#anireco

[puellamagiholyquintet]

I wanted to add more but i can't find the link i used ??? Makin me sad fr puella is not impressed

[gorochuva]

screenshot of Iroha's Soul Gem from episode 13 of anireco

this is the first chapter asset I've had to upload for my minibang fic

[ai-the-broccoli]

misc. art from 2022

magia rekodo

[honouredsnakeprincess]

There is a scene in the Magia Record anime adaptation’s first season that stands out to me. I don’t entirely recall what goes on in it, but I remember the background vividly. It is the platform of a train station, suspended off the ground so as to access the suspended train tracks. Oddly, it seems to be connected to nothing save for the train trait; there is neither an elevator nor stairs for pedestrians to get on or off the platform, and there is only one train line connected to it.

The other notable characteristic of the platform is that it is full of bird perches and birds. It is painfully obvious that no sensible urbanist would construct such a train system, and this is only one of many oddities present in the two cities depicted in this anime. On the trains themselves, there are electronic signs which proclaim “the only good witch is a dead witch!” and other messages that have no place being on a non-magical train.

For a long time, my pet theory was that these aesthetic choices represented a sort of power creep for the Madoka series. While the original show had relatively grounded setpieces for its mundane world (a school with glass walls is a strange design choice, of course, but not quite surreal), many of its most striking and memorable scenes (such as the dream sequence/previous timeline that opens episode 1 and was inexplicably cut from the first movie) take place in surreal and illogical places, usually because of the influence of witches, but occasionally due to magical girls.

Rebellion built upon this surreal aesthetic, but due to its central conceit of taking place within a labyrinth, the surreal settings of explicitly magical places were permitted to leak into domestic and mundane settings, and this only continued to intensify as Homura’s mental state worsened. My theory, then, was that the Magireco anime was taking its visual cues more from Rebellion than from the original anime, hence the strange and illogical architecture and design appearing in places otherwise separate from the influences of magical girls.

As of yesterday, however, I have a new theory. The Magireco adaptation has fundamentally surreal and magical backgrounds because it tells a tonally and thematically different story from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. A sizeable chunk of Madoka’s central conflict is one between the mundane and magical parts of its setting, and Madoka’s struggle to determine her place within it.

Madoka’s entirely non-magical mother, Junko Kaname, is a major influence in her life, and Madoka is hesitant to make any sort of contract with Kyubey due to her own indecisiveness (as well as Homura’s urging her not to, and the gruesome deaths of Mami Tomoe and Sayaka Miki), but still finds herself ultimately driven to engage with the world of magical girls and witches, if only out of concern for the people around her. For the majority of the show’s run, Madoka is not a magical girl.

Similarly, most characters’ arcs involve some interaction between the mundane and magical world. Sayaka Miki and Kyouko Sakura use magic to try and improve the world around them, to disastrous or unsatisfactory ends, while Mami Tomoe and Homura Akemi find themselves isolated from the mundane world and its people by the pressures of their roles as magical girls, and that isolation ultimately gets them killed and trapped in a loop of tragedy, respectively.

The anime adaptation of Magia Record has no equivalent character to Junko Kaname, and its central conflict is ultimately a struggle between magical girls, rather than something that involves the mundane world to any particular extent. While the anime incarnation of Alina Gray’s ultimate goal is to turn all humans into witches because ????, this is revealed very late into the series and frankly seems to have been made up on the spot by the writers. All of the show’s major characters have already contracted with Kyubey before the plot begins, and while the precise circumstances of the contracts made by the three members of the Magius are important to the plot, it is the nature of their wishes (rather than the circumstances in which they were made) that make them important.

As such, my conclusion is this: the Magia Record anime adaptation makes use of surreal backgrounds and aesthetics in such a way that (intentionally or not) it reinforces that this story is one about magical girls and only magical girls. Just as there is no thematic room for mundane humans in this story, mundane architecture and urban design are similarly excluded.

I still think the main reason for the aesthetic change is flanderization though. The new film will be an interesting data point.

