I want to preface this with a content warning for images of violent abuse. These images are unfortunately illustrative of the shows I will be talking about, and somewhat ironically, I kinda need them to get my point across. I haven't put out content warnings for the previous shows because I haven't felt it necessary, but the level of abuse in these shows is actually quite insane. Take caution and have this nice pic of a fox girl cuddling someone. Maybe imagine yourself being cuddled. We all need cuddles.
Episode 4 of Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari (The Rising of the Shield Hero) is, to me, one of the most beautiful metaphors for healing trauma. In Shield Hero, the main character, Iwatani Naofumi, is subjected to intense social rejection and alienation from the moment he is dropped into another world. This comes to a (problematic) head when he is falsely accused of rape by the princess of the matriarchal Kingdom of Melromarc to which he was summoned, and damned as a criminal of the most vulgar nature. He is widely hated by the rest of society; merchants refuse to trade with him, townsfolk mutter about him in the streets, and even the fellow Heroes he was summoned to this world with see him as a crude and abusive man.
This, as is to be expected, warps his perception of himself. Even though he leads a relatively peaceful and average life before he came to this new world, the emotional torture to which he is now subjected completely changes his personality. Psychologically speaking, he is unable to move past the moment of betrayal; his vision is warped, and he is unable to taste any food he eats. Faced with such incessant and oppressive ostracism, he falls victim to a self-feeding, negative reinforcement loop. He sees himself as only capable of evil acts, even though his actions are mostly benign (constructed within the weird anarcho-capitalist paradigm of the show's morality). Because of this, when the slave girl he hired (oh yeah, he did that) is freed from slavery, he can't see when she stands up for him. She reaffirms her promise to be his sword, to fight for him, because he defended her countless times in the short time since they'd known each other. It's beautiful because she's said this before, but he never took it seriously up until the point where she had the power to leave him if she so desired, but chose to stay with him.
Of course, I don't mean to discount the fact that the false rape accusation (and also slavery) is problematic. There's a reason why Shield Hero is colloquially referred to in more woke parts of the community as Incels/Gamers Rise Up: The Anime. Given that Naofumi is meant to be a stand-in for audiences who have experienced some form of social rejection, it's only natural that he will become beloved by male fans who see women as sly and treacherous beings, whose sole purpose in life is to swindle and manipulate them for the sake of status/wealth/whatever. But, more importantly, this phenomenon of using an overly dramatized and sensationalized bad thing (also known as trauma porn) to situate the character at their lowest of lows. Many hold the opinion that there are some cases where the usage of trauma porn is so overt and disgusting as to discount any point that is being made in the plot.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I sometimes indulge in the extreme, visceral display of human suffering that I'm going to talk about. A lot of media I love consuming are ones in which there are no heroes and there are no "good" endings; one of my favorite films of all time is Stalingrad (1993), in which the viewer slowly watches an entire German platoon starve to death and descend to the lowest depths of humanity while being besieged in the city of Stalingrad. No matter how problematic it is, I just can't seem to stop myself. Being forced to suppress a lot of my emotional volatility on a daily basis, these are pretty much the best ways for me to achieve catharsis on my off days. But sometimes, story-telling takes the near-fetishistic meaningless over-representation of human misery just a teensy bit too far. This piece dives really deep into it, and I want to cite it because it's another product of the increasing usage of trauma porn to force audience sympathy in media today. Trauma porn's effectiveness draws on a deep dark place in the human psyche, where shame and pain is sensationalized to create a sense of superiority through pity in the audience. We don't enjoy seeing people and characters suffer horrific injustices because it's pleasurable; we're subconsciously drawn to it, fascinated by it. Many a teen has gone on to LiveLeak to watch crimes against humanity being committed: beheadings, torture, murder. The shock value of trauma porn allows us to draw catharsis from it, and when over-indulged, can warp our sense of normality.
Okay, I'm ready to talk about the main topic of this piece now.
