what a weird show. I'm so glad it exists

Looking for the Full Moon is a throwback: a 2002 magical girl hearkening back to the magical idol series of the 80s. A young girl, Mitsuki, gets a magical chance to become a pop star... because she's dying of throat cancer, and the reapers take pity on her for her last year to live. Genuinely this feels like an edgy web serial mahou premise, not something they would actually put on tv, but here we are.

Unlike Creamy Mami or LuluttoLilly, the other magical idols i'm experienced with, Full Moon takes a fairly limited approach to the supernatural. The shinigami are the source of the magical transformation, and nearly all magical intervention in Mitsuki's life is their doing (compare Yuu/Mami stumbling across a new magical creature every few episodes). This gives Full Moon a pretty unique niche, where it can focus more on the often-brutal realities of the idol industry. It's not quite a neverending misery parade, Mitsuki gets a fair number of wins. But it never quite lets you forget that this is an extremely difficult path to travel, even as Mitsuki frequently succeeds by being the Goodest Girl Ever.

The ultimate ending feels like a sigh of relief, not just a cheap victory. the Child Mortality Magical Girl Show of all time

Recently translated interviews from the director and series composition expert of LuluttoLilly!

Last week's episode got uploaded to youtube but doesn't have english subs yet. whoopsie.

Proposition: Approaching a work with the expectation that it is a perfect representation of its genre tends to make your experience worse.

Genres are ongoing conversations across space and time, it's extremely difficult for a single work to distill all its inspirations in a way that preserves their original significance, and if it does succeed at that, it still has to be good on top of that. It's an expectation that sets you up for disappointment, and can obscure the significance of a work's variation from the genre standard.

So: How do we end up with this expectation in the first place? a few ways I've found:

1) Bottleneck events. A reader encounters a work somehow in isolation from the rest of the genre. This might mean that it's their first time reading in the genre and they're ready to judge the whole genre on the single work. But it might also mean that a work becomes a breakout hit, vastly more popular than others in the genre, or it's an adaptation to a medium that doesn't have as many entries in the genre. It's a function of visibility; the more you stick out, the more you invite various lenses of interpretation, whether or not they're very productive.

2) Discourse Poisoning. This often accompanies bottleneck events; sometimes a community spends significant time discussing the genre and constructing a definition or set of priorities that meets their particular needs. Once the community has reached consensus on what the genre should be, they'll start to compare works to their criteria and reject them from the genre if they don't meet the standard. Once the community starts producing their own works, these standards become reified as they create works that consciously adopt the established standards, forming a "crystallized" version of the original genre.

3) The work itself calls attention to the genre it's working in. References or comparisons to other works, appealing to genre logic as an explanation or justification, etc. This can happen in the text itself or paratext like marketing, author interviews, etc. Here's the key thing: Once you say something happens "because of genre," you're claiming that you've identified an essential element of the genre. That means the stakes are higher, the question isn't just whether the elements are good for your story, the question is whether your genre analysis is correct.

4) uhhh probably more than that idk

Lyrical Nanoha: magical girl spin-off of the Triangle Heart eroge VN series Prisma Illya: magical girl spin-off of Fate/stay night + Fate/hollow ataraxia eroge VNs Madoka Magica: Not a direct spin-off but creators wrote/directed several VNs

There's plenty of similarities in the marketing strategies, themes and motifs, and some more direct shared production history (Shinbo working on both Nanoha and Madoka, Urobuchi writing a Fate prequel, etc), but I'm intrigued by the... otaku crucuble of the VN scene suggested here, I guess. no thesis just putting strings on a corkboard and going "someone should check this out huh"

umamusume: pretty derby is a nerd game for huge nerds. this is known. Among its nerdery is a remarkable sensitivity to magical girl history. There's two horsegirls who have magical girl motifs as a major part of their character: Kawakami Princess and Sweep Tosho (Special Week gets a mahou henshin sequence as part of her unique skill but there's no real follow-up for it).

Kawakami Princess is a fan of Princess Fighter, a magical girl franchise that's very much riffing on Precure. There's monster fights, lots of punching, multiple seasons, they recreate the pose from Futari wa Precure, it's not exactly subtle. She's got a fun dynamic with Biko Pegasus, the tokusatsu enthusiast whose favorite show became real. But the term "magical girl" is conspicuously absent from her various monologues; she prefers the term "princess," which links directly back to PriFai and, of course, her own name.

Sweep Tosho calls herself "Magical Girl Sweepy" (mahou shoujo), but also claims to be a witch (mahou) like her grandmother. Her aesthetic is farther from modern magical girls compared to Kawakami, but it does cohere pretty well with the first magical girls, the "little witch" era. For a while I assumed that the designers had started from "Sweep->broom->witch" and used that as the seed for her presentation in Umamusume, but as I dug a little deeper, I found out that there were other "witches" in the real horse's pedigree: Samantha Tosho and Tabatha Tosho, apparently named after characters from American sitcom Bewitched... which was also a major inspiration for those same "little witch" magical girls!

