Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Magical Girl Raising Project
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zrnzle500
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I rather liked the ending and the show itself. I thought it was very good and the third worthwhile entry in the dark magical girl genre and my third favorite one, after Madoka (of course) and Yuuki Yuuna. I'm glad to here there is enough material for additional season(s). I hope it gets one and I will watch it if it does.
Now I am far from dissatisfied with Paul's reviews, but I kinda want to see what a critic who is fan of the traditional magical girl genre (say Rebecca) would think of the show, now that it is completed, because I think it has a great deal of admiration for the ideals of the traditional magical girl. I mean the one who won the selection process (until Ripple was revived) was the one who most adhered to the ideals of the magical girl. I think that is important. And not just through happenstance, but by her very adherence to it did she win. All those who violated those ideals (mostly by murdering people or attempting to, even bad ones) paid a price for doing so, and except for one it was the ultimate one. Even the one who didn't (Ripple) paid an arm and an eye which is more or less equivalent to the euphemistic way of saying a lot. Granted Snow White's adherence almost got her killed a few times, but she was saved by people who admired her for her adherence to those ideals (at least in part in Souta's case but especially in Hardgore Alice's case). I think at its core, MGRP is a defense of the ideals of the traditional magical girl and if it has any criticism of its lighter cousins, particularly of the kind aimed specifically at little girls, it is the scope of their ambitions not their ideals. |
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Luke's Yu-Gi-Oh! Channel
 Posts: 159 Location: Australia |
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And that is the end of a rather dark and disturbing series.
Not sure about snow White leaving home like that but at least her and Ripple are friends and are stopping crime around the areas. I remember a Smash Bros video where Luigi won a match by doing nothing, it's pretty much what Snow White did, she went about her own business trying to do good while everywhere else was a massacre. |
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Merida
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Well, i pretty much agree with the review. The show was entertaining enough, but i wish it had put half as much detail into the actual story than it did in inventing gruesome ways of killing its characters...
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GoddessOtome
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So Magical Girls Raising Project has come to an end. At least the first season. The fact that the review is labelled "Season Finale" makes me think there has been some kind of confirmation of a season two. Not that I have seen, but if so, I think it would be interesting. spoiler[ Its never addressed in the anime, but in the light novels it is revealed that Fav was a rogue agent from the Magical World acting on his own behalf, as those people who reside in the Magical World are horrified when they discover what Fav has done and even offer Snow White the change to lose her memories of the whole sordid event to go back to living her normal life, which she refuses. ] As a huge magical girl fan, I approached the show with caution. It started out nice enough, but in the end I was less invested in the girls themselves and more horrified by the gore and bloodshed that occurred. spoiler[ The ones that horrified me the most were the way Cranberry and Tama died in Episode 11 and Sister Nana's suicide in Episode 9. Cranberry's was the most violent, being exploded from inside with a hole, and Tama was the one magical girl I really felt for. The fact that Sister Nana had a ribbon of urine running down her legs when she hung herself was entirely unnecessary. ] The reason why I think a Season Two would be nice is it might give a chance to explore the Magical World and expound upon the world that was created. Time will tell.
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23907 |
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I sort of disagree with you here. I think Snow White's survival was more to do with her passivity and the lack of being a threat than anything else. Unlike Sister Nana who actively tried to rally the magical girls to fight against the system they were trapped in, Snow White made absolutely no effort to stop the slaughter until close to the end. Her character arc explicity demonstrates that she herself recognized the limitations of her earlier conception of what it means to be a magical girl. As she says, small acts of kindness just won't cut it in this world. So she has become a kick-ass hero of justice mentored by the battle-scarred Ripple. |
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NeverConvex
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This summarizes my thoughts really well too. I'm generally a fan of dark twists on traditional genres, but I thought MGRP fell really far short of its potential, and ended up as a mediocre contribution to the genre. Its production values were decent and I certainly don't mind gore if it's used to construct a suitable atmosphere or evoke particular feelings from the audience (Higurashi no Naku koro Ni is one of my all-time favorite shows, and I'd say it rivals MGRP in the gore factor), but I just never got the impression that MGRP cared all that much about its characters or its underlying narrative. Every member of the cast was either a static one-note creature with a last-second shoehorned backstory telegraphing their death or, like Snow White and Ripple, evidenced very little real character growth throughout the show's run; in later episodes I found myself cracking up at the senseless procession of characters slaughtered, so little had MGRP done to make me care about any of them. (One notable exception: I felt a bit of a tug when Hardgore Alice bit it. So I know this show could have done better, and that's all the more annoying! Ugh!) It also didn't help that MGRP demanded Madoka comparisons so strongly; had it just been a dark magical girl show the parallels would've been easier to avoid, but MGRP's 'sinisterly dispassionate, inhumanly rational, cute overlord critter' and the perverse system in which it traps its magical girls both scream "Madoka homage" pretty freaking hard. That's a bummer, because MGRP isn't even close to Madoka in terms of quality, and it only looks worse when that comparison's in the back of the viewer's head the whole time. Lastly, the repeated focus on narrative contrivance was really off-putting. The scene where Snow White and Ripple destroy Fav's master disc thing in the finale was a good example of this; that a 'magical weapon' but not a 'magical girl' could destroy the disc (and that this rule had to be just-in-time explained to us by Fav, rather than naturally shown to us by the course of events in the story) felt very artificial, the kind of rule an author arbitrarily makes to add a bit more struggle or maybe some symbolic significance to an action, but that isn't placed naturally within the narrative universe. And, from that same scene, I completely agree with Paul on this:
That scene genuinely felt like it had some potential; had Snow White's power been key to destroying Fav, that would have felt like a really cathartic turn of events, a kind of karmic justice. But instead we're just treated to her meaninglessly yelling at Ripple to do what she's already going to do anyway. I guess we're supposed to take from this that Snow White has 'changed' to the extent that she's willing to actively urge the destruction of a living creature, but holy moly was that ever a disappointing role for her to play in the finale. Meh.