I want to begin by explaining what I mean by "postmodern mahou shoujo" as a genre. Generally speaking, we can lump most of the mahou shoujo anime released in the aftermath of Puella Magi Madoka Magica in this category, because all of them seek to do what Madoka did: to deconstruct the tropes of the mahou shoujo genre. This article by Therefore It Is more expansively delves into what I mean when I say this about Madoka, but to summarize, the relationship between traditional mahou shoujo anime (think Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, Pretty Cure, etc.) and more modern works seems to be quite consistent when talking to genre. I'll call this process from the former to the latter "postmodernification". Postmodernism, for the purposes of this piece, can be defined by its skepticism of modern value systems and its abandonment of the epistemological certainty of the enlightenment. It casts doubt not only on what we perceive as good or bad, but whether it even is possible for humans to ascertain what is good or bad, or even whether such a thing exists as anything beyond a social construct.
Catch-22, one of my favorite novels, was written by Joseph Heller to demonstrate the absurdity of war. He did this by conducting a full postmodernist deconstruction of a scenario in World War 2, using the themes that are common to postmodernist fiction. These tropes include that of the unreliable narrator, where the story is not only represented in a non-chronological order but also told by different characters in different chapters; absurd and farcical moments; and a seeming illogical quality in the way the characters behave. In fact, the reason why this title might sound so familiar to you is because a catch-22 is commonly used today to describe circular logic. This was coined as a result of a particularly famous conundrum that Captain John Yossarian, one of the characters, has. Since he has joined a high-risk air force unit, the only way to avoid flying more missions is to demonstrate his insanity; however, on inquiry, it is found that the only way to demonstrate his insanity is to voluntarily request to fly more of these near-suicide missions. Somewhat closer to the kind of postmodernist critique which I want to talk about is how Catch-22 deals with the question of evil, also known as theodicy; questioning the coexistence of an omnipotent, omniscient God in the Judeo-Christian canon and all manner of evil and horror visited on mankind.
"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways", Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? … Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He? … What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. …"
It is this particular questioning of values that I think attributes to the power of Madoka as the original postmodern mahou shoujo work, and the devaluation of all works that come afterwards. Madoka's success was based on the reinterpretation of the common values of love and peace that were universalized as ideal by original mahou shoujo works. Culturally speaking, many modern societies have in fact attempted to implant these values in women; the equivalent in Western culture would be women being trained only to talk about love and peace worldwide when asked questions at beauty pageants (as satirized in Miss Congeniality (2000)). In the past 5 years, in fact, beauty pageants as a media form have been undergoing significant deconstruction as well, with women being asked much harder questions and giving much more well thought-out, rounded answers, as well as being extended to various marginalized communities as means of making those communities feel valued without necessarily aspiring to toxic white beauty standards. A successful deconstruction of the mahou shoujo genre, then, would be a subversion of the typically pure values that lie at the heart of these stories. As mentioned by Therefore It Is, in mahou shoujo these values tend to be that of friendship and helping others. Madoka, then, was powerful in how it showed these values to not only be naive, but also to inevitably lead to destruction when the relentless pursuit of it in a cruel world caused despair to its characters. Particularly, the arc of Miki Sayaka is my favorite in illustrating this subversion - Sayaka dedicates her wish to the boy she likes with the overall intent that it is a purely selfless wish, and that she only wishes to see him healthy, happy, and able to thrive in music again. When one of her friends steals this boy even though she has done nothing for him, she goes insane with jealousy, revealing that the sentiment underlying her unrequited love was not as altruistic as we are led to believe. In essence, Sayaka transforms into the female "nice guy" archetype; feeling entitled to the reciprocation of her act of love, and seething so hard from a single spurning of affections that she sinks into deep despair for no real good reason at all.
