Children’s Literature in Education

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9355-9

ORIGINAL PAPER

Shoujo Versus Seinen? Address and Reception in Puella

Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

Catherine Butler1

© The Author(s) 2018

Abstract This article uses the Japanese television anime series Puella Magi
Madoka Magica (2011) as a case study through which to problematise the rela-
tionship between two prominent traditions within children’s literature criticism:
narratology, with its vocabulary of implied readers and textual address; and
reception studies, which typically gather data through empirical work with children.
The figure of the “child reader” is claimed by both traditions, although in one case
that reader is a textual construct and in the other a human being; yet this ambiguity
is not typically addressed within studies of individual texts. Puella Magi Madoka
Magica, a complex work that disrupts viewer expectations and genre assumptions,
both destabilises its implied viewership and challenges conventional beliefs about
the tastes and capacities of actual viewers, especially the extent to which those
viewers can be categorised by age or gender. I argue that, by taking a sideways step
from page to screen, and especially by analysing a non-Western work, it is possible
to highlight the contingent and arbitrary nature of some of the assumptions that
permeate literary critical discussion, and to help bring narratalogical and reception
studies into a more productive relationship.

Keywords Textual address · Reception · Puella Magi Madoka Magica ·

Anime · Japanese television

Catherine Butler is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University, where her academic
books on children’s literature include Four British Fantasists (Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006), Teaching
Children’s Fiction (Palgrave, 2006) and Reading History in Children’s Books (with Hallie O’Donovan;
Palgrave, 2012). She has also edited several academic collections, including Modern Children’s
Literature (with Kimberley Reynolds, 2014), and produced six novels for children and teenagers.

& Catherine Butler

[email protected]
1
School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, John Percival Building,
Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK

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The television anime Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (魔法少女まどか☆マギカ),

known outside Japan as Puella Magi Madoka Magica (hereafter PMMM), was a
critical and commercial hit in its home country when first broadcast in 2011,
winning a large fanbase and multiple awards, including the Japanese Ministry of
Culture’s grand prize for animation at the 15th Japan Media Arts Festival (Japan
Media Arts Festival Archive, 2011). It has since spawned numerous spin-off manga,
three feature films (including a sequel, Rebellion [2013]), video games and many
and varied forms of merchandise. It has also gained a fanbase in the West, where
there has been considerable discussion of its themes, structure, intertexts and gender
politics, including some scholarly interest (Greenwood, 2015, Cleto and Bahl,
2016). However, this is the first academic article to consider PMMM in relation to
its audience.
In what follows I will use PMMM and its reception in the (primarily Anglophone)
West to explore the relationship of two critical traditions that have long cohabited in
children’s literature criticism but seldom cross paths: textual address and reader
reception. By making a sideways move from book to screen, and from a Western
text to a Japanese one, I will demonstrate the culturally bound nature of these
traditions as they are used in critical discourse, and challenge both the critical habit
of conflating implied and actual readers, and the tendency of critical discussion to
default to binary language along the axes of age (child/adult) and gender (male/
female).

The Relationship of Address and Reception in Children’s Literature

Studies

Both address and reception can be viewed as possible approaches to one of the
abiding projects of children’s literature criticism, that of providing a satisfactory
account of the relationship between children’s texts and their readers. The concept
of textual address derives from the narratological tradition running from Wayne
Booth (1961), Wolfgang Iser (1974) and (within children’s literature) Barbara Wall
(1991), and is often discussed in terms of identifying and describing a text’s implied
readership, implied readers being carefully distinguished from living readers and
defined as textual constructs rather than as human beings. Reception studies,
conversely, take as their province the ways in which actual readers have understood,
discussed, used and felt about texts, as well as the broader interactions of texts with
their cultural contexts. In such studies, empirical data of various kinds are likely to
be prominent, with questions of address relatively overshadowed.
These differences in approach partly reflect methodological fault lines that reach
back to the origins of children’s literature as an area of academic study, rooted as it
is in both Literature and Education departments, with their respective text-centred
and empirical biases. As the discipline has developed, its attempts at self-definition
have often revolved around such ambiguous terms as “the child reader”, which has a
place in both traditions. Is “the child reader” an implied reader, a construct created
by texts themselves, or a metonym for real children, whose reading practices are
potentially open to empirical investigation? Many of the best-known and most hotly

