Selector Infected Wixoss has been accused of being a copy of Madoka Magica. This is unsurprising since everything post-Madoka has been a response to Gen Urobuchi's deconstruction of the magical girl genre. The proliferation of Urobuchi works: Fate/Zero 1 & 2; Psycho Pass 1 & 2; Aldnoah.Zero 1 & 2 within the last 3 years and the rebirth of magical girl animes that confront the post-Madoka discourse: Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal; Penguindrum; Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou; Madoka Magica shitty movies; etc. are only a part of the wider influence the plot, visuals, characters, and Faust inspired themes of Madoka have had. So when we say Selector Infected Wixoss is a "copy", this is both true and meaningless. The question is what is Wixoss saying about Madoka, in the way modern literature responds to Don Quixote or modern art responds to Fountain (Duchamp).
Now that we got that out of the way, what is Wixoss about? The main character of Wixoss is Ruko Kominato, a young girl who has no friends and a dysfunctional nuclear family. She discovers a card game, in which special girls (selectors) who win an unspecified amount of battles can have any wish granted, while the loser of 3 battles has their wish taken from them. Her card avatar (LRIG) is Tama, a girl with no personality or memory who only exists to battle. All pretty basic magical girl stuff.
Right away we get into the first fascinating aspect of Wixoss. Avatars, whether they be magical girl powers or cards, are clearly the sub-consious manifestations of desire. This is not sub-text in MAdoka Magica but simply text. While Madoka's manifested desire is universal love, the one transcindental force that the rational utilitarian Kyubey (Mephistophles) is unable to account for, Ruko's desire is the exact opposite, Kyubey himself:
Tama, the avatar of our main character.
Kyubey, the devil's agent on Earth.
To make this clear, Ruko horrifies the other selectors because she has no wish and plays only for the thrill of life-and-death battle. Further, Ruko horrifies herself becausse her subconsious Tama constantly agitates for battle while she attempts to understand the emotional weaknesses and pains of the other selectors. Ruko has no friends and was abandoned by her family precisely because she has no emotional desire and is "unreadable."
This itself would be an interesting concept (what if Madoka Magica was about Kyubey surrounded by a bunch of irrational, emotional girls who couldn't see the obvious necessity of their sacrifice) but Wixoss takes this further. In the first episode, we see Ruko's brother playing tetris, and an unseen narrator speaks of a prophecy of a pillar from the sky destroying Tokyo. The destruction of Tokyo by a pilar evokes the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the very next frame equivocates the image in the game of tetris:
Pillar destroys Tokyo in a nuclear explosion.
The Tetris block destroys the row of blocks.
What is the show saying here? Our protagonist is the alien, sociopathic Kyubey and the destruction of Walpurgisnacht (the apocalypse of Madoka Magica) is shown as a video game played by a minor character in a show about playing games over life and death. The show is not saying that our main magical girl is a psychopath, rather it is the audience who are the psychopaths. The people who live their daily lives purchasing commodities which disguise the violence of the system that allows their circulation, the world in which drones have made video games into a war, the ideological hyperreality in which the explosions of violence of the underclass interrupt the bubble of peaceful coexistence, we are the mosters. It is only when confronted with our desires directly (in this case in the form of wishes and direct life-and-death battles) do they become horrific.
H.P. Lovecraft eplains the horror of desire in The Call of Cthulhu:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of blackseas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, eachstraining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
Slavoj Zizek applies this to liberal democracy in his analysis of They Live:
"They Live...tells the story of John Nada. “Nada,” of course, in Spanish means “nothing.” A pure subject, deprived of all substantial content. A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around, one day enters into an abandoned church and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses. And when he put one of them on, walking along the L.A. streets, he discovers something weird. That these glasses function like critique-of-ideology glasses. ...When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the standard story of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens...{The horror revealed} is the obscenity of barbarian violence which sustains the public law and order."