[mjlol52]

have i mentioned how fucking in love with alina gray i am

[homuraakumaakemi]

Fitting that I’d find out a potential leak in Magia Record about Kuroe on my birthday. Gimme all the Kuroe love! If people have a problem with that, Anireco shouldn’t have done what it did to her!

She would have as many units as Kanagi. Only one more than Sana. Yes, Iroha has a lot, but she’s the main character. Besides, unlike SOME characters, she doesn’t GET to be in the main story.

[rukimakino-heirofheart]

🔥Puella Magi Madoka Magica

🔥Renaruki

🔥 MadoMagi:

The original anime was pretty mediocre and had a mediocre soundtrack. Its fatal flaw is that it tries to center itself around a single main character (Madoka Kaname herself) whose viewpoint we see the world through, but her characterization physically cannot get focus in this format in an anime, because you just don't get to see how deeply screwed up her worldview is if you never know what she's thinking. Consequently, you actively lose information by telling the story in a format other than a novel or VN. (Observant viewers may recognize this as the same ultimate problem behind why adapting FSN for the screen inherently requires getting more exposit-y about Shirou's deal.) Ultimately, I wholeheartedly recommend skipping the MadoMagi TV anime entirely; most of the best parts of the Puella Magi Series are elsewhere and don't expect familiarity with a disappointing TV anime. (The Different Story, Rebellion, and Wraith Arc escape this curse by not being Madoka-centric, instead focusing on more conventional protagonists in Kyouko and Homura.)

Rebellion was a perfectly fine ending in and of itself, and it doesn't need a sequel. The only reason I'm interested in Walpurgis no Kaiten's existence is that it seems to be going so far out of left field that I kind of have to entertain it and find out what the cook is.

Of the "classic" Puella Magi titles (pre-2017, i.e. before Magia Record), I'd rank them like this:

Puella Magi Tart Magica - Masugitsune

Puella Magi Oriko Magica - Kuroe Mura

Extended Puella Magi Madoka Magica Series - Gen Urobuchi (TV, Rebellion, Wraith Arc) & Masaki Hiramatsu (TDS) & Hanokage (Wraith Arc)

Puella Magi Suzune Magica - GAN

Puella Magi Kazumi Magica - Masaki Hiramatsu

Rankings of Tart and Oriko may be swapped depending on how I'm feeling that day.

This is not to say that Suzune and Kazumi are bad manga, but the former quite infamously ran into production troubles and the latter bit off way more than it could chew, and it shows. Kazumi has a lot of cool plot ideas and themes in play but reading it for the first time can feel like being subjected to a plot point firing squad. The original manga run of Suzune was good but not spectacular -- it didn't truly get to shine until the MagiReco crossover events started happening. (It has been 1200 days since the last Suzune event...)

MagiReco fans often describe Arc 2 as "when it gets good," and it's common to write off Arc 1 entirely as an extended prologue, however I do still maintain that Arc 1 is a good story on its own terms. You can feel the weight of the production issues (there's a very noticeable midpoint shift where a major rewrite happened) but it's still a perfectly fine and coherent story. Most of what the fandom writ large likes to call "flaws of Arc 1" are just, intentional foreshadowing.

When AniReco (the companion anime to MagiReco that tells a completely separate story)'s final batch of episodes originally came out that fateful April 3, I gave the production as a whole a massive side-eye (I distinctly remember logging on and asking a chatroom I was in "what is even happening?? Why is the anime Folklore of Zero propaganda all of the sudden?? Wait, Neo Dorothy Motherfucker???? Huh??????"), but I've since warmed up to it. It's its own thing, and you have to have its place in the series' cosmology and the showrunner's goals in writing it explained to you first before you start watching, and it makes some writing decisions I find to be questionable, but it did a remarkably good job for a series that was slashed from 39 episodes down to 25 halfway through.

Apparently this is a hot take now: I like Nagisa Momoe's actual backstory as detailed in MagiReco a hell of a lot better than "dumb idiot child wished for cheese instead of healing her ailing mother." The collected Nagisa cycle of MagiReco stories makes her arguably the single most interesting member of the Holy Quintet.

