entry in the MGLN franchise. There's a new main character, Fuka Reventon, in the spotlight, who doesn't exist (yet) in the source material, the Nanoha ViVid manga. Vivio, Nanoha's daughter is mostly pushed to a supporting role, and the White Devil herself isn't seen or mentioned at all, nor are any of the characters from pre-ViVid aside from Nove, one of the Numbers cyborgs from Strikers. It's not that the show is bad, but it's really strange that it's going this route. Wouldn't it do better if its connection to Nanoha was more emphasized? Maybe they're making a clean break, I dunno. The magical martial arts fight scenes are still cool, and the cast of youngsters is adorable enough to carry the show, as ViVid proved. This one looks like it'll need more time to develop, so I'll hold off on a full opinion until it does. Also related to the Nanohaverse: after a half-decade of development hell and no news whatsoever, the third of the Nanoha movie trilogy, REFLECTION, finally has a teaser trailer and a release date, Summer 2017. Given that it's been five years since the last one, I'm not holding my breath that it will come out on time, but we'll see.

At one of my followers' suggestions, I finally got caught up with Cardcaptor Sakura: The Clear Card Arc, after first blowing through the run of the original CCS manga. Which I'm glad I did beforehand, because Clear Card picks up right from the final few pages of the last chapter. So far, I'm intrigued: the mysterious hooded figure in Sakura's dreams seems more outright antagonistic than any of the Cards or Eriol ever were, and neither of the two new Cards Sakura's created exist in any other media. We're in truly uncharted territory here, and I'm anxious to see how the story develops. On a related note, next month's Nakayoshi, the magazine that's running the manga, has a "big announcement" for the CCS franchise, which I'm willing to bet is the new anime that was announced a few months ago. It's probably an adaptation of the Clear Card Arc, but any new Sakura is good Sakura, I think. More on this as it develops!

And I haven't even gotten into Netflix's Luke Cage series, the latest from the Marvel stable... I spent most of my weekend watching it, but as this thing has run on long enough already, I think I'll save my thoughts for next week.

- BHS