"Bewitched is an honorary magical girl series" would be an appropriate joke to make here but I think it's also just true?? the whole title of Bewitched Agnes depends on this being a recognized consensus??? and now I guess the web of associations that led to Magical Girl Sweepy demonstrates that too.

her song is pretty great btw

Finally got my hands on Fellowship through a bundle after years of telling myself "i should read Fellowship." worth it!

Fellowship puts some work into codifying GM actions and pacing. This is a good thing. Right now I'm looking at how it asks the GM to have two multi-stage plans running at all times, either to seize a new source of power, or to destroy a specified community. Certain actions of the player party trigger the advancement or completion of these plots.

Fellowship doesn't demand a fully-defined world, it invites you to continue to add details during play, each player contributing information that their character is most likely to know in-character. So, when the Overlord starts every game with a plan to destroy a named community, the most likely option is that you're targeting either an important location from the players' backstories, or the literal first location they're visiting in-game.

Without directly saying so, it nudges you into putting the players' hometowns in the crosshairs. This rules.

I'd heard that Studio Pierrot was doing a new magical idol anime for the first time in almost twenty years, and then forgot to follow up on it, and then saw that it's on youtube in English now. get hype. It's making some very clear callbacks to Creamy Mami, but the music design honestly reminds me of more modern American cartoons. bee and puppycat. idk. Real interested to see where this goes.

locking in and finishing Full Moon would make it easier to compare the two... both magical idol revivals but themselves separated by over a decade...

they made a bunch of these. let's make a list

• Beauty and the Beast: An Enchanted Christmas (1997); Christmas special, frame story is a sequel but the main body is not. makes sense, include their most marketable designs.

• Belle's Magical World (1998); Beauty and the Beast again, compilation movie of a cancelled TV series (another recurring theme among Disneytoon output)

• Hercules: Zero to Hero (1999); EDIT, MISSED THIS ONE, another tv compilation movie. I guess adding all the tv series and not just their movie versions would add to the list too but i'm not doing that this time

• The Lion King 1 1/2 (2004); this is the famous one! This is the one people remember. get some use out of that split-second teenage simba design. fair amount of prequel to it too.

• Tarzan II (2005); this is now the third (Edit: FOURTH) of these that takes place during a single song during the original. i can't find any production details but it feels too close to be inspired by the success(?) of Lion King 3/2

• Bambi II (2006); BIG throwback, the others weren't as distant from their originals

• The Fox and the Hound 2 (2006); they're churning these out huh. got Brother Bear 2 in there too somehow

• Cinderella III: A Twist in Time (2007); this one is a time travel thing not a "true" interquel but i'm including it anyway because it's the time travel sequel to Cinderella and that's just fun

did you know? now you do

forced to redo my RSS feeds bc my reader isn't working right. Theoretically, this would be my chance to stick it all onto my Dreamwidth reading page for convenience and to get me more active here... but i'm not feeling it so instead you're just getting this notice. sorry.

i've gotten back into Fate Hollow Ataraxia, really enjoying it. Something about the way Medusa's backstory is handled really reminds me of how Wheel of Time handles retold myths, some kind of mixture of intentional subversion and "I'm using this cool bit of scholarship, which may or may not be accurate, as the basis of my retelling." Makes for some cool material, but now i'm curious where the writers are getting their inspiration.

I still want to make a post about the No ICE in Minnesota bundle bc there's a lot of cool stuff there, just gotta muster the motivation

how are y'all, how's things

I have discovered a new old Dracula, one even newer and older than my previous preferred new old Dracula: Mörkrets makter ("Powers of Darkness"), the likely-unauthorized Swedish version. It's nearly twice as long as the original, reframes Dracula as the head of a social darwinist conspiracy, and nobody realized it was different from the English version until a few years ago.

There's two secret draculas like this. at least two. maybe more undiscovered. whatever. The first is an Icelandic version, about one-third as long as the English version, but with a much longer exploring-Dracula's-haunted-castle section and a really rushed ending. Somehow it took over a hundred years for people to catch on that this was not the same thing as the original book, but it got an English translation in 2017. This is what I had already read; it's not as good as Stoker's version but I really like the additions to the haunted castle sequence.

The 2017 translation is what tipped off the folks in Sweden that they also had a variant instead of a straightforward translation. The Swedish version was serialized in a newspaper by an unknown translator just a couple years after Dracula Classic was published. Like the Icelandic version, it features an expanded haunted castle sequence... because this one was the source text that the Icelandic one was abridging. But instead of that rushed ending, it keeps going and going, accumulating more and more differences from the English version.

idk i just think it's neat. dracula forever