I want more Kyubey worldbuilding, goddammit! We know precious little -- the Incubators were created by an advanced alien civilization (local expert Touka Satomi, A1C9), and their tissue is analogous to stem cells and can be reconfigured on the fly (Kosane Kiriha, NMG) -- and I need to know more! What were the progenitors like? Did they wipe themselves out? Actually, now that I think about it, are Incubators like Touhou's shikigami where you take fleshy hardware and flash it with your own artificial intelligence? We know a human can control one (Madoka uses LoC-branded pink Incubators for surveillance purposes) and we know a human can have their soul shoved into one losslessly (mokyu!), so like, what are the limitations here? Hell, the Pleiades made their own once! It sucked at its job, but it existed! How did they do that? Tell meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I think that even in the absence of the Automatic Purification System, being a magical girl is just kind of objectively better than being human. You get to opt out of mortality, you get private(-ish) telepathic communication for free, you get a shrunken hitbox -- no more worrying about workplace safety hazards as long as you protect the gem! -- you get a weirdly specific personal magic that varies in effectiveness from Konomi's baton pass to Iroha's localized time reversal, and even if you don't get something useful you still have a magical weapon that you can spawn on command. That's even before we get into the existence of Coordinators, and the logical applications of their Adjustment magic in gender-affirming care. To be quite honest, if Kyubey ever had reason to approach me, my wish would probably just straight-up be "immediately megucify every human who exists right now and every human who will ever exist in the future regardless of energy cost."

I'm scared of the new Magia Exedra mobage's existence because (1) it's very prominently advertised as being Quintet-centric and I'm sick and tired of the Quintet, and (2) there's a nonzero chance it will take resources away from Magia Record to focus instead on what seems, if the credits on the website are to be believed, to be a shitty autobattler. MagiReco is the best thing the Puella Magi Series has ever done and I want it to survive well past its tenth anniversary.

🔥 RenaRuki:

Okay, seriously, did the entire Tamers fandom collectively forget that, past a certain part of the D-Reaper arc, none of the Primary Colors are actually human anymore? Because it feels like I'm the only one who's acknowledging this, despite the fact that "Ruki, alienated from humanity, voluntarily gives it up, while Renamon, aligned with humanity, is a trans woman" seems like a pretty obvious thread to work with, and being turned into a digital life-form offers plenty of opportunities for neat body horror, not even to mention how this affects the ways in which Ruki's Candy timeline counterpart has steadily been getting worse for two decades.

[Side note: I really need better names for the "more canon" movie timeline that's relevant, essential and true, and the "less canon" drama CD timeline that isn't. If I keep calling them Meat and Candy I'm going to get weird looks from the non-Homestucks.]

I swear I had more observations I was going to put here but I got sidetracked. Might add on a reblog later.

[magicalgirlagency]

Do you have magical girl series that you used to like but now hate it?

Shugo Chara;

Hugtto PreCure;

Wonder Egg Priority;

AniReco (a.k.a. the Magia Record anime);

Steven Universe;

Star vs. The Forces of Evil;

Miraculous Ladybug;

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

[hotarutranslations]

Unexpectedly!!

Evening

On the day of TV Tokyo Music Fest,

Miyama Karen-san was there to record a special show, and I met with her~~🥴🤍

Its amazing how we happened to be at the station on the same day🪽

After our rehearsal for the music fest was over in the morning, I heard she was there!

I did my makeup and went to meet with her~~

And so it seems the rehearsal also, was show on TV within the station kya

She said that our new song was cool~~

I wonder if she watched the actually performance at home~🥴🤍 lol

I also met with NONSTYLE's Inoue-san~~ Its my first time seeing them since my appearance on AniReco TV! Although I was watching the recording of the live with a day-of ticket 🤭lol

I got to talk with them! Wa-i

I was surprised! Like, how come!

