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A Little Vice (Trans Magical Girl fic)

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Not a guess, but Ira Betta would make for a funny one as a magical girl villain. The contrast of the cutesy name along with said girl representing a very beautiful animal, against said that animal being so full of rage and aggression that it will attack its reflection on sight
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
I mean, there are Komodo Dragons.
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They're not extinct, though. They're not even critically endangered!
(Also, they don't have wings or horns. Superbia does.)


Hestia&theCourt said:
Consider: Ira Hummingbird. Given that hummingbirds look unassuming and harmless but actually have a warrior's spirit and no sense of chill, it'd be pretty fitting.
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I don't think they'd qualify. Aside from the hypothetical bears, every known Abyssal Beast has been based on an obligate carnivore, and bears have a disproportionately predatory reputation. Hummingbirds' primary diet is nectar.

Betta fish are carnivores, though. If bats and sharks qualify, so do bettas.
 
Icipall said:
Magical girls being actual thing would put a spin on magical girl media.
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Yeah, we've had some debates about this on the Fool Bloom side of things, from 'nothing would change' to 'everything would change' to 'Magical Girl Spec Ops: The Line'

GreatWyrmGold said:
That's not how I'd describe SVAH. Though maybe it's different from Inessa's perspective.
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Sorry for the late reply, but yeah, I wrote the omake under the assumption I've talked about before that SVAH would look pretty different from Inessa's assumed POV than from C's. I was also toying with the assumption of ALV itself being an in-universe fanfic, though that didn't fully make it into the omake.

You've also reminded me, is Tumblr popular in Japan? I admittedly have no idea
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
You've also reminded me, is Tumblr popular in Japan? I admittedly have no idea
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According to the first source I had, Tumblr is somewhere around the 12th to 15th-most-popular social media site in Japan, compared to 10th in the USA.

Source

Source for the Tumblr figure
I checked, they count YouTube and Facebook Messenger.
From other sources I glanced at, it looks like Japan might be more centralized on its top five social media platforms than the USA is, but that's hardly conclusive. I'm probably comparing apples to oranges. The difference between Tumblr's popularity in Japan and its popularity in the USA might not be significant.

So no, it's not popular in Japan, either.
 
The chapter still doesn't want to look right, but I think it's starting to come together for real.

in other news, I finished Fresh Precure today. (I've been watching it recently to help set the mood for writing after finishing Heartcatch a while back). And I must say the arc in the middle from like episode 19-28 or so is just the absolute perfect magical girl redemption arc (and burns much slower really from an episode 1 introduction even). There's not a lot gendery going on compared to Heartcatch, but the trauma and tension that give way to a character finally escaping a toxic environment lands really beautifully for the medium of, admittedly, TV aimed at preteens.

If you want something that's mostly pretty mindless and low stress to watch to wind down, but that manages to find its emotional core and just hammer in on that as hard as it can, or you just want to see what's commonly considered a "classic" type magical girl show, then Fresh Precure is really up there.

ArlequineLunaire said:
Yeah, we've had some debates about this on the Fool Bloom side of things, from 'nothing would change' to 'everything would change' to 'Magical Girl Spec Ops: The Line'
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Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka already exists. (Unfortunately…)
 
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I wonder if Patientia/Ira has some importance to the plot or metaphysics.
From wikipedia
In the swampy, stinking waters of the river Styx – the Fifth Circle – the actively wrathful fight each other viciously on the surface of the slime, while the sullen (the passively wrathful) lie beneath the water, withdrawn, "into a black sulkiness which can find no joy in God or man or the universe".[53] At the surface of the foul Stygian marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers writes, "the active hatreds rend and snarl at one another; at the bottom, the sullen hatreds lie gurgling, unable even to express themselves for the rage that chokes them".[53] As the last circle of Incontinence, the "savage self-frustration" of the Fifth Circle marks the end of "that which had its tender and romantic beginnings in the dalliance of indulged passion".[53]

Shadell said:
in other news, I finished Fresh Precure today. (I've been watching it recently to help set the mood for writing after finishing Heartcatch a while back). And I must say the arc in the middle from like episode 19-28 or so is just the absolute perfect magical girl redemption arc (and burns much slower really from an episode 1 introduction even). There's not a lot gendery going on compared to Heartcatch, but the trauma and tension that give way to a character finally escaping a toxic environment lands really beautifully for the medium of, admittedly, TV aimed at preteens.