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discussed contributions to children’s literature studies, from Jacqueline Rose’s The

Case of Peter Pan (1984) to Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult (2008) and David
Rudd’s Reading the Child in Children’s Literature (2013), have dealt in one way or
another with demarcation disputes between living and text-generated readers.
According to Wall in The Narrator’s Voice (1991), writing for children generally
exhibits either single, double or dual address, each of which constructs a different
implied reader (or readers). Single address occurs where a text constructs an implied
child readership exclusively, through its choice of subject matter, style or
vocabulary. Other texts (or perhaps other passages of the same text) use double
address, constructing both an implied child and an implied adult reader, and offering
different fare to each. While some material may appear child-directed (perhaps
through its use of limited vocabulary or children as point-of-view characters), other
features imply an adult reader (for example, through literary references with which
children are unlikely to be familiar, or ironies visible only to those with adult
experience). Wall’s third category is dual address, which appeals to experiences and
interests shared by adults and children, using language accessible to both, and
constructing an implied reader who cannot be labelled exclusively as child or adult.
However, Wall concludes that “genuine dual address” is “very rare” (35).
In theory, these distinctions refer to implied readers only, and represent quite a
different critical tradition from that involving research into the behaviour and
attitudes of actual children. Nevertheless, studies of address are inevitably informed
by wider cultural assumptions about the tastes and capacities of children and adults
(for example, that children are less likely than adults to notice irony), even if these
assumptions and their capacity to constrain and shape textual analysis tend to be
tacit. One advantage of considering a work that falls outside Western cultural
categories is that the contingent and culturally specific nature of such assumptions
can more easily be made visible. Specifically, Wall’s binary language of doubleness
and duality reflects a longstanding tradition, not only in children’s literature
criticism but in Western society generally, of defining the relationship of childhood
and adulthood in terms of difference rather than continuity. Marah Gubar has noted
that “the categories ‘child’ and ‘adult’ neatly carve up the human community into
two separate classes of people” (Gubar, p. 454), and this article partly responds to
her call to challenge that assumption of difference with a “kinship model” that
acknowledges the overlap and variability of different human states (Gubar, p. 451).
I contend that binary conceptions of age, as of gender, are deeply problematic; as we
will see in the case of PMMM, they are especially so in combination.
Those who produce books, films, and television programmes for children signal
the audience that they expect in numerous ways, both within the texts themselves
and through paratextual and extra-textual features such as cover art, merchandise,
marketing, and trailers—features that may be extended and elaborated by retailers,
age-classification boards, parents, teachers and other gatekeepers. One may
understand this kind of activity in terms of address (constructing an implied
reader) or as a practical attempt to indicate a work’s intended market. Like any act
of communication, however, such signals are vulnerable to ambiguity—which is to
say that they are opportunities for the creative production of meaning. I suggest that
the makers of PMMM took advantage of this capacity for ambiguity in a way that