With powerful genre deconstructions like these, there is very little left of the original genre left for new creations to create anew. There has not been a good, traditional magical girl product in the aftermath of Madoka. While My Little Witch Academia reverts to the pre-magical girl genre of Hogwarts-style magical academies, shows like Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Ilya move the needle much closer to fanservice, while Magical Girl Ore clearly parodies the genre by subverting gendered expectations. However, there have been no more sincere efforts to produce traditional, feel-good mahou shoujo anime, just like there have been no more sincere efforts since Zack Snyder's cynical, Randian ass took over the DCEU to make the nice, honest Superman we all know and love. What we do get is deconstruction for the sake of deconstruction, the pure aesthetic of subversion and despair with none of the core experiences to make it anything significant. To put it very plainly, mahou shoujo has become nothing more than a medium for sharp, sharp edge, and as a result of the push to use the aesthetics of despair without really thinking about the product, all we get is trauma porn shoved into our faces time and time again.
Yuuki Yuuna is a Hero causes the loss of a sense for the characters every time they engage their full-burst mankai ability. Magical Girl Raising Project is basically Battle Royale, but if everyone fought with superpowers. But one of these shows stands above the rest; the most egregious purveyor of trauma porn that I have seen within this veritable fountain of edge is, without a doubt, Magical Girl Site. In the first five (5) minutes of the first episode, we are treated to the main character, Asagiri Aya, attempting to commit suicide. She stands at a train junction, and as the train passes by she laments that she couldn't do it today again. This is, quite easily, the bleakest opening to any piece of media that I can remember - not necessarily a sin if it is used for some purpose down the line. We learn that Aya's entire family is abusive in different ways - her parents outright deny her worth as a human being in general all the time in favour of her relatively high-flying older brother, who then uses her as a pincushion to take his rage out on physically. I would say it's a miracle that there's no sexual abuse, but a number of her classmates who bully her eventually try to cause and abet a senior's rape of her, so that apparently seems to be the last straw for the creators here. Very admirable restraint, I must say (sarcastic).
It's tempting to think that this is simply par for the course for Magical Girl Site, an anime in which the signature catchphrase used by the system administrators is "How unfortunate, how unfortunate!", and in which the extent of the girls' misfortune is the requirement to become a magical girl. So you get Aya, the girl whose misfortune is what you would get if you asked a classroom to describe "domestic abuse", collated the results, and then brought all of them to their logical extreme. You get Suirenji Kiyoharu, a trans girl for whom the bullying she faces surrounding her identity is the foundation of her misery. You get Yatsumura Tsuyuno, a girl who watches her adoptive parents get brutally murdered and swear revenge upon their murderer. There's an overarching plot of the pending apocalypse, but in general it's quite difficult to focus on that plot when so much of the show's premise is focused on inflicting as much misery on its characters as it can seemingly get away with in a bid to win the Most-Edgy-Magical-Girl-Anime award.
When Aya spends the entirety of the first episode of that anime being abused both physically and psychologically, the knock-on effects of that abuse should be felt for the rest of the story. The fact that in the very next episode Asagiri was able to interact socially with her new friend Yatsumura Tsuyuno completely normally cheapens the experiences that the author decided she should have. Her suicidal intent, literally the first thing she expresses in the very first spoken line in the anime, should not simply vanish. If these are the things that the author has decided to impart to his characters, then he should follow through with it, and think through the rehabilitation process properly. It is an insult to those who suffer from depression and domestic abuse to use these experiences purely as a cudgel with which one can club pity into the audience. Pity which ultimately goes nowhere.
In my first piece of this series, I mentioned that one of the operative elements within trauma is that the individual is unable to weave the traumatic experience into an autobiographical tale, and as a result is functionally trapped in time. Character development cannot occur for the individual without first resolving this traumatic barrier. With shows like Magical Girl Site, the traumatic experience is merely ignored after it has been introduced. Arguably, if one's entire life is a slog through multiple sacks of shit, it is possible that a character is never able to resolve that barrier. Functionally, I have never seen this visited upon anybody in fiction as anything other than a punishment - take for example Prometheus, who for the crime of stealing fire from the Gods and gifting it to humanity was bound to a rock, with his liver pecked out by an eagle every day anew. The purpose of punishing Prometheus is clear - to make the Greeks grateful that a titan was willing to go against the Olympians for their sake, and also to justify the dominance of humanity over the earth, with fire being symbolic of civilization to this day. I have racked my brain for any possible purpose to punish Aya in the story so. Most likely, it is a misguided appeal to the notion that the most damaged are also the most kindest, since Aya is the archetype of the kind, nice hero around which the magical girls are typically able to unite. In fact, Aya's entire personality in itself is a flaw in the subversion of the genre; by all accounts, Aya is the closest in character to what we would traditionally identify as a magical girl, and everyone else exists in various shades of gray. Yet, she is the central character and her character traits are the ones that drive the story, thereby demonstrating that Magical Girl Site really is not seeking to actually deconstruct mahou shoujo, but rather recreate that deconstruction, leading to a piece which operates on an empty postmodernist aesthetic.