If you want something that's mostly pretty mindless and low stress to watch to wind down, but that manages to find its emotional core and just hammer in on that as hard as it can, or you just want to see what's commonly considered a "classic" type magical girl show, then Fresh Precure is really up there.
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Oh, nice. Going to the consume later list. It's so damn long.
 
Was always kinda weird to me how the Inferno had two separate circles for wrath and violence. Though I suppose you can be violent over sins other than wrath, like greed and pride with colonialism.

I also just remembered that Fresh PreCure is also Clown Bean's favourite season

Edit: And inb4 Wrath being the School Principal or Town Mayor ~
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
Granted, I'm pretty sure the similarities end with there being spec ops in both of them
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According to a quick TV Tropes check, Magical Girl Asuka is a deconstruction of its genre, just like The Line. So there's that.

The big difference is that Magical Girl Asuka didn't stumble into coherent political commentary by criticizing a genre tangled in the political issues around an active military conflict. It probably would have in the Fool Bloom universe. (Not so much in SVAH.)
 
Shadell said:
The chapter still doesn't want to look right, but I think it's starting to come together for real.

in other news, I finished Fresh Precure today. (I've been watching it recently to help set the mood for writing after finishing Heartcatch a while back). And I must say the arc in the middle from like episode 19-28 or so is just the absolute perfect magical girl redemption arc (and burns much slower really from an episode 1 introduction even). There's not a lot gendery going on compared to Heartcatch, but the trauma and tension that give way to a character finally escaping a toxic environment lands really beautifully for the medium of, admittedly, TV aimed at preteens.

If you want something that's mostly pretty mindless and low stress to watch to wind down, but that manages to find its emotional core and just hammer in on that as hard as it can, or you just want to see what's commonly considered a "classic" type magical girl show, then Fresh Precure is really up there.
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I know right! Eas's arc is amazing.
 
Silent seething, maybe. Much like how looking at a sexy lady and noticing that she's sexy can be considered a form of sinful lust, getting mad and not doing anything about it can be considered a form of sinful wrath.
 
GreatWyrmGold said:
It's not that you're wrong, it's that I can't think of another place I could quickly get the gist of an anime I'm unfamiliar with. And there aren't a lot of comparisons I can make from the gist. PTSD, maybe?
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Bluntly Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka is, rather than being any meaningful deconstruction, just plain pure edge.

Like. Madoka has some kind of claim to deconstruction status with examining things like the cutesey mascot and then going 'but what if the cutesey mascot being cute isn't the same thing as being good'.

Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuke is just... honestly strangely played straight other than the horrible ultra violence, actual literal torture, and general edginess. It's almost literally some dudes edgy fanfic in which the protagonist is constantly sneering at Naive, Innocent People Who Have Nothing Bad Happen To Them while, other than the backstory being edgy, being protected by massive plot armor and literally just being one of those naive, innocent protagonists except posturing edgily a lot.

To the extent it makes efforts to comment on the genre, those efforts betray a general lack of understanding of the genre. (it's amazing how many edgy magical girl things miss the memo that the exact things they're thinking of as Typical Magical Girl fare like Sailor Moon are themselves stories in which the protagonist runs around enduring massive trauma, repeatedly has all their friends die on them, and fights through literal broken bones- exactly the sort of thing these stories act like unrealistically doesn't happen in typical magical girl stories. They apparently just... never read or watched sailor moon, i guess.)
 
