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For as popular and influential as Madoka is, I wish it had inspired more experimental animation and thoughtful genre and trope deconstructions in anime across the board and fewer edgy series about teenage girls being forced to undergo severe emotional and physical trauma. https://twitter.com/randomsakuga/status/1317586298467717122
While breaking a trope/genre down to its basics and exploring them in-depth can lead to a more cynical interpretation, deconstructions are not required to be edgy, and frankly, I would be far more impressed by a work that did not rely on being grimdark to cover up shoddy writing.
A great deconstruction of the magical girl genre that doesn’t rely on being dark and edgy is The Demon Girl Next Door, a SoL comedy that manages to explore everything from speedy magical transformations to the stress that comes from bearing such a heavy burden from a young age.
If anything, I wish Madoka had inspired more stories about magical girls aimed at older audiences that did not rely on traumatizing and/or hypersexualizing the cast for entertainment purposes, even if they were only born out of spite for Madoka’s influence.