And this!! A thousand times this. The epilogue was a neat direction to take the post-show story, but good lord did it ever feel disconnected from the rest of the narrative, and emotionally disjoint from the choices Snow White and Ripple made. Emotionally sterile. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23907 |
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I find both Paul's comment and your agreement with it bizarre. Haven't paid much of a price? Ripple has lost an eye and and arm. Snow White has run away from home and Ripple is now her only friend. Both still have to deal with the loss of friends they loved. I appreciated the fact that neither of them have given into nihilism but I hardly got the sense that this was a jaunty, upbeat ending. Disconnnected from the narrative? Huh? After the hideous experience they went through, I find the end to be very much of a piece with what preceded it. It was a long time coming, but Snow White was finally shaken out of her passivity. "Small acts of kindess are not enough." Indeed. And Ripple shows the impact that Top Speed has had on her, becoming the sort of magical girl that Top Speed would have approved of. |
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zrnzle500
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Well she seemed to be a threat to at least two people, considering they tried to kill her, but after that yeah she did seem low on the target list, though I would argue her firm no killing people stance was most responsible for that, as Hardgore Alice and Cranberry were much more likely to kill Swim Swim and friends than Snow White. And I don't think they ever saw Sister Nana as a threat who was trying to fight the system, more a easy mark too naive for her own good who was attached to a larger threat, Winterprison. Once Winterprison was dead, no one saw fit to finish of Nana. And her response to witnessing her most important person was to just give up, on everything, whereas Snow White, after some help from her friends, which is not an infrequent element in the lighter variety, she ultimately takes it upon herself to take down the one most corrupting the system. So add don't be too naive to that but I think they still value the ideals, which I think post story Ripple adheres to, to not only Top Speed's approval but also Snow White's as well. And I have to reiterate that yeah Ripple paid a significant price, and like Blood- said so did Snow White in having to leave her (regular human) friends and family. And for the magical weapon destroying the magical terminal, I don't think that is too contrived. Sure magical girls are powered up but they are very much still flesh and blood, so a sturdily built metal device doesn't seem like something they could destroy with their bare hands or even rocks. And from a design point of view, it doesn't really make sense for them to make it so that they can destroy it barehanded cause that is the familiars' body of sorts, and if it could be destroyed barehanded it wouldn't be all that durable in the first place. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23907 |
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Snow White was only a "threat" when collecting Magical Candies seemed to be important. Once it was clear that nobody gave a crap about that any more, SW dropped off anybody's list. And it wasn't because she was known to have a "no killing" stance, it was because she was perceived as powerless. She only survived because luckily Hardgore Alice found her before Magicaloid 44 did. So I'd say Snow White's survival was due to luck and powerlessness as opposed to the fact that she adhered the most strongly to a "real" magical girl ethos. In fact, by not taking a more active stand before she did, she - in my view - violated the magical girl creed of opposing evil. If you ain't trying to be part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. I agree that Sister Nana was too naive but it wasn't just a matter of "giving up" after Winterprison died. She no doubt was wracked with guilt because she was the one who ensured that Winterprison became a magical girl in the first place. In her mind, that would have made her indirectly responsible for the death of the person she loved most. But yes, a ritual disembowelment would have been more traditional...
