PSA: As with every entry, this post assumes that you have either read/watched the material or that you do not care about having major plot points revealed.
In a suddenly recent reignition of my love of magical girls, I picked up a copy of the first volume of Magical Girl Raising Project, by Asari Endou. A friend of mine showed me a couple of episodes of the anime a couple of years ago, and it has nagged at me since. How sad was this going to get? What kinds of characters had I not had the chance to meet yet? I had never read a Japanese light novel before, but it was honestly a kind of nice, low-pressure read. I remember a couple of awkward moments of very specific phrasing (such as a moment where a character was specifically aiming for someone’s carotid artery, when it would have been simpler to say “neck”), but I think that the overall translation wouldn’t come off strange to someone who has read a lot of manga, either fan-translated or official.
I have rather mixed feelings about this book, because, as mentioned above, it’s like watching a horror movie without any of the horror, and instead, everyone is just sad or crazy. For a quick synopsis, the book revolves around a cell phone game where the players make their own magical girls and play games for candies, the presumed currency of the game. A select few find themselves gifted with the actual powers and appearances of magical girls of the magical girls they’ve created. These powers vary from having certain skills with weapons, to being able to hear to thoughts of others in distress, to just immediately making holes when she starts to dig. As it turns out, their numbers have become too great for the Magical Kingdom to handle and they must reduce this number by half. Initially, the goal is to go out into the community and earn candies by doing good deeds. The girl with the least amount will have her powers taken away and as a result, she dies. The concept of earning candies quickly falls by the wayside as the girls start to turn on each other and fight to the death until they reach the desired number of magical girls. From there the book becomes a tournament-style “fighting anime.”
There are many things that I love about this book: I love the character designs; I love the concept that your character is based on the one you created from the game, non-matching costumes and all; I love that the characters encompass a vast variety of ages and social backgrounds, including adult women, a first grader, a boy, and someone who doesn’t actually appear to be from Earth (although I could be totally wrong about that one). I love the ending, where it is revealed that none of this should have even happened and that this who thing is a plot concocted by a blood-thirst magical girl master, and that the Magical Kingdom comes in at the end in a “oh my god we are so sorry that this has ever happened, here have honorary powers and positions, and we know this could never make up for this trauma, but oh my god we are so sorry” kind of way.
I liked that many of the characters deaths were not based on who was more powerful, but who used there powers in the smartest ways. Characters who are obviously physically more gifted than other magical girls can be brought down by a smart plan, or just be very quick thinking. I think they greatest example of this is Cranberry’s death by “sudden hole in middle of body” created by Tama, who up to this moment has been portrayed as rather slow on the uptake and who is given kind of an oddly specific power, but incredibly devoted to those who treat her well. Even Winterprison meets her end by an unfortunately well-laid trap.
What I didn’t like, was losing a lot of really wonderful characters without really getting to spend more time with them or before they were able to complete any kind of meaningful arc. Characters like La Pucelle are killed “off-screen” before she gets to carry out her duties of protecting Snow White. I don’t necessarily have a problem with her dying, but feel that this should have happened while in the act of doing this thing that she has gone out of her way to vow to do. There was such a big fuss about her making this vow, but she dies in this bloodlust-fueled fight instigated by Cranberry when Snow White has already gone home for the evening. It just seems like this book has a lot of set-up with not very much payoff. The book is a little on the shallow side, but I know that’s almost the point, as it is a light novel meant to be read kind of quickly and easily.
So here’s my hot-take: I want a book exclusively about the trials and tribulations of Hardgore Alice, and not necessarily in the way her story plays out within this book. I felt that she had the strongest motivations for being a magical girl, and even befriending Snow White, whose small act of kindness saved her from wanting to commit suicide and led her into believing in what it meant to be a true magical girl. All she wants to do anymore is help Snow White and subsequently help the people of her town. It’s a dark and sad beginning to what could potentially be a really sweet story with some realistic lessons and character growth.
I really like the concept of a magical girl whose power is that she just can’t die, and who repeatedly gets impaled, decapitated, possibly exploded, etc., but with the mood and tone of a Sailor Moon cartoon. At the core of it all, she is a magical girl, though a very unconventional one. I like the idea that after a big fight against some monster, the other magical girls go home for the night, but she has to go around and pick up the pieces of her that have come off (perhaps waving goodbye to the other girls with her own severed arm) before she can go home and de-transform. I like to imagine that she finds her powers very frustrating and that she is often upset that she doesn’t seem to really embody the unspeakable beauty and strength of a magical girl like her peers do, and that she perhaps finds her powers to be some kind of a cruel joke about how she wanted to commit suicide not long ago (in my version, she is assigned her powers and appearance in spite of the fact that she had picked a very cute costume on the cell phone game).
I guess what I ended up not liking about the book was that there was a lot of missed potential, and not in the sense that I don’t understand what the premise of the book is. What I mean is that we are given a lot of really good characters who just don’t have the chance to thrive in a story like this. In spite of the premise, the author went out of their way to set up some really neat stories that never get to come to fruition, and it just seems like a waste of character development.
I’m a big fan of character stories and character growth moments. The plot is usually very secondary for me as long as I like the people I’m reading about or watching on TV, and I liked a lot of these characters so much, but it just felt like some were mistreated in their arcs. None of this means that I’m not going to pick up the next books. I’ve already ordered volume two and am waiting very impatiently for Tuesday to arrive. All it means is that I have some thoughts, and that while I like the idea of adding dark elements to what is normal classified as a very light and bubbly, I would like to see these dark elements become less about the violent deaths of magical girls, and more about the deep personal battles that they have to deal with.
That’s all for me today. My next entry was going to be about American Gods, but then I read this (in about three weeks somehow), and thought I would throw in my two cents on an discussion that was had probably about a decade ago. Enjoy!
Slowest Reader Reads Slowly 