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allowed them to expand their audience to include two demographics (young female
teenagers and males in their late teens and early twenties) often seen in the West as
distinct to the point of being mutually exclusive on grounds of both gender and age.
In doing so they exploited the relationship between address and reception in ways
that enabled the series to surprise reader expectation, to prosecute a metatextual
exploration of its own genre assumptions, and to increase the reach and profitability
of the franchise. Importantly, PMMM achieved this by combining two anime types:
shoujo and seinen.
Anime (like the manga from which many are derived) are conventionally
categorized in terms of their supposed audience, which is generally divided along
age and gender lines, and thence correlated with certain genres and subject matters
that are supposed to appeal to a given demographic. For example, kodomomuke
(子供向け, “child-directed”) anime are marketed to young children and typically
feature humorous stories, adaptations of children’s classics and the like. Shounen
(少年, “boy”) anime are designed for slightly older boys, aged up to about 15, and
are typically adventurous and action-based, a well-known example being One Piece
(1999-present). Shoujo (少女, “girl”) anime are associated with girls from around
10–18 years, and come in a variety of genres, including slice-of-life stories, plots
about sport and romance, and of course the mahou shoujo (魔法少女) or magical
girl genre. There are also anime associated with older boys and young men, aged
from around 15 into their early twenties, sometimes called seinen (青年, “young
man”) anime. Many seinen anime are “dark”, dealing with violence, psychological
disturbance and philosophical themes, sometimes with a degree of sexual interest:
examples are Elfen Lied (2004) and Psycho-Pass (2012–2013). Assumptions about
age and gender are thus built into Japanese genre categories no less than Western
ones, although the fact that the divisions employed by manga and anime publishers
map only loosely onto those used by Western publishers of children’s literature
should alert us to the culturally bound nature of such divisions in both cases, as
might the consideration that anime have a broader audience generally in Japan than
cartoons in countries such as the United States (Katsuno and Maret, 2004, p. 83). In
what follows I shall consider how some of the assumptions informing these
divisions have inflected both reception and address in the case of PMMM.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Over twelve 24-minute episodes, PMMM tells the story of an ordinary, somewhat
naı̈ve fourteen-year-old girl called Madoka Kaname. The story begins when
Madoka is disturbed one night by a strange dream, in which she witnesses a dark-
haired girl (whom we later learn to be Homura Akemi) fighting desperately against a
powerful magical enemy in the ruins of a city. In her dream, a cat-like creature
called Kyubey tells Madoka that she can save the situation if she agrees to let him
turn her into a magical girl. At this point Madoka wakes up and gets on with her
day, wrongly assuming (like many a protagonist before her) that it was “just a
dream”. However, later that day Madoka and her friend Sayaka become trapped in a
supernatural labyrinth and find themselves under attack by surreal, blade-wielding

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assailants. Madoka and Sayaka are rescued just in time by Mami Tomoe, an
established magical girl who, it turns out, knows Kyubey—no figment, but a real
creature. Mami and Kyubey explain that labyrinths are created by witches, malign
creatures who lurk in the human world and draw in victims to kill them or drive
them to suicide. As in Madoka’s dream, Kyubey asks Madoka and Sayaka to
become magical girls and join the fight against the witches. He offers the
inducement that, on becoming a magical girl, each will be granted one wish and
issued with a Soul Gem, a piece of jewellery that acts as the source of a magical
girl’s power. Should Madoka and Sayaka accept Kyubey’s offer?
This summary of the opening of PMMM may sound familiar to anyone who has
seen other mahou shoujo anime, for it uses numerous tropes that are standard
features of the genre. Mahou shoujo anime typically centre around an apparently
ordinary teenage girl who, on encountering a magical creature (sometimes known as
a mascot character), is given magical powers and a cool costume to go with them,
then goes on to fight evil and uphold justice, usually while having to keep her
magical identity secret from family and friends.
The most economical way to convey the extent to which the opening of PMMM
adheres to the established conventions of the genre is through a direct comparison
with earlier mahou shoujo anime. In Table 1, PMMM is compared with Sailor Moon
(1992–1997), probably the best-known mahou shoujo anime in the West;
Cardcaptor Sakura (1998–2000), another well-known mahou shoujo, broadcast
(in a significantly edited and straightwashed form) in the West as Cardcaptors
(2000–2001); and Lyrical Girl Nanoha (2004)—a series that is less well known, but
significant in this context because, like PMMM, it was directed by Akiyuki Shinbou.
This table is far from being an exhaustive list of mahou shoujo tropes, but is
indicative of the extent to which the opening of PMMM conforms to the features
typical of the genre. It does so in terms both of major elements (the existence of a
magic-granting mascot creature reminiscent of Sailor Moon’s Luna, Sakura’s Kero
or Nanoha’s Yuuno) and of details, such as the protagonist running to school with
toast from breakfast dangling from her mouth, a habit associated with the
disorganised Usagi Tsukino (alias Sailor Moon). The result is that, the jarring
surrealism of the labyrinth sequences notwithstanding, there is little in the first two