"Kaminari Oyaji" is a comedy duo, right, It was particularly impressive when I saw it at the time🍘‬‪🍘‬ (I couldn't convey this at the time) lol

Since today is also Monday, In a bit, AniReco TV is airing🪽

Also, Hello Dream too🪽

TV Tokyo Music Fest 2024 Summer, You can watch it on TVer if you missed it🪽

We've started rehearsals, Towards the summer concerts~~~

I'm happy about this song and this song and that song~~~()

.😂😂

Play▶️List

Graduation Announcement Blog🐣🪽

Hello! Station #531 I also talk about my graduation in this video

📺Hello Pro Dance Gakuen Season 11

Every other Thursday at 11:30PM~ Learning Locking from HIYORI-san

📺Sendai Broadcast "Ara Ara Kashiko" Ishida Ayumi Goes~! I appear once a month as part of the AraKashi Family

The previous shows, and makings, are on OX VIDEO STORE!

Thank you for following.. Instagram💙🩵

💿 August 14th new single✨ "Nandaka Sentimental na Toki no Uta/saiKITOU"

Cheki Sign Talk Meet Announcement

̗̀📣You Can Apply On This Site

̗̀📣Limsta

🪩The MusiQuest 2024 July 21st (Sun) PiaArena MM

We're challenging a new festival stage❤️‍🔥 Absolutely, Definitely, Thank you for your support❤️‍🔥

🪩Hello! Project 2024 Summer ALL OF US "Vega" "Altair" From July 13th~September 1st Traveling To 7 Cities Nationwide All Hello! Project groups are performing🔥

⚾️"Hawks SUMMER BOOST" July 28th (Sun) Mizuho PayPay Dome Fukuoka

After the match, we'll be having a live!

📚July 20th Release "non-no September" special issues cover is, Morning Musume '24

Preorders are here

Releasing on July 23rd

"Up To Boy vol.341" September Issue I will be on the 7net limited cover page

Preorder it soon🪽

I'd be happy if you could pick it up❤️

📻Morning Musume '24 Morning Jogakuin ~Houkago Meeting~

Airs Every Saturday, On Radio Nihon at 12:00AM~

Past Broadcast Episodes Are Available →Program Details

I visited as a guest🪽 "Sayashi Riho and The Time From Now On" presented by Meiji Bulgarian Yogurt

see you ayumin <3

[aokozaki]

PMMM TV anime OST vs Rebellion OST vs AniReco OST. Thoughts?

I'm sorry to say that I never paid much attention to the PMMM OST, in any release. I guess the TV Anime has to win by default because the only songs I remember are Connect or Sis Puella Magica.

[magicalgirlagency]

Except that TOH didn't dropped the ball at the final moment like AniReco did, and has actually bothered to give their couple a happy ending where both survive and thrive.

Yes, I am still bitter about the anime. Though there's still the game app.

Yeah, I'm really into ships where a chick in a red dress with a circular gem near the collar line breaks up with the love of their life due to them learning the dark truth about their magical powers, only to find out their ex-lover has been brainwashed by the enemy and that's what ends up pushing them back together again. In fact, this is pretty much my OTP:

Wait a second, this is a Magia Record blog! I meant to say this is pretty much my OTP:

(As you can see, I have highly specific shipping tastes and I have been wanting to make this joke for a long time.)

[puellamagiholyquintet]

New Magia Record banner!

Includes Tamaki Iroha, Nanami Yachiyo, Minami Rena, Rumor Tsuruno, and Holy Mami! (All anime units!)

Additionally, there is a free roll banner with selectable magical girls! It features: Minami Rena, Togame Momoko, Kaname Madoka, Tomoe Mami, Isuzu Ren, Sakura Kyoko, Amanda Tsukuyo, Miki Sayaka, Alina Gray, Kozue Mayu, Yakumo Mitama, Yukino Kanae, Azusa Mifuyu, Izumi Kanagi, Satomi Touka, Hiiragi Nemu, and Tamaki Ui! All in standard versions.