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2362 |
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I can't speak for Paul, but this isn't quite what I meant; I'm not saying the ending was upbeat or that Snow White and Ripple didn't visibly suffer. I'm saying it's not clear that their suffering had anything to do with their choices (except for the obvious choice to become magical girls in the first place, but that's not a choice that carries any emotional weight outside of their universe). I do think there was the opportunity to show us a connection between their choices and their suffering; if, for example, the show had convinced me that Snow White's passivity was a mistake, that a more aggressive Snow White could have averted any of story's many deaths, etc, then I'd be inclined to see the ending in a different light. Her being shaken out of her passivity would have moral and emotional weight, because she'd have paid for her inaction with the deaths of her friends. But I don't recall the show ever really driving home that Snow White's refusal to fight had anything to do with the people around her dying. It did regularly harp on her helplessness, mostly by showing her moping and mourning a lot, but that's not the same thing as showing us that she had the power to save her friends but didn't exercise it. I think MGRP felt like it made these characters suffer for no particular reason - not because of their choices, and often in spite of them. Suffering was just a plot device - the price they paid for making a decision to become magical girls, but not carrying any clear significance outside of that.
I don't think Snow White's unwillingness to fight was ever presented to us as a very embattled decision, as relevant to the girls' suffering, or as something she really had a ton of genuine agency in (until her utter about-face in the epilogue, anyway, but it needed to come way earlier than that, I think). See my disquisition in the upper part of this reply. I think Ripple's 'change' was even less compelling than Snow White's. I mean - when was Ripple anything other than a mildly tsundere do-gooding badass with a bit of a penchant for hard-edged justice? She still looks like exactly the same character by the end of the narrative to me; she's got a bit more psychological baggage (and some serious physical injuries), but Top Speed's death doesn't seem to have done anything other than make Ripple willing to kill Swim Swim (a decision we were led to believe had great significance but which had no real consequences within the story outside of briefly upsetting Ripple and Snow White). She's trying to become a 'girl who won't Tch'.. but what the heck does that mean? She's still just running around doling out vigilante justice to whomever she thinks deserves it. The major difference seems to be that now she's got a partner in crime who wants to actively join in the vigilantism, and that she's now a killer, but neither of those notes are really meditated upon by the story in the epilogue, though they were both (especially the 'You'll be a murderer!' bit) portrayed as important earlier in the narrative. Last edited by NeverConvex on Sun Dec 18, 2016 11:15 am; edited 1 time in total |
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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I can't speak to Snow White, but I think Ripple's injuries and near death were clearly linked to her choice to kill Swim Swim, as she would not have sustained such injuries if she hadn't been trying to kill her and just left her alone and/or submitted. In a broad sense, I don't see that as wrong as Swim Swim needed to be put down, but it is probably the most un-magical girl thing to do to kill an unconscious little girl, monster though she was, and she paid the price for it.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2362 |
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That's true, zrnzle500, and I guess that's something. Physical injuries are generally the least interesting kind of 'price' for a character to pay, though, unless we see their everyday, psychological consequences carried out (which we don't, since the story ends shortly thereafter).
I guess as far as Ripple's decision to kill Swim Swim goes, I'd just like to have seen a somewhat more thoughtful take from MGRP on the consequences of her deciding to become a killer. 'She got hurt killing her.' doesn't really feel like it says a whole lot. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23907 |
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@ NeverConvex - thanks for the clarification, I do feel like I have a better idea of what you mean, now. I agree that the show did not explicitly editorialize on Snow White's passivity as being a problem she struggled with and then had to overcome. That's an interpretaton I'm sort of imposing on the material because, psychologically, I can draw a line between Snow White's behaviour for most of the show and where she ends up.
I've said this before, but I'll repeat: this particular story needed two cours to execute properly. With more breathing room, we could have gotten more insights into characters as opposed to brief flashbacks that were normally harbingers of that character's imminent demise. But as I've already said, I'm sort of glad it didn't go that way. I was upset enough at some of the deaths even in their clusmier form. A better executed version would have truly crushed my heart, I think. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2362 |
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I can't quite say the same, but I imagine a better-executed Hardgore Alice death could've brought me to tears. I really found her story a lot more poignant than the others, even hurriedly told as it was. I think a lot of that emotion, for me, came from A) her connection to Snow White being placed naturally and quietly in the story's early arcs (so that it didn't feel as if it had been artificially shoved into the narrative to demand the viewer feel at some pre-orchestrated juncture) and B) their connection being so beautifully understated. All Snow White did was help Hardgore Alice get back into her house, and unloved Alice responded by giving herself completely to Snow White. That simple act of kindness creating their bond really kicked me in the feels. That it wasn't over-the-top and obviously contrived to manipulate my emotions (like with a certain pregnant lady's endlessly prophesied death) made it feel a heck of a lot more genuine, I suspect. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23907 |
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I responded to Hardgore Alice's RL story and her connection to Snow White, too. But I was also really wounded by Nemurin, Sister Nana and Tama's stories/deaths. It's a peculiar aspect of my psychological makeup that even badly handled, overtly emotionally manipulative (I don't include MGRP in this category) situations can "get" me most of the time.
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