Ace of Scarabs
Mechanoid Pilot
- Location
- Singapore
Midchildan culture seems to treat mental maturity as the key to legal adulthood, so a sufficiently capable child would be able to get work long before puberty
Usagi Quest (CK3/Princess Maker) (Sailor Moon)
Lunaryon
Dual Aurora Wave
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Admittedly, there is also the issue of the TSAB being, well, a very young state.
It's mentioned in... A's I think, maybe Strikers. But the TSAB was formed roughly 70 years prior, which would put the establishment as being 63 years old at the time that they recruited Nanoha. The TSAB as a political entity doesn't have the luxury of choosing when they have a mage of any real capability dropped in their lap. They have to take what they can get, or else potentially find themselves on the blade end of disgruntled mages of all sorts. Like the Belkan empire remnant that wants to recreate their queen through cloning.
Yup, especially egregious since there is already a good picture of aged up Mercury (with long hair even) that was used in the story. From "The City of Flowers Part 9":
And leaves just as quickly. There is a crack as something slams into a wall, and carefully Makoto looks up. There, standing tall, one hand pinning the demon to the wall is... It's Sailor Mercury.
It's Ami! Ami is alive! There is something different about the girl.
She seems... just a tiny bit taller, and for a split second Makoto starts to hesitate, yet...
Despite all that the parts of the girl that are screaming at Jupiter that it can't be. The demon killed her... But at the same time, The waves of beautiful blue hair cascading in disordered waves down the woman's back is that perfect shadow of blue, and that means that it can be. It has to be, despite... Despite-
Jupiter pauses, looking near the back of the shop, where there is a frozen statue of the former Cat Youma, one arm cracking slowly before it falls off, crashing to the ground and shattering apart. Then, Ami speaks.
Her voice is deeper, not a whole lot deeper, but it is deeper, and smooth as silk. "Whatever you just did, did you enjoy doing it to me?" Mercury asks, as the white glove wrapped around the creature's neck starts to tighten. "Or do you wish you had never done anything like it in your life?"
This clause in particular seems superfluous, because 1) Pretty Cures generally serve 1, maybe 2 season stints (with each season about a year long) before losing their power because the fairies return to their homelands and 2) many Pretty Cures that we see are foreign to the fairie realms they are empowered by, and do not go with the fairies to the fairie realms.
They're more like temporary workers/mercenaries hired for specific campaigns, and because the faerie realms are almost always in terrible straits, often with the originating realm already defeated if not outright slaughtered, some level of desperation when it comes to selecting candidates is to be expected. That they always end up with a bunch young female teenagers, or younger, is all sorts of questionable though.
Of course, that does mean they take(and make) the amoral mad scientists too.
They need every possible advantage to establish some kind of order wide enough that its not one bad lost logia from going back to Magical Girl Mad Max.Of course, that does mean they take(and make) the amoral mad scientists too.
They need every possible advantage to establish some kind of order wide enough that its not one bad lost logia from going back to Magical Girl Mad Max.
The groups we see are all Japanese girls, but that doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of Brazilian boys getting randomly picked by fairies who we never see.
- Location
- Finland
The ethics of, recruiting, bunch of teenage (or younger) girls to fight a war against demonic hordes is one often best not examined too closely when dealing with Magical Girl genre.
It is an interesting question to examine, but in the end it is a story, often meant for young girls, so the protagonists are themselves young girls.
It is an interesting question to examine, but in the end it is a story, often meant for young girls, so the protagonists are themselves young girls.
Considering the success rate, it's hard to argue with their selection protocol. Why mess with a winning formula?
In-quest, the Precures are probably all female due to them being Senshi knockoffs, of course.
- Location
- Finland
On that scale we could argue that torture is completely ethical practice in lot of fiction.
Ofcourse it is succesful, the Magical Girl genre is more often than not optimistic, even PMMM has, i am lead to understand, something approaching a happy ending if you squint hard enough.
Trying to justify the practice is easy as long as you create a contrived enough reasons, and control the narrative to make it work.
But same can be said of almost anything.
Considering torture is useless in a lot of fiction(and real life as well, there have been studies), that proves the opposite of your point, please pay attention.
But if we are already going into comparing things to torture, this argument is clearly too emotionally charged for me to be interested in.
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- Location
- Finland
The point is that arguing from "it works" is irrelevant because ofcourse it works, that is part of the premise.
Whether or not something works or not is irrelevant to how ethical it is.
It is fiction for children, therefore protagonists are children, there is no real deep meaning to it.
Questions for why this happens within the setting of the quest can be interesting to explore, and i have no problem with that, but in the context of the source material, or genre in general, i see little point to it.
Now, barring "it's fate," that last bit implies that you can find girls like this with reasonable frequency, and/or that multiple such girls acquainted with each other tend to bring out the potential in each other.