A bit more justification is in order. While the twist in Madoka Magica is that magical girls will eventually become witches to balance out the karmic energy of granting their wishes, in Wixoss (incoming spoilers-the plot is the least important part of a show so deal) one's wish is granted, but for your subconscious avatar and you are forced to become someone else's card in order to fulfill their wish. Wishes are commodities, exchanged from one magical girl to the next. While Madoka Magica posits that the excess of desire changes the world (Madoka's final wish makes her a God and literally changes the laws of physics), Wixoss posits that an excess of desire is impotent against the violence of the banal everyday. The show explicitly tells us that the only wishes that are granted are those you yourself could do but because of shyness, misunderstanding, or fear are unable to accomplish. Or, to put it in political terms, Madoka presents all desire as a revolutionary force which causes change, while Wixoss presents desire as precisely the post-modern form of politics which has no revolutionary content. Every desire, no matter how small, in Madoka disrupts the order of the Real, while desire in Wixoss is allowed and encouraged through consumption of card games, video games, anime, etc. The horror of the deadly card game is not that the stakes are so high, it is rather that the deadly card game forces Ruko to confront her own aquiescence to (and even enjoyment of) the proper consumption of desire. The horror of Ruko as Kyubey is that she sees the pointlessness of others' desires just as Kyubey sees the irrationality and potentially universe-destroying consequences of the magical girls. While Madoka gives us faith in the universal desire for love as the solution, Wixoss condemns such desire as already part of Kyubey's desire-producing machine.
Basically, Wixoss is an extremely cynical show. The spectacular atomic bombing of Japan has become the banality of video games, the meta-narratives of the past have become replaced by commodities, and the ethical person is precisely the tolerant, desiring-machine who wishes for things which are immanently possible. Perhaps this is a response to the massive success of Madoka merchandise which ignores the content of the actual show (Evangelion's recreation as a moe anime, culminating in degenerate remake movies of both Eva and Madoka, probably defines the cynicism of modern anime) or perhaps this is because the inevitable incest, yuri, moe, and merchandise marketing make any anime already undermine itself (this show is no exception and can be seen as a resonse to School Days which was another genre defining moment). Regardless, Selector Infected Wixoss is the first anime to confront the post-Madoka world in a comprehensive, critical, and very depressing way.
The show is far from perfect and gets off the rails quite a bit with the power and friendship and such. But Selector Infected Wixoss is potentially the first of shows which are capable of confronting the problem of modern anime in total, and it's cynical confrontation of the genuine despair of the anime industry (and the failure of Madoka Magica) hopefully can be a jumping point for overcoming it.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
Pillar destroys Tokyo in a nuclear explosion.
The Tetris block destroys the row of blocks.
Lessons posted:People who get extremely bent out of shape by anime, video games and other stupid nerd crap are always, as rule, deeply insecure and overcompensating for the lack of meaning in their lives.
agreed with this until i looked at the poster and realized he didn't mean people who get upset because people mock anime, videogames, etc
babyhueypnewton posted:Selector Infected WixossSelector Infected Wixoss has been accused of being a copy of Madoka Magica. This is unsurprising since everything post-Madoka has been a response to Gen Urobuchi's deconstruction of the magical girl genre. The proliferation of Urobuchi works: Fate/Zero 1 & 2; Psycho Pass 1 & 2; Aldnoah.Zero 1 & 2 within the last 3 years and the rebirth of magical girl animes that confront the post-Madoka discourse: Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal; Penguindrum; Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou; Madoka Magica shitty movies; etc. are only a part of the wider influence the plot, visuals, characters, and Faust inspired themes of Madoka have had. So when we say Selector Infected Wixoss is a "copy", this is both true and meaningless. The question is what is Wixoss saying about Madoka, in the way modern literature responds to Don Quixote or modern art responds to Fountain (Duchamp).
Now that we got that out of the way, what is Wixoss about? The main character of Wixoss is Ruko Kominato, a young girl who has no friends and a dysfunctional nuclear family. She discovers a card game, in which special girls (selectors) who win an unspecified amount of battles can have any wish granted, while the loser of 3 battles has their wish taken from them. Her card avatar (LRIG) is Tama, a girl with no personality or memory who only exists to battle. All pretty basic magical girl stuff.