Why is it important? After all, I could have just said Mahou Shoujo Site was bad, and that would have been that. I need to demonstrate to you, the reader, why I think that Mahou Shoujo Site is not just bad, but a problematic piece of media, and an affront on trauma-related media. There is an inherent difference between something that is simply bad and something that sends or perpetuates deeply harmful messages. It's the difference between every single season of 13 Reasons Why, which somehow managed to send out a different terrible message each season, and Glee, which was just a little bit cringy in hindsight but overall rather vapid and inoffensive.
The most obvious thing to get out of the way nearly immediately would be the sexualization of Aya's traumatic experiences. The way the camera lingers over her in the very first episode as she is used as a punching bag by her older brother is an incredibly blatant example of the male gaze in media. The male gaze is a concept which states that the default view of society, and therefore the default perspective of the camera, is male. This is why in almost every single anime there are scenes which linger on the bodies of the girls and women featured within them, or back in the old days "fanservice". The archetypal beach episode and hot springs episode are further symptoms of the male gaze in anime. I'm not suggesting that every man gets off to physical abuse (I've asked about it enough to conclude that it is rather uncommon in minimally decently-adjusted people), but rather the fact that physical abuse is somehow turned into sexual spectacle not out of intent but rather almost reflexively both demonstrates and perpetuates the male gaze.
The more important issue is this: trauma porn, the portrayal of horrific abuse for the sake of spectacle, is harmful to both the consumers and the victims. To bring this closer to home, I want to bring up two recent trends which are relevant. The first is the trend of TikTok users role-playing as Holocaust victims (??????????? why). Even if one gives the benefit of the doubt to these social media users and believes that they are making a good faith attempt to spread Holocaust awareness in a generation which has increasing levels of Holocaust denial, outreach in this particular fashion has the unintended effect of trivializing the subject matter. It's hard to not find the level of abuse Aya faces farcical at times, and this eventually leads to a desensitization of the audience to the subject matter. The second trend is that of videos of shootings going viral, especially over the course of Black Lives Matter as people sought to hold police officers accountable for their actions. In this particular instance, the necessity of publicizing and making the footage of these shootings trend is ambiguous - it has been argued in many circles that this publicity only serves to either desensitize the population or further the feelings of despair. In any case, trauma porn in Magical Girl Site doesn't reach this standard of ambiguity.
The message that I want to drive home is this. I am not one of those weirdo formerly skeptic alt right YouTubers who slings terms like "postmodernism" together with "cultural Marxism" as politically-charged epithets. However, it must be recognized that the works of the postmodern mahou shoujo genre genuinely do suffer from the curse of many other genres that have undergone deconstruction: the curse of form without function. The particular nature of the mahou shoujo concept also makes the genre particularly susceptible to extreme levels of trauma porn. I believe that we should always be suspicious of shows that put their characters through intense suffering for no discernible reason. I mentioned in my article on Banana Fish that trauma is heavily misrepresented by the media, and shows like this are oftentimes the biggest culprits in perpetuating that misinformation. I promise that I'll get back to more wholesome stuff tomorrow.
References
Darnell, Regna. “The Paradoxical Legacy of Postmodernism.” Anthropologica 53, no. 2 (2011): 328–30.
Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. Simon & Schuster, 1961.