Without one of those elements being in play, you'd expect several such artifacts, activated in succession, to scatter all over the world or at least all over Japan, or to be unable to find more than zero or one suitable Pretty Cure recruit in any one place. And in a setting like this where there are numerous different Pretty Cure teams being 'recruited' all at once, it'd be even worse; if the artifacts were searching far afield they'd all home in on the best available candidate and you'd have cross-team crap going on, like Cure Black being Nagisa Honoka but the Cure White transformation artifact flying off to Hokkaido in search of Aida Mana or something.
Thinking about this, and the inherently linked nature of Pretty Cures, it might be more accurate to think that the devices aren't seperate trinkets. After all, they can't transform separately can they (at least not white and black) ?
So, it may be that the artifacts aren't actually seeking out "a warrior with a pure heart" as much as they are "two warriors of pure heart who have the potential to build a deeper bond with each other". It would explain the clustering at least.
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To be fair... we don't know if this is still true. In Quest Canon none of the Pretty Cures have been depowered yet. It may be possible that they stay Pretty Cures after the defeat of their various dark realms in this reality. Which lends credence to the theory that the "auto-select" feature is picking recruits who are meant to be trained, not full-fledged warriors.
This is true. Just because the main viewpoint we have for the Pretty Cures are Japanese girls doesn't mean that boys aren't being chosen in countries like Spain or Canada. I mean aren't there like three American Pretty Cures?
Grue
滅亡迅雷
- Location
- -
IIRC a bunch of brief-shot worldwide Cures showed up in...I think it was Happiness Charge?
Mainly the initial few sets of Cures TBH, once they transition to full Sentai teams transformations tend to be independent bar a handful of paired Cures(though the aforementioned Amour isn't one of those because the artifact seeked that out, she's one of those because she's literally using a miracle-duplicated version of her partner's transformation device).
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Snipping out some of the digressions, not because I didn't appreciate them but because they kind of complicate the attempt to interpret the relevant parts of the text...
1) Pretty Cures routinely lose their powers when their personal bonds weaken or there is discord between them. I don't think this is because it prevents them from "having a pure heart" in any sense of moral character; I think it's just an additional requirement of the transformation trinkets. A Pretty Cure team runs very heavily on the power of friendship, to the point where it is not a metaphor. Break the friendship and you break the Cures, at least temporarily.
2) Again, I was restricting my questions to Amour's moral character. Nothing you've said leads me to question post-redemption Amour's moral character. Her rejection of her creator/father figure is broadly consistent with things a morally good but outraged person could do in that situation. I'll be surprised to learn that there has never been another Pretty Cure on any of the many teams who expressed hostility to a major villain and didn't want to give a villain a chance to redeem themselves.
3) I totally believe that Amour's powers as a Pretty Cure hinge entirely on her friendship with Emiru, because of (1), and my questions were concentrated on whether or not her moral character was somehow portrayed as changing because of her friendship with Emiru to the point where she became qualified as a Pretty Cure when she never would have been before.
As to the part where time travelers from the future are all "Hope for the future, begone" and say they want to make things better, maybe they're just really edgy and have a kind of screwy idea about what constitutes a 'better' future?
Yeah. Not a fan.
Yes, but the recurring theme is that the only reason there's a show in the first place is because the realm in question no longer had (enough) Pretty Cures to defend itself against the threat.
My working hypothesis is that the artifacts were originally designed to be owned continuously, so that the relevant realms would, y'know, actually have a defense force all the time and not need to rely on recruiting untried youths at the last minute to face whatever the threat was.
But that for one reason or another, this practice lapsed, either because of centuries/millennia of peace or because the relevant realms had to conserve the artifacts' battery power in the wake of the Fall or something.
And so now there are many Fairy Realms whose main line of defense (their respective Pretty Cures) are effectively mothballed. And whenever one of these Realms gets attacked, well, either they just straight-up get conquered and that's the end (in which case there's no Pretty Cure show for them)... Or they have the usual scene where a handful of fairies escape with the transformation artifacts, frantically activate the "oh shit find a new user" functionality, and to their considerable embarrassment find that the artifact's "find new user" function consistently seeks out children who are suitable to be trained into the intended 'final form' of Pretty Cures eventually.
And then the immediate crisis is resolved in a season or two, and because the girls don't actually live in the relevant Fairy Realm, they wouldn't want to hang around and become its guardians indefinitely, so they stay on Earth and give up their powers or something.
Which explains how we can see the general plot dynamics of a Pretty Cure show unfold again and again in a fairly consistent manner, rather than as a one-off.
Again, I think I have a valid explanation for this, in that the mechanism being used to select the candidates (in desperation mode) consistently selects for children because it wasn't designed to be used this way, but rather to be used as a mechanism for picking "which of the natives of this realm or of the volunteers we've recruited to tryouts is going to be a Pretty Cure for the next __ years, and which ones aren't?"
I wonder if the short service period is the reason they target children. Precures are meant to be knock-off Senshi; artificially boosting people without planetary mana taps up to a close level through advanced artifacts.