Right away we get into the first fascinating aspect of Wixoss. Avatars, whether they be magical girl powers or cards, are clearly the sub-consious manifestations of desire. This is not sub-text in MAdoka Magica but simply text. While Madoka's manifested desire is universal love, the one transcindental force that the rational utilitarian Kyubey (Mephistophles) is unable to account for, Ruko's desire is the exact opposite, Kyubey himself:
Tama, the avatar of our main character.
Kyubey, the devil's agent on Earth.
To make this clear, Ruko horrifies the other selectors because she has no wish and plays only for the thrill of life-and-death battle. Further, Ruko horrifies herself becausse her subconsious Tama constantly agitates for battle while she attempts to understand the emotional weaknesses and pains of the other selectors. Ruko has no friends and was abandoned by her family precisely because she has no emotional desire and is "unreadable."
This itself would be an interesting concept (what if Madoka Magica was about Kyubey surrounded by a bunch of irrational, emotional girls who couldn't see the obvious necessity of their sacrifice) but Wixoss takes this further. In the first episode, we see Ruko's brother playing tetris, and an unseen narrator speaks of a prophecy of a pillar from the sky destroying Tokyo. The destruction of Tokyo by a pilar evokes the dropping of the atomic bomb, and the very next frame equivocates the image in the game of tetris:
Pillar destroys Tokyo in a nuclear explosion.
The Tetris block destroys the row of blocks.
What is the show saying here? Our protagonist is the alien, sociopathic Kyubey and the destruction of Walpurgisnacht (the apocalypse of Madoka Magica) is shown as a video game played by a minor character in a show about playing games over life and death. The show is not saying that our main magical girl is a psychopath, rather it is the audience who are the psychopaths. The people who live their daily lives purchasing commodities which disguise the violence of the system that allows their circulation, the world in which drones have made video games into a war, the ideological hyperreality in which the explosions of violence of the underclass interrupt the bubble of peaceful coexistence, we are the mosters. It is only when confronted with our desires directly (in this case in the form of wishes and direct life-and-death battles) do they become horrific.
H.P. Lovecraft eplains the horror of desire in The Call of Cthulhu:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of blackseas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, eachstraining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
Slavoj Zizek applies this to liberal democracy in his analysis of They Live:
"They Live...tells the story of John Nada. “Nada,” of course, in Spanish means “nothing.” A pure subject, deprived of all substantial content. A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around, one day enters into an abandoned church and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses. And when he put one of them on, walking along the L.A. streets, he discovers something weird. That these glasses function like critique-of-ideology glasses. ...When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom. The explanation for the existence of these strange ideology glasses is the standard story of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Humanity is already under the control of aliens...{The horror revealed} is the obscenity of barbarian violence which sustains the public law and order."
A bit more justification is in order. While the twist in Madoka Magica is that magical girls will eventually become witches to balance out the karmic energy of granting their wishes, in Wixoss (incoming spoilers-the plot is the least important part of a show so deal) one's wish is granted, but for your subconscious avatar and you are forced to become someone else's card in order to fulfill their wish. Wishes are commodities, exchanged from one magical girl to the next. While Madoka Magica posits that the excess of desire changes the world (Madoka's final wish makes her a God and literally changes the laws of physics), Wixoss posits that an excess of desire is impotent against the violence of the banal everyday. The show explicitly tells us that the only wishes that are granted are those you yourself could do but because of shyness, misunderstanding, or fear are unable to accomplish. Or, to put it in political terms, Madoka presents all desire as a revolutionary force which causes change, while Wixoss presents desire as precisely the post-modern form of politics which has no revolutionary content. Every desire, no matter how small, in Madoka disrupts the order of the Real, while desire in Wixoss is allowed and encouraged through consumption of card games, video games, anime, etc. The horror of the deadly card game is not that the stakes are so high, it is rather that the deadly card game forces Ruko to confront her own aquiescence to (and even enjoyment of) the proper consumption of desire. The horror of Ruko as Kyubey is that she sees the pointlessness of others' desires just as Kyubey sees the irrationality and potentially universe-destroying consequences of the magical girls. While Madoka gives us faith in the universal desire for love as the solution, Wixoss condemns such desire as already part of Kyubey's desire-producing machine.
