So over the holidays I had the pleasure of watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica for the first time, though it’s been on my watch list for years; ever since it first came out in fact. It’s the series that arguably made studio Shaft’s reputation, a deconstruction of the Magical Girl/Mahou Shoujo story, with its elementary or middle school heroines getting magical powers from dubious alien mascots to fight ill defined evils — after first having gone through a lengthy transformation sequence of course. Call it the genre’s Watchmen, if you’re looking for a lazy comparison. Because it’s best watched without knowing quite what you’re in for, I won’t talk about the plot here, but I found it interesting to compare Madoka to another Mahou Shoujo series, one that came out a few years after it. There will be some spoilers once we get to the nitty gritty.
That series is Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru (Yuki Yuna is a hero), which came out in 2014 and which is very much a post-Madoka Mahou Shoujo series. Like Madoka, it looks like a regular Mahou Shoujo series at first, but continually drops hints that not everything is what it seems, feeding the mistrust and suspicion of the viewer expecting a similar twist as Madoka delivered, a mistrust that only builds when the twist refuses to come (as witnessed in the relevant TV Tropes thread). Yuki Yuna remains cheerfully optimistic even as the true scale ot the threat its middle school heroines have to face becomes clear, ultimately arriving at a true happy ending.
What I wondered was, if you could call Puella Magi Madoka Magica a deconstruction of the Mahou Shoujo genre, because it took a long hard look at its core premisses and asked what it would look like set in a more “realistic” world, would that make Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru a reconstruction? Something similar to Astro City perhaps, which took into account the effects Watchmen had had on the superhero genre, then create a more hopeful take on it, repudiating its worldview. But mulling over it further, I thought that wasn’t quite right. Rather, it was a matter of perspective.
Because when it comes down to it, Madoka and Yuki Yuna tell the same story, just from a different perspective. Both take the central conciet of the Mahou Shoujo genre, of giving young girls unlimited magical powers and pointing them in the direction of a nebulous evil to fight and give it a good kicking. In both there’s a price to pay for that power, that is only revealed once it’s too late. In both the evil the girls are recruited to fight, the reason for their fight as well as the world itself are revealed to be very different from what they believed it was, with the truth being far worse than they could’ve imagined before. Both in the end even have something of a happy ending.
The difference is whereas Madoka quickly breaks through the angst barrier and delights in letting its characters suffer (in the best possible way), when the same happens in Yuki Yuna the characters may suffer, but their sense of optimism even in the face of overwhelming despair remains. It’s a matter of perspective; Madoka emphasised the bleakness at the heart of its story, Yuki Yuna chose to focus on the hope. Both are valid. Which one you prefer depends on your own tastes; myself I liked both.