While we don't know (IIRC) that Nanoha is a crossover they do have a number of methods of significantly boosting mage performance. Cartirdges, Full Drive, and the Blaster System all provide significantly enhanced combat performance at the cost of varying degrees of damage to the user. Most notably damage to their Linker Core.
It would make sense for children and teenagers to be more capable of surviving overclocking their magic. It would also tie into the comparative short service times; the Precure's magic is burnt out after only a couple years of combat. Still extremely exploitative though.
More likely, the younger the Precure are, the easier it is for them to grow into their power without any damage to their core, which is why young people are chosen. Especially since Cure Flower, when she was given her power back for Christmas, had no trouble using her magic despite the decades since she was active, which tells us quite clearly that there is no long-term damage caused by becoming a Precure (just a lot of enemies that try to kill them).
Basically, the only downside to becoming a Precure throughout the various series is that you are now a target of evil forces. But since the endgame for most of those evil forces is widespread death, that just means you are a armed and informed target rather than a unwitting target.
I actually think that is an interesting question as to why young girls are chosen in a more meta sense, because it impacts the kind of stories told. Magical Girl stories tend to heavily lean towards "Jesus story" plots (see Sailor Moon and PMMM) because young girls represent innocence. And a story of the innocent being who sacrifices herself for others is a powerful story line that tends to naturally flow from that.
Additionally, Magical Girl shows tend to emphasize feminine virtues as the core of heroics instead of the traditional male virtues. Most shounen stories emphasize things like bravery, courage, determination, and strength; virtues traditional associated with being manly. It's usually later during character development that the male lead learns to be compassionate and kind. (A lot of shounen leads start out as jerks).
Magical Girls shows emphasize empathy, compassion, etc. Not that Magical Girls don't demonstrate traditionally masculine virtues of heroes (see Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, etc) but who is the leader? Not the strongest, or the bravest, but rather Moon (who explicitly calls her self a coward and a crybaby), the character that emphasizes compassion and empathy. Same in PMMM, where the main character is not Mami, or Sayaka, or Homura, but rather Madoka (who again explicitly identifies herself as lacking and helpless). (This also plays strongly into the Jesus motifs - see Isaiah 53: "...he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.") They then have character development that then leads them to become brave, rather than starting out that way.
Characters that explicitly point to themselves as lacking in what we traditionally associate with masculine heroics, but become the hero instead because they exemplify traditionally feminine virtues. Instead of focusing on "girls can be brave and strong too" like most western heroines, magical girl shows tend to say "traditional feminine virtues can be the core of a hero too." It's one of the reasons Sailor Moon was sometimes referred to as a form of "lipstick feminism."
Adding to that, Raising Heart is itself a Lost Logia of unknown origins with capabilities that TSAB frankly doesn't have (virtual training, initial form selection), and its initial activation involves the line "I, the one who accepted this mission by the ancient contract, order you to release your power!".
TSAB not poking the hornet's nest to find out what the consequences of contract breach are is simply sensible.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It would also make Pretty Cures non-viable as a long-term non-emergency defense system for the realm, since you'd burn through an unending and rapid succession of magically gifted children. This would be bad for something crafted in a period of relative stability... which in the crossover continuity of the quest that underlies your theory, was the world in which the Pretty Cure artifacts originated.
My own view is that Pretty Cure artifacts were made using something closely approximating Silver Millennium levels of magitech. Note that they are lostech by the standards of the fairy realms that use them- nobody talks about making these things, they just exist. I'm pretty sure they'd be Lost Logia by the standards of the TSAB- which is not to say the TSAB couldn't match them in a straight fight, but that they wouldn't be able to duplicate or understand the functions of the device.
So I strongly suspect they've found a way to create magically empowered guardians without burning them out.
Lunaryon
Dual Aurora Wave
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So... I have been struggling real hard with this update, if only because the last time that I had people over was before the Pandemic.
Which uhh... Was a while ago.
So yeah. I am really struggling with this update. What are some things that people are wanting to see out of this dinner?
Which uhh... Was a while ago.
So yeah. I am really struggling with this update. What are some things that people are wanting to see out of this dinner?
FictionPack
Monochromatic Ursine
- Location
- Tennessee
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well Ikuko certainly wants 'getting to know you' talk.
Obligatory teasing.
Food discussion?
Obligatory teasing.
Food discussion?
- Location
- Dragyxx
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I wasn't terribly social even before the pandemic, so I'm not sure what to contribute.
Of course, I was also mostly in intellectual (dare I say 'nerdy'?) circles anyway, so gatherings tended to be focused on gaming groups, and dinner conversation was a mix of inside jokes, role-playing discussion, and occasional tangents into niche scientific topics or joking discussion about world conquest, so I probably wasn't a good example even when I was participating in get-togethers.
Of course, I was also mostly in intellectual (dare I say 'nerdy'?) circles anyway, so gatherings tended to be focused on gaming groups, and dinner conversation was a mix of inside jokes, role-playing discussion, and occasional tangents into niche scientific topics or joking discussion about world conquest, so I probably wasn't a good example even when I was participating in get-togethers.