{"id":5860,"date":"2011-02-15T23:28:51","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T03:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/?p=5860"},"modified":"2011-02-15T23:28:51","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T03:28:51","slug":"cardcaptor-madoka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2011\/02\/15\/cardcaptor-madoka\/","title":{"rendered":"Cardcaptor Madoka"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By now most of the people watching <em>Puella Magi Madoka Magica<\/em> have concluded that the real villain is the cute animal mascot character Kyuubee. (I&#8217;m just going to transliterate the name. Others use &#8220;Kyubey&#8221; or even &#8220;QB&#8221;.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to believe that he&#8217;s actually in league with the witches. At best he&#8217;s a totally amoral pragmatist who is willing to sacrifice any number of magical girls in order to defeat a greater evil. Worst of all is the way he deceives his potential recruits. He doesn&#8217;t exactly lie to them but he certainly doesn&#8217;t tell them the whole truth about what they are getting into.<\/p>\n<p>This is a notable subversion of the well-worn tropes of the <a href=\"\/fun\/terms-used-in-anime-reviews#mahou_shoujo\">magical girl<\/a> genre, but it is not unprecedented. In fact it evokes the greatest magical girl show of them all: <a href=\"\/fun\/2006\/12\/08\/cardcaptor-sakura-anime-review\/\"><em>Cardcaptor Sakura<\/em><\/a>.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nAnyone watching the first episode of <em>Cardcaptor Sakura<\/em> may be forgiven for wondering if Sakura is making a big mistake. Maybe in some sense she is. Kerberos, the cute animal mascot character of CCS, recruits Sakura with carefully-worded equivocation. He doesn&#8217;t exactly lie, but his words are misleading. If Sakura had known the real truth about what she was getting into, she probably would have refused.<\/p>\n<p>Yet nobody hates Kerberos. I&#8217;ll give you some reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Kerberos, unlike Kyuubee, has an actual personality.<\/li>\n<li>Kerberos genuinely cares about Sakura and tries to look out for her interests. Kyuubee just seems to be looking out for Number One.<\/li>\n<li>Kerberos sometimes shows uncertainty about what he is doing. Kyuubee just seems smug.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most importantly, even if Sakura doesn&#8217;t get what she wanted in the beginning she seems satisfied with the outcome. In fact the whole series can be regarded as an extended metaphor for the trade-offs involved in growing up. You don&#8217;t get exactly what you dreamed about, but you also get things that you could not have imagined.<\/p>\n<p>It seems unlikely that Madoka will have such a happy outcome, but I suppose anything is possible at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By now most of the people watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica have concluded that the real villain is the cute animal mascot character Kyuubee. (I&#8217;m just going to transliterate the&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/2011\/02\/15\/cardcaptor-madoka\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[186,410],"class_list":["post-5860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime","tag-cardcaptor-sakura","tag-madoka-magica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5860"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5866,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5860\/revisions\/5866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugfox.net\/fun\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}