The Yard Sale
Spoilers about Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku, or Magical Girls Raising Project:Â the TL;DR is that it’s a story with consistent and overarching thematic points that make sense, despite seemingly underhanded ploy to appeal to emotion through relatively cheap tricks (of killing people). More details after the jump, but it is at least something I can deal with mentally after it’s all said and done.
Sometimes reading other people’s blogs give you a way to convey what you wanted to say but couldn’t find the words for, and such is the case here. I don’t know if I am happy with “uncanny valley” to describe where Izetta’s hijinks fall in with Too Much Realism way to explain how some things don’t jive. To me the hope I had with the series shattered when the OP came on in episode 2. If there was a path that leads us beyond the uncanny valley, it would be the bridge of suspended beliefs. Too bad the whole busty witch with no panty shots riding a big gun flying around shooting tanks with swords thing is way over the load bearing limitations of strands of good will and its fantastic, make-believe setting of not-historic-but-you-know-what-is-going-on.
I still stuck with 6 episodes of the show and it turned out to be an OK experience. I can see why certain European countries would like to stick it out with the series through thick and thin, and props to them. For those of us who don’t have a bone in the national-pride-game-because-my-country-is-(not)-in-a-fiction, however, I’m not sure you would have trouble finding a better use of your time and attention than to follow this silly thing that is really just full-on-pandering in disguise.
I’d like to compare it to Keijo!!!!!!!!, where we all go in expecting something and in the end got something slightly different, too, but in that situation our expectation betrayed us in a positive way. (I’d add Keijo!!!!!!!! is a great example of a story use both its strengths and weaknesses to delight). It’s like a post-Aria otaku media world, where we want our wide faces iyashikei stories not because they heal, but because we’re healed through much poetry and finesse, even if the portrayal is the utmost ordinary.
It’s hard for me to write about this show, which is, by all means, a trip. By that I mean, like, if you’ve just had a great cruise vacation or a nice international flight, you might be tired by the end but you’re kind of refreshed. To stretch the analogy, when it comes to Flip Flappers, it’s like traveling first class.
To me, though, as someone who always flies economy, the joys and sorrows of flight as an eventer has more to do with bargain shopping, optimizing travel times, doing the best mileage runs, taking advantage of various loyalty programs and promotions, and the ins and outs of frugal traveling. The parallel here is that if you drop a show like Girlish Number on my lap it’s like dropping a CSR on my lap. I like it and can enjoy the various perks, but it is definitely not for everybody. In fact one of my issues with that show is exactly reading the reactions of people who are not familiar with the ins and outs of the seiota world, which is namely everybody who has bothered to review it that I’ve read. “Yeah you may get 3x points on restaurants but you aren’t getting the travel benefits if you don’t travel!” It’s like that.
Flip Flappers is kind of like flying first class. Sure, it might be weird and you definitely don’t understand what’s going on all the time, but Yayaka holds Cocona’s hand throughout the process, and you’re a little bit assured that at the core of the experience is a story about friendship that we are just a little too familiar with.
Too familiar, because episode 5 properly subvert the notion of their relationship in this house of repeating horror looped by the comfort of same-sex familiarity. The yuri is fun to watch and it’s a point of overlap in which Flip Flapper explains itself to the viewer in as many words. I mean it takes fewer words too, compared to, say, post-apocalyptic sand societies. Or Mad Max.
Visually this episode kind of blown me away. Yeah you can make an Utena joke, but we’ve been doing this since the 90s. Flip Flapper actually does something I thought that was kind of trendy in episode 5, which is pairing it with actual horror, and not just the horrifying thought that your yuri ship can sink at any time by the canons of canon. (Heyo, Kyoto Animation. BTW, if Flip Flappers 5 is a first class flight, then Sound Euphonium 5 is definitely a cruise.) Anyways, the magical girls stuff is a vehicle for the fine animators described here to show us just how there is strength in numbers? How many people worked on this show? The art credit is like, a mile high, let alone the key animators.
As you can see I’m just not equipped to gush over animation, even if at times I feel compelled to do so. The dimensionality inside the clock tower is vertically oriented, which allows for the crazy action scenes we sort of saw in episode 3 take place in a constrained space. It made those fanfare slo-mo during the transformation scenes fit. Inside a closed environment we can think of it in more straightforward terms (versus, say, Brave Witches and the requirement for clouds or the ocean in every single air combat scene).
I just don’t think it’s low cal?
PS. Go vote you American pigs!
This blog post is like a 200-level course and requires you to be familiar with Girlish Number episodes 1-4. And seiyuu/anime biz. Spoilers, in other words.
This article may be 10 years too late but it’s better late than never.
I’m glad also the forum thread’s most triggering thing was someone linking to TVTropes to chime in how Light Novels are easier to read than regular novels (hint: it’s wrong). Pretty peaceful otherwise.
YES GUYS LIGHT NOVELS ARE A BRANDING/MARKETING THING. Remember OEL Manga? This is the same bullcrap. Maybe the magic of radobe shines in the way how it is a “by fans for fans” enterprise (ignoring the billion-dollar companies pigging back on them) so we can have self-cestual nonsense that is your average garden variety light novel best-seller, and the safe space where these terrible ideas can blossom into the same beautiful things that feeds my anime viewing habit.
Girlish Number’s Wataru partly draws his ire in the show, from precisely that. It’s impossible to ignore, once you know, how anime gets made. It’s not wrong to compare Girlish Number to Shirobako in this sense, where words like “gyara” take on a new meaning and unless you know how seiyuu gets paid, or how seiyuu do afureko, the lead character’s cheekiness in the first two episodes might be lost on you.