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[Orange Wizard]

Like seriously, what even posessed them to slap the Gatchaman brand onto this show instead of just going with the original plan of just having it be called Crowds?

So they could annoy Gatchaman fans, obviously.

In all seriousness, I actually really liked Crowds. Mostly because it shat all over the standard superhero anime tropes, which I generally don't care for.

But, yeah. The show's biggest problem probably actually is the tacked-on Gatchaman thing. It'd be like the guys who did Madoka got halfway through writing it and someone suddenly said, "hey we should do this in the Sailor Moon universe because that totally makes sense".

[Frumple]

... being fair, it wouldn't be that much of a mismatch to shove madoka into sailor moon canon. Sailor Moon's backstory and greater plot and such are all kinds of fucked up. Could cheerfully fit bleedin' lovecraft into that mess, nevermind something as minor as madoka's stuff. Which would probably even slot right in with the silence and whatnot.

Don't underestimate sailor moon, OW. It's actually pretty nasty in a lot of ways.

[Orange Wizard]

Stop undermining my point.

[majikero]

It's better to compare Madoka to Precure. While Sailor Moon is what people think off when it comes to Magical Girls, that's only because old people.

[Tellemurius]

It's better to compare Madoka to Precure. While Sailor Moon is what people think off when it comes to Magical Girls, that's only because old people.

Precure and Sailor Moon would go together much better than Madoka to anything.

[JoshuaFH]

Ok Reelya, I finished ep 7 of Mahouka. It wasn't easy, every episode is severely testing my patience for bullshit, and I couldn't do both eps back to back I had to take a break after 6 to wash my eyes out and get the taste out of my mouth by watching something better. I clicked away during ep 7 thinking it was done at one point and saw that there was still like 10 minutes left, that was a gut punch right there.

But I can see what you mean now with his utterly absurd powers. Literally nobody stands a chance against golden child Shiba. Apparently just winning the fight isn't enough, he has to humiliate them, render them harmless, and then kill them whilst harmless and helpless. I'm pretty sure that's on par with war crimes Shiba, that nobody thinks you and your sister are psychopaths is a miracle. I was briefly reminded of Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star, but the endless mooks he plowed through atleast attacked him mindlessly even if they had no chance of winning, this was just straight up executing people that had lost their will to fight. And he's the hero apparently...

I could empty my stomach over the ending as well. "OH I LOVE SHIBA, but he's just too good for me! I better set my sights lower to the man who bravely cut off the arm of a helpless man who wasn't fighting back, or I'll never find a boyfriend!" Jesus Christ.

I feel bad for the guys that did the opening and the ending songs, cause it sounds like good music, but too bad it's attached to a big pile of shit.

[Neonivek]

and as I love to also mention...

Shiba is STILL considered to be "at a disadvantage"

[Reelya]

Yeah, that episode 7 love scene is a whole new level of WTF writing. Girl: "Shiba Tatsuya is my true love, but he's too amazing, and I'm an ordinary nobody, I could never walk by his side and so I settled for Mr Sad Sack of Shit here on the right because he's mundane and on my level." Sad Sack of Shit: "Gee thanks honey! That's so sweet". I guess the boyfriend was so awed just to be mentioned in the same sentence as Shiba that he wasn't offended that his girlfriend told everyone she loved someone else more than she did him. This is basically literary Prima Nocta. Any guy who gets a girl, well Shiba Tatsuya metaphorically fucked them first, sucka! And the other guys are happy to get the scraps.

EDIT: Actually this is another thing where the parallels between Shiba and Jesus are alarming. Originally John the Baptist's followers were a rival cult to the very early Christians. So they wrote John the Baptist into the Gospel of Luke as a lesser figure. The pattern is repeated: John the Baptist does something, then Jesus does the same thing 1000 times better. This actually starts in the womb when John the Baptist's mother meets Jesus's mother and claims her unborn baby is doing a little dance in the womb (more or less) because he's so happy to meet unborn baby Jesus who is emitting some sort of super-baby aura. Elizabeth (Johns mother) goes so far as to claim that Mary's baby is infinitely better than her own baby. This reminds me heavily of the hacky writing in Mahouka, how any time anyone else does something cool, Shiba has to either get all the credit or do it 1000 times better in the next scene. Guy gets the girl: she really wanted Shiba. School Team beats the other team: it was secretly (or not secretly) all down to Shiba.

