When you think of Mahou Shoujo, what are the first series that come to mind? Cardcaptor Sakura, Tokyo Mew Mew, Shugo Chara, Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure. The list of these titles in this particular trope could probably fill an entire Wiki by itself. Now, I’m sure there’s some other titles that come to mind as well and you all know which ones I’m talking about.
Your darker Mahou Shoujo titles that take all the sparkle, glitz and glitter of its more light-hearted counterparts and turns it on its fluffy head. Does Puella Magi Madoka Magica ring a bell for anyone? For a new generation of anime fans, this particular title may be their introduction to Anime as a whole. But I’ve stumbled across another Mahou Shoujo title that takes a dark twist that has blown my mind.
Did you see that big old yellow sign at the top? This post has SPOILERS for Yuki Yuna is a Hero up to — and including — episode eight. If you have not watched the series up to this point, I’d highly recommend perusing some of the other posts on the Geeky Corner. Otherwise… you’ve been warner.
Cute in the beginning, dramatic in the middle and packing an emotional gut punch right at the end.
Recently, I’ve been watching Yuki Yuna is a Hero (Yuki Yuna wa Yuusha de Aru/結城友奈は勇者である ) and in the beginning, it was turning into your standard Mahou Shoujo title. A group of young girls is called upon to save the world from the evil force known as the Vertexes in typical monster-of-the-week Super Sentai/Ultraman/Power Rangers fashion. Using the powers granted to them by the Tensha and Shinju-sama itself, they defeat these enemies and save the day.
Or… so they thought.
Main character Yuki Yuna and her friend Mimori Togo have encountered a key figure — Sonoko Nogi — involved with the Tensha who tells them something that she wished she’d known in the beginning. The more that they keep using their Mankai abilities — think Mahou Shoujo Super Saiyan — they will continue to lose their bodily functions. Yuna has lost her sense of taste, Mimori — on top of being an amnesiac paraplegic — has lost the hearing in her left ear. Fu has lost the vision in her left eye and Itsuki has lost her voice entirely.
I had been wondering about the reason for why they never regained these senses and episode eight put it all into clarity. The five members of the hero club were chosen to be sacrifices and it was something that they had all readily accepted. In the beginning of the series, it comes off as the notion that these girls are destined to save the world and in a sense, they still are.
Now, these five girls are intended to be sacrificial lambs because of their purity. They’re meant to give everything up for the greater good of humanity and expected to carry on with their lives as if a mind-shattering emotional bomb rife with discord and despair hadn’t been dropped on them. Do they sit back and take this pill that they’ve been forced to swallow or will they find a way to fight back against a cruel fate forced upon them?
So far, it looks like they’re going to fight back and it doesn’t look like it’s
Fight me, I dare you. Madoka Magica is pretty damn dark.
going to be in a Homura fit of yandere and time reversal either. Yuki Yuna is a Hero appears to be taking a darker route like its dark predecessor Madoka Magica did but not falling down into a dank pit of horror and a series of traumatizing events that would leave anyone suffering from PTSD. However, it appears to me that Yuki Yuna is going to keep a more light-hearted take on the darker side of Mahou Shoujo.
Now let me pose a question to the readers of this humble blog. What makes a darker Mahou Shoujo title so damn good to you?
For me, it’s really the fact that they take all the glitter and sparkles away and strip the genre down to what it really is. Mahou Shoujo is pretty damn dark when you get down to it. You’re forcing a bunch of young girls who have their whole future ahead of them to do the dirty work of others who don’t have the balls to do something about it themselves. Or in the cases of Sonoko Nogi, they failed miserably and have lost everything already. You’ve got a group of girls who willingly agree to help save their worlds but don’t know the ramifications of what they’re getting themselves into. In Yuki Yuna, the girls are giving up facets of their very beings while in Madoka Magica, the girls have to keep defeating witches lest they become one themselves.
It really makes you question about what you would do yourself if you were presented with the same situations. If you knew the consequences and discovered that you were nothing more than a pawn in someone else’s chess game, would you act the same way?
I’d love to know what you guys think about this and hey, let’s have a good old fashioned discussion about it!