Terrabrand said:
'but what if the cutesey mascot being cute isn't the same thing as being good'.
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Tangent I know, but the funny thing is Sabrina the Teenage Witch of all series beat Madoka to that. Okay yeah, Salem and Kyubey are obviously portrayed pretty differently, but the show did make clear that Salem would absolutely return to world-conquering dictatorial villainy when given the chance.

Dung Beetle in Bokurano and Monokuma in Danganronpa also both predate Kyubey. And yeah, neither of those are MG, but cutesy mascots certainly aren't unique to the MG genre
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
Though I suppose you can be violent over sins other than wrath, like greed and pride with colonialism.
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I feel like it's nice to have a distinction between the action itself and the mental state of the perpetrator?

Like, yes, violence is bad even if you are calm and happy while committing it. Wrath seems bad because what it does to someone to be wrathful, violence is bad because of the harm it does to others?

LampWitch said:
Cain and Abel are the prime example of violence over envy.
Now I wonder about non-violent Wrath. Keeping someone prisoner is still a form of violence, right? Hmm, ditching a group over an argument?
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Was also going to say 'seething' as a response to this. I knew a lot of guys in highschool who were smart and nice and when asked described themselves as simmering pits of rage?
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
Tangent I know, but the funny thing is Sabrina the Teenage Witch of all series beat Madoka to that. Okay yeah, Salem and Kyubey are obviously portrayed pretty differently, but the show did make clear that Salem would absolutely return to world-conquering dictatorial villainy when given the chance.

Dung Beetle in Bokurano and Monokuma in Danganronpa also both predate Kyubey. And yeah, neither of those are MG, but cutesy mascots certainly aren't unique to the MG genre
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I mean cutesey mascots aren't unique to the magical genre but leaving aside that even not being a novel insight doesn't make something not valuable commentary, it's also just the case that like, Monokuma for example is used to specifically create a dissonance but does not spend a significant period 'played straight'. Madoka, by contrast, basically recreates something like Sailor Moon- our heroine finds a cutesey animal under attack, we the audience are clearly meant to take the animal as the good guy and the attacker as bad at the time this happens, the heroine saves the animal, it offers to make her a magical girl for the good of all, and so on and so forth.

The revelation that Kyubey is in short a monster and the audience coming to view Kyubey as the bad guy and Homura as, if not a good guy, then more in an anti-hero space comes later. For the first several episodes, Madoka endeavors to apparently follow standard magical girl tropes of the helpful cutesey animal mascot.

Monokuma meanwhile is like. I haven't played the games myself but my understanding from what I've seen and read of derivative fanworks and such is that Monokuma basically shows up, gets brushed off as weird, and in his literal first scene kills someone.

Which is a different kind of use of the cutesey mascot. As I said, played more just for the dissonance.
 
Terrabrand said:
It's almost literally some dudes edgy fanfic in which the protagonist is constantly sneering at Naive, Innocent People Who Have Nothing Bad Happen To Them while, other than the backstory being edgy, being protected by massive plot armor and literally just being one of those naive, innocent protagonists except posturing edgily a lot.
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Oof. In the opener Asuka had left because she had PTSD and valued the ability to be innocent and try to recapture it. And her greatest regret was roping her best friend into that life. Sad to hear that she becomes a sneering militarist.
 
Terrabrand said:
Like. Madoka has some kind of claim to deconstruction status with examining things like the cutesey mascot and then going 'but what if the cutesey mascot being cute isn't the same thing as being good'.
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Insofar as there's a difference between deconstruction and reconstruction, Madoka is definitely the latter. I mean, in the end Madoka's idealism (plus the power built up by Homura never giving up her hope while living the same month over and over for a decade or so) is powerful enough to let her solve 90% of the problems with one wish. Something that the edgy magical girls which claim PMMM as inspiration seem to have missed; maybe they thought it was an 11-episode anime?

But I appreciate the information about Asuka.
 
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