As for the violent smackdown: the end of the second arc is even worse, he outright snipes a room full of people in the face from a far distance using a magical sniper rifle, while they are helpless. He doesn't even get one shot fired back at him, because you know the author is obsessed with always pointing out how Shiba is untouchable and lightyears ahead of the competition. The he gets the info he wants from the last guy, and shoots him anyway. That's the lot that didn't even try and kill anyone during the whole arc, they were just match-fixing gangsters who's match fixing just happened to involve his sisters school sports carnival. So apparently trying to deprive his sister of a sports trophy warrants killing 20 people in cold blood. And of course this sort of stuff is interspersed with the "Shiba: what a great guy!" crap.

[Bauglir]

obviously everybody else is so afraid of him that they dare not do anything but supply unceasing praise

[Neonivek]

And the explanations for how he is able to do what he does are often so ludicrous and insane it is a parody.

Shiba is an unintentional parody...

[Reelya]

Yeah, for example the explanation for his ability to regenerate himself is that he "reads" the "Eidos Change-log" and then he can restore anything inorganic or organic (including other people or himself) to a previous state from the last 24 hours.

instantaneously 'remove' all injuries of any type or form incurred on a human or machine by reading and rewinding the Eidos Change-log and then making a full copy to restore the human or machine to its previous state before the injury occurred.

So apparently reality works exactly like making a Restore point in Windows before you install new software. If you get your arm blown off, just hope Shiba is there to rewind the change log and copy the intact-arm data over your current data. But this opens a lot of philosophical cans of worms. Is the copy of the person's old data the same person, or do they just think they are? What if he makes a copy of the person, but without erasing the existing person. Now there are two people. Are they the same person or are they two separate clones? If someone overwrites the entirety of YOU with a copy of you from a previous time, where is the proof that consciousness is transported from one copy to the other? For all we know, every time he "restores" someone, he could actually be murdering the old person.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm reminded of the one scene from Akagi, who is another Sue, where Akagi is chilling out in a bed and I think it's his cop friend speaking to him, saying "You know what you need? What you really need? A worthy opponent." and that's simply what Shiba doesn't have, there's noone who could kick his ass or even pose any threat at all to him. He's too good to feel threatened by any of the pissants who meddle in his life, and he's too emotionless to seek out a bigger fish outside of his little pond. There was supposed to be a magic war or something going on, or whatever the prologue was talking about, but I doubt the author has the actual cajones to throw his precious baby into an actual brutal conflict against people that actually know how to fight.

While there's SO MUCH wrong with Mahouka, I still feel it could have been salvaged if someone, anyone could have reached the author while he was still writing his self-insert power fantasy and just told him to knock it off and put a good villain in there.

[Reelya]

Yes to that. I think something like Mahouka makes you appreciate certain overused tropes and cliches. We complain about these tropes all the time, but then you have a series that doesn't have those tropes, but instead of imaginative writing to fill the gap, its has ... nothing. You start to realize why those tropes exist. Things like overpowered villains, rivals who have powers that match the hero,, and the hero getting humiliated via slapstick violence. These kinds of things aren't great writing, but they have a function, to put the hero in perspective and make them more human.

Mahouka has these things a little (except for the villains, which suck), but they're hobbled by the authors preciousness about his hero. Leo, the sidekick, gets the beatdowns and scorn from girls that the hero in most similar series gets directly. So in other words, the writer knows how to use those tropes but he doesn't want to get Shiba dirty by having any of the slapstick at his expense.

There is a rival in part II, but he's only a friendly rival in a sports contests, so nothing rides on it, and he's ultimately shown to be no match for Shiba (mainly through ass-pull additional powers). The rival is part of a team, so he has one main skill-set and relies on his team-mates for different skill-sets, whereas the story makes a point that Shiba has all the skills that matter, everyone on his team is totally relying on Shiba's inventions and strategy as well as his warrior prowess.

[Flying Dice]

It's better to compare Madoka to Precure. While Sailor Moon is what people think off when it comes to Magical Girls, that's only because old people.

Precure and Sailor Moon would go together much better than Madoka to anything.

Pay attention to the context of the post. They were talking about what PMMM would translate into if you shifted from dark/deconstruction of mahou shoujo to played-straight.

[Frumple]

... 'course, the thing is, PMMM could be stuck whole-cloth with no translation into a fair amount of mahou shoujo and not really stand out that much. About the only difference between it and a number of other played-straight magical girl shows is focus, not really content or construction. Everything about it, from the deaths, to the cosmology, to the various critters, could slot in to something like Sailor Moon with barely a blink.

Mostly due to the fact that a lot of magical girl shows are frank fridge horror waiting to be noticed, heh. SM's just one of the ur-examples, what with the whole planetary-scale genocides and universe destroying entropy beasts and whatnot. It'd be pretty easy to turn it into something that out madoka's madoka, as plenty of the fanfiction displays