[breaddmuncher]

you will view them

[crescentcrossbow]

The best part of the MagiReco finale movie happening is watching the discourse over the new amalgamate witch’s name: to wit, is “MOTHERFUCKER” a surname of Neo Dorothy Motherfucker, or is she just named Neo Dorothy and the runes are just calling her a motherfucker?

[rukimakino-heirofheart]

I think the way that you conceptualize the Puella Magi Series is so alien to me as to make effective communication about it impossible.

Regarding your "primacy of the Magica Quartet" stance, I would offer a reminder that the franchise has been a media mix from the very beginning, Kazumi began less than three weeks in, and Kazumi's author had substantial input on Kyouko and Mami's characters. While obviously some level of "different writers will do different things" is to be expected with a franchise like this -- sometimes, there is official media that literally writes Kyubey incorrectly (AniReco S3E1 being a particularly infamous example), and we just kind of have to deal with that -- it's impossible to actually create a hard and fast dichotomy of "anything Urobuchi/Shinbo/DoroInu/Aoki says is god, anything anyone else says is hearsay." Furthermore, I would point out that the collaborative nature of the franchise is a good thing, as it results in works like Kazumi going absolute ham with the worldbuilding in ways that wouldn't have happened had the overall setting been more solidified when they were written.

Your framing of Rebellion as "improving the status quo somewhat" is also pretty alien to me. The Madoka series (as opposed to the greater Puella Magi series) is profoundly uninterested in improving the status quo, because it follows characters who have unusual opinions on it (namely Madoka, who doesn't care if magical girls die as long as they're remembered, and Homura, who doesn't care if magical girls die as long as the four magical girls she knows personally are alive). The rest of the franchise is able to explore the boundary conditions of the worldbuilding at its leisure, and indeed Record depicts a reality where magical girls are actually saved; Madoka, on the other hand, is really only concerned with the Holy Quintet. In fact, it is my main criticism of the original TV anime that Mitakihara is just not a setting so much as a collection of vaguely SHAFT-looking sets in roughly the shape of what Rebellion tells us is probably a major economic center. (Compare Kamihama City, who has such an involved history and class dynamics so as to essentially be a character in her own right.)

I feel it's a pretty obvious point to raise that Homura hates herself not because she is right to do so, but because she was raised Catholic. She spends the entirety of Wraith Arc idolizing Madoka in the most literal possible sense to the point of having an existential crisis when she starts to suspect she used her bow to fake her memories of her. This mindset of "Madoka is an infallible messiah and anything that disrupts her wish must be destroyed" follows her into Rebellion, whereupon she immediately classifies herself as "something that disrupts her wish." The only people who really think Homura's world is unstable are Homura herself (obviously not an unbiased source) and Sayaka (renowned the world over as the King of Haters); Nagisa doesn't give a shit, and Madoka's actual essence is perfectly intact, as Homura states, it's just no longer located in the Law of Cycles. While Madoka does get nearly eaten alive by her Ultimate Self at one point, the circumstances are such that this is unlikely to be a recurring problem long-term.

(The second Tart Magica crossover event introduced well-defined mechanics to time travel, namely, history is validated by proving its existence FGO-style. If Ultimate Selves work on a similar principle, where the Law of Cycles is only able to physically invade Madoka's head because it considers her a part of itself, it's likely that Madoka can become immune to her Ultimate Self sickness by simply becoming enough of her own person that the Law of Cycles stops recognizing her as what was once its controlling intelligence. Since WnK's logical niche would be to give Madoka an actual character arc for once, it's probable that this is going to happen.)

I feel like your analysis is going too hard on attempting to construct a one-to-one parallel with Goethe and is not actually engaging with Madoka as a completed work. The primary cultural referent for Ultimate Self Madoka is in fact confirmed by runes in Rebellion to be Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, the demon who tells you everything that's about to happen has already happened once and challenges you whether you'll despair at determinism or not. This is why her primary foils are Homura, whose Event Falsification ability is literally seen to shatter the screen while Madoka is attempting to take her into the eternal recurrence, and Nagisa, a noted tragedy enjoyer who makes it her life's mission to completely fucking derail any narrative she appears in for the express purpose of making it incompatible with Madoka's hegemony.

