Consulting Witch

prokopetz:

mammon-machine:

dixiewetsworth:

So I completely disagree with the idea that Madoka Magica is feminist especially considering that the director more or less said that the girls deserved to suffer for wanting things, but I DO think it’s pretty funny that a staggering amount of women saw an anime about girls being constantly severely punished for existing and went “holy shit, I see myself here, this anime is just like my fucking life”

Talk about a total philosophical backfire, Urobuchi managed to hate women so much he somehow accidentally made an anime about how much it sucks to be one. It’d be a Greek punishment if it didn’t just get him money and acclaim lmfao

Even by japanese porn novelist standards Urobuchi is noticeably misogynist but flies almost completely under the radar, probably because  1) in Madoka Magica, there are no men so he’s forced to humanize the women in order for there to be a story 2) he’s so much of a better writer than Nasu that his other popular work, Fate/Zero, is so well popcorn movie paced that the comparative scarcity of women and the lack of agency in those that left is more or less ignorable because it’s not like this trash was any good in the first place.

Sometime the only way a vaguely human depiction of a woman’s experience gets on screen is because a dude was accidentally forced into doing it—I’ve seen directors talk in interviews more than once about how they wrote a woman “as if she was a man” by which they really mean “like a human being.” I see the seeds of this in ever boy in my MFA workshop who’s said that he “doesn’t know how to write women,” revealing that he thinks the problem is that he can’t understand the bizarre alien mindset of these illogical creatures, like there’s a secret that he doesn’t know, completely missing that’s itself half the problem, the other half being he’s never seriously considered how the actual day to day experiences of women are different than his and how those shape a person.

This happens completely on accident in Madoka Magica; the girls are punished ruthlessly for expressing the bare minimum of desire to survive in the world (like how small is it to wish to keep living or for your family to not be poor or your friend to not die?). And Urobuchi’s a good enough of a writer that when it comes down to it he can give these characters convincing motivations and identities. Sometimes the conventions and tropes of the work itself have a way of forcing career misogynists into accidentally creating something relatable—which should change the way you relate to the creator but not necessarily the work itself, I feel. The conditions under which men are forced to create compelling women are kinda fascinating in a morbid depressing way. 

It’s starting to feel like “you can totally construct a plausible feminist reading of this show, but it almost certainly wasn’t intended that way” basically describes every female-targeted anime series ever made. Thank goodness for the Death of the Author, I guess.