Basically, Wixoss is an extremely cynical show. The spectacular atomic bombing of Japan has become the banality of video games, the meta-narratives of the past have become replaced by commodities, and the ethical person is precisely the tolerant, desiring-machine who wishes for things which are immanently possible. Perhaps this is a response to the massive success of Madoka merchandise which ignores the content of the actual show (Evangelion's recreation as a moe anime, culminating in degenerate remake movies of both Eva and Madoka, probably defines the cynicism of modern anime) or perhaps this is because the inevitable incest, yuri, moe, and merchandise marketing make any anime already undermine itself (this show is no exception and can be seen as a resonse to School Days which was another genre defining moment). Regardless, Selector Infected Wixoss is the first anime to confront the post-Madoka world in a comprehensive, critical, and very depressing way.
The show is far from perfect and gets off the rails quite a bit with the power and friendship and such. But Selector Infected Wixoss is potentially the first of shows which are capable of confronting the problem of modern anime in total, and it's cynical confrontation of the genuine despair of the anime industry (and the failure of Madoka Magica) hopefully can be a jumping point for overcoming it.
Front page.
aerdil posted:Lessons posted:People who get extremely bent out of shape by anime, video games and other stupid nerd crap are always, as rule, deeply insecure and overcompensating for the lack of meaning in their lives.
agreed with this until i looked at the poster and realized he didn't mean people who get upset because people mock anime, videogames, etc
Kiss my ass rich boy.
c_man posted:i just realized "shrieking violet" is a pun, on the phrase "shrinking violet" that i just heard of for the first time
somehow i always knew this, without realizing it..
orchestra_hit posted:c_man posted:i just realized "shrieking violet" is a pun, on the phrase "shrinking violet" that i just heard of for the first time
somehow i always knew this, without realizing it..
Wild UNKNOWN KNOWN appeared!
tpaine posted:Tantei Opera Milky Holmes.
Little did we know, this degeneration is exactly was babyhuey was fighting against.
Has some interesting ideas, like using water color impressionism to convey the eternal recurrence of pre-WWI bourgeois utopianism as part of the cycle of capitalism, an obnoxious merchandise stand in who disrupts any serious emotional content or audience resonance, the existential burden of having ones wishes actually fulfilled, and a card game show with basically no card games. but the rest is a confused mess that throws away the themes built up in season one for anime cliches and it seems to be headed nowhere good.
tpaine posted:Tantei Opera Milky Holmes.
Petrol posted:Yes, to be fair, the worst anime is not fascist propaganda. It's just child pornography.
wasn't there some popular show a couple months ago that was literally both
babyhueypnewton posted:At least the worst Japanese anime is not literal fascist propaganda like Avatar: The Legend of Korra. I watch children's shows and Japanese animes in my free time some time.
i thought Korra was a metaphor for how Feminism and female empowerment is used by Neoliberalism as a Trojan Horse to protect the existing Objectivist power structure of privilege-born, self-styled ubermenschen from populist revolutionary movements of Scientific Socialism. For more on this subject please visit m a n y f e s t o.org
Superabound posted:babyhueypnewton posted:At least the worst Japanese anime is not literal fascist propaganda like Avatar: The Legend of Korra. I watch children's shows and Japanese animes in my free time some time.
i thought Korra was a metaphor for how Feminism and female empowerment is used by Neoliberalism as a Trojan Horse to protect the existing Objectivist power structure of privilege-born, self-styled ubermenschen from populist revolutionary movements of Scientific Socialism. For more on this subject please visit m a n y f e s t o.org
im confused, that's not a link to deadken's blog
shriekingviolet posted:Petrol posted:Yes, to be fair, the worst anime is not fascist propaganda. It's just child pornography.
wasn't there some popular show a couple months ago that was literally both
World Conquest Zvezda Plot?
Edited by wasted ()
Edited by wasted ()
Edited by wasted ()
Lessons posted:shriekingviolet posted:
Petrol posted:
Yes, to be fair, the worst anime is not fascist propaganda. It's just child pornography.
wasn't there some popular show a couple months ago that was literally both
World Conquest Zvezda Plot?
a cursory google search reveals that Yes, and that i need to have an embarrassing discussion with my CIA handler in the near future