Furthermore, I feel like your analysis is going too hard on attempting to construct a framing of Madoka as social commentary and is not actually engaging with it on the character-driven terms it is written in. Fundamentally, Madoka is about people whose opinions on the systems they live in are too deeply insane to function as social commentary in any meaningful way, because they're actually opinions on narrative. I cannot stress enough that Madoka Kaname cares not for life but for legacy and as such literally murders magical girls by the billions in order to cap off their legacies before they can be distorted. There is very little difference between Kriemhild and Ultimate Self Madoka, and Oriko was pretty fucking justified in her choice of meaning in life even if the way in which she approached it was deeply unhealthy. If you want coherent social commentary in your magical girls, there's a very nice hundred-hour gacha game about some of them unionizing you can watch through at Magia Union Translations. Go check it out, it even has realistic depictions of classist city planning.

Record (the game, not the anime; anime's an alternate continuity like Last Encore) is indeed set in an alternate timeline, but the timeline in which it's set is an extremely cosmically important one because it's unique in being literally untouchable by the Law of Cycles due to containing certain figures that are also unique in the multiverse. Due to being the only universe where magical girls have ever actually legitimately been saved, it may be worthwhile to touch on it in a work focused on giving Madoka a character arc. And indeed, it looks like they're doing that; freeze-frame the second trailer, and you'll find key art of a witch named Pennen Nolde who cannot exist in any non-Record timeline, because the magical girl in question only contracts if Iroha does, and therefore cannot exist within the Law of Cycles at all. Indeed, because it is physically impossible to become a witch within the Record, the only reason we know what Pennen Nolde looks like as a witch instead of a doppel is that Alina became a therapist and painted her clients' witch forms.

Ultimately, I was really hoping WnK was permanently cancelled forever until it suddenly resurfaced last year. The only thing giving me any form of interest in it is that both of the trailers seem to indicate it'll be coming so far out of left field that I have to watch it to see what they're cooking. But as long as it exists, there is a specific niche I want to see filled: namely, where Rebellion saw Homura start to heal from her idolization of the Law of Cycles, Madoka's character has remained pretty static and one-dimensional throughout, with spinoff material refusing to help. While I am fully aware that the light novel adaptation of the original TV anime goes to significant lengths to characterize Madoka, due to her being its PoV character and thus giving us a glimpse into her head beyond simply "has clinical depression" (it's like how anime adaptations of Fate/stay night really can't adapt Shirou properly because you only get to see 10% of his derangement if the camera is outside his head), as long as WnK exists it might as well give her some actual development. Basically, if Madoka is the Rabi of PMMM, WnK should be her Arc 2 Chapter 11: it should be a story about her starting to unlearn her deeply-screwed-up mindset and becoming a proper individual/protagonist.

If Madoka Magica is the story of someone permanently sacrificing her ability to be relevant, essential or true ever again in order to bolster everyone else's narrative clout, WnK should be the story of that same girl descending the hell tiers to become hyperrelevant and hyperessential.

I don't want Record or Exedra fully integrated into the plot because Record is vastly superior to literally any other part of the franchise and it would feel cheap to make WnK reliant on it, both because it would invite a natural framing of Record as being "fodder for the madohomu mines" and because asking people to watch a 100+ hour game as homework for a 2-hour movie in an unrelated series is pretty fucking unreasonable. However, if it's more like an Oriko situation as Pennen Nolde's presence in the second trailer suggests (wherein you don't really need to watch Madoka to get the full experience out of Oriko, but it helps contextualize things somewhat), then I'm going to be more or less fine with that. Like I said, ideal circumstance is that WnK is a fully-self-contained two-hour movie that also introduces some new lore that can be co-opted by the rest of the franchise.

I'm gonna say right now that if Walpurgisnacht Rising isn't the finale and is instead leading into a whole other arc I'll actually be mad

[mjlol52]

the girls ever