[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by Classified Info

Ye well, i'm a 20y male, and i don't really get how i should be able to enjoy magical girl animes; i mean, being a boy, i tend to empathize with the protagonist, but if it's a girl, it's obviously impossible; add to that that the entire cast is 99.98% of the times made of other girls...

Midonin made a very good point in response to this - "Many, many experiences in life, more yay than nay, are independent of one's gender."

You don't necessarily have to share a character's age or gender in order to sympathize/empathize with the situations that the plot puts them through. It may help, certainly, but it's not usually a prerequisite.

And I think that with Madoka Magica, this is very true. Most of the Madoka girls are grappling with intellectual quagmires and ethical/philosophical issues that frankly transcend gender and age. For example...

Spoiler for Madoka Magica Episode 6 spoiler:

Sayaka's "Evil must be vigorously opposed, always, and by force if necessary." vs. Madoka's "We must always strive for peaceful solutions, fighting other people is dangerous and wrong" is one of the oldest philosophical arguments in the book, with no clear-cut right or wrong answer (at least not in an across-the-board way). Now that's not exactly what Sayaka and Madoka said, but that's the basic jist of it if you read between the lines.

The magical girl genre appeals to a lot of guys because it essentially combines moe with flashy superheroes (and superhero style conflict). Now, I'm going to put moe aside because that's a huge discussion in and of itself, and probably not the most helpful one to explaining to you in particular why people like the magical girl genre. So I'm going to focus on the superhero side.

Again, Midonin raised a great point in what he wrote about Sayaka.

Sayaka, like a lot of magical girls, has many of the same characteristics as a comic book superhero. If you can like characters like Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine, etc... or even shonen heroes like Ichigo Kurosaki - It shouldn't be that hard to transition into liking magical girls. In fact, magical girl aesthetics helps here, in my opinion, because you have that "flashy style" similarity going on.

As somebody who loved comic books as a kid I find it very easy to love magical girl anime for much the same reason that I once loved comic books.

I'm asking this because i want to know what is so good about the anime "Madoka Magica", that seems to be the best series of 2011 according to many: what's so good about it that even males loved it?

A lot of this is SHAFT's distinctive style and Yuki Kajura's BGM work. It's the full, trippy theatrical package that appeals to a lot of us. Madoka Magica has a real edge to it (maybe not that much in the first couple of episodes, but later on it does).

Out of curiosity, i wanted to get over my aversion for this kind of genre, and watched it anyways, but it was painful: i didn't like the artwork much (the faces were... squared? Or something, they looked like stuffed...),

"Pancake-faces" is admittedly a common criticism raised against Madoka Magica. But I think that the art style will grow on most viewers over time if they give it a chance, and don't focus too much on it (as opposed to focusing on the dialogue and the plot). It's similar to how I felt about the Key/KyoAni art style - At first, it seemed a bit off to me, but over time, it grew on me, and I came to love it.

the story was rather predictable from the first appearance of the black haired girl.

Lots of stories are predictable. Many of them are for adults. This is hardly something that you only find in magical girl anime.

I myself usually love unpredictable stories because they're so rare, so I empathize with you here, but this isn't something that magical girl anime in particular deserves to take heat for, imo.

If you just followed the first 2 episodes very carefully, you'd get what i mean: a girl that comes from nowhere and that cares about you but can't say anything; the same girl is trying to kill a little animal that, in the meanwhile, is trying to suspiciously convince you to become a magical girl: isn't it somehow obvious that the girl knows something more and is trying to avoid you getting hurt in the future? But then, how can she know what bad events are going to happen? Most likely, she comes from the future, and there you have got some plot with time travelling. This was my reasoning, and it actually turned to be like that, and so i wasn't surprised and the whole series became a pain.

Even as somebody who loves unpredictability, I wouldn't watch a show with my only hope being "Surprise me, please!".

Even a very predictable show may be good in other ways. Focus on that. Focus on the characters that you like, the action scenes that you simply found fun to watch, the overall execution of things.

I mean, let's face it - 99 times out of 100, the protagonists win. That alone is going to make anime shows and stories at least a bit predictable. To a certain degree, it's just something you have to learn to live with (while appreciating those shows that truly manage to surprise).