Week Nine: Shojo + Josei

Before taking this class, I had known what Shojo was, but was not really aware of Josei's existence. I had heard of the term before, but generally manga and anime seem to be sorted into the Shojo category instead of the Josei category. Because of this, I decided to do some extra research on the differences between Shojo and Josei, for my own sake:

I found that Josei was more similar to Seinen in the idea that the romantic relationships between characters are more realistic, and less idealistic like Shojo. Josei targets older women and typically are about women and only women, and are typically more explicit, which explains why I was not really aware of the genre. Josei also seems to stay in manga form and typically does not become anime, which I found to be interesting.

I was originally going to talk about Ouran High School Host Club as it is a Shojo manga, but seeing as I covered it during the Romance week, I decided to talk about Puella Magi Madoka Magica instead.



Puella Magi Madoka Magica is part of the magical girl genre, a sub-genre of Shojo. What makes Madoka Magica such an insightful and unique show is the underlying darkness that comes along with such a cutesy, happy-looking anime. Instead of being your typical magical girl style anime, this anime probably fits better under the category of Dark Fantasy. Right off the bat, the show instantly delves you into the question of what it means to be a Magical Girl, depicting the idea to be both harrowing and dream-crushing. Everyone that has devoted themselves into becoming a magical girl gets trapped in this unbreakable cycle of life or death: the idea that they must defeat witches in order to both save themselves, and save the world. Defeating witches allows them to purify their "soul gem", both their source of power and where their actual soul ends up. However, failure to purify soul gems turns the magical girl into the very witch they are fighting, so there is no winning. The system is inherently broken and as the plot develops, people's individual hopes are dreams are twisted and shifted in ways that are hard to explain or justify without watching the show. Overall, Madoka Magica is a horrifying masterpiece in the way it delivers hope, despair and sacrifice through its plot and character development, and is definitely a show worth watching.