Table 1 Mahou shoujo tropes in PMMM

Trope Sailor Cardcaptor Lyrical Girl PMMM
Moon Sakura Nanoha

“Dream” that is more than a dream YES YES YES YES

Cute mascot character… YES YES YES YES
… whom the protagonist meets by rescuing it… YES NO YES YES
…. and who turns out to be an alien YES NO YES YES
Transformation (henshin) sequences YES YES YES YES
Named attacks/manoeuvres YES YES YES YES
Jewellery is the source of magical power YES YES YES YES

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episodes of PMMM to suggest that it is anything but a relatively typical mahou

shoujo anime. This impression is reinforced by the show’s official trailer, which
carefully selects only the gentlest and least disturbing sequences from its early
episodes and matches them with an equally saccharine text, for example describing
Kyubey simply as a “magical messenger who will grant a girl’s one wish” (the
inadequacy of which description will become apparent).1
The conventional nature of the opening episodes is underlined, but also
somewhat undermined, by the degree of self-aware genre-savviness exhibited by
some of the characters. Sayaka, in particular, recognizes both Homura’s appearance
in Madoka’s dream and her later incarnation as a mysterious transfer student as
anime clichés. Madoka, enticed by the prospect of becoming a magical girl, takes
time to sketch out “costume ideas” in her school notebook (Episode 2). Although
these details ostensibly highlight the show’s mahou shoujo credentials, the degree of
self-consciousness they imply may hint that this is something of a pose. It may also
reflect the fact that, by 2011, the mahou shoujo genre had a long and rich history, of
which middle-school students such as Madoka and Sayaka would plausibly have
some awareness.
It is only at the end of Episode 3 that the viewer is alerted unambiguously to
PMMM’s departure from the conventional parameters of mahou shoujo anime.
Here, in a scene set within a cake-themed labyrinth, we see Mami fight and
apparently kill a witch, witnessed by Madoka and Sayaka (both still pondering
Kyubey’s offer). At Mami’s moment of triumph a giant caterpillar-like creature
hatches from the witch’s body, bites Mami’s head off, and feasts on her corpse.
Madoka and Sayaka are horrified, and so it seems were many of the show’s viewers.
Mami had been introduced as a main character, a dependable mentor to the other
girls. As if to confirm her permanence, she features heavily, along with Madoka and
Sayaka, in the show’s opening credits. To kill off such a major character so
suddenly and violently, as early as the third episode of the series, was shocking, and
the scene has become notorious in consequence. Youtube hosts numerous reaction
videos to the series that allow us to witness the shock of unprepared viewers at
Mami’s death (see, for example, Timekeeper 2015).
This moment marks a decisive shift in the series. The first two episodes ran the
end credits against an everyday picture of Madoka, Sayaka, and their friend Hitomi,
set to a melancholy ballad performed by Madoka’s voice actress. From Episode 3
the ending theme changes to rock guitar and drums, against an animation of Madoka
walking, then running, past her silhouetted friends into the darkness of an abyss.
Early in the following episode the distraught Madoka, who is suffering flashbacks,
leaves the sketch book containing her naı̈ve sketches of herself as a magical girl in
Mami’s empty apartment, as if abandoning the idealistic version of magical
girlhood that Mami had embodied and to which she herself had aspired.
What does this change of direction imply? There are several possible
interpretations, distinct but by no means mutually exclusive. We may view this
simply as a change of tone—from an essentially upbeat show about good
triumphing over evil to a dark and unhappy show that emphasizes the suffering and

1
Japanese text: “少女のお願い事をひとつだけ叶えてくれる魔法の使者” (AniplexUS, 2011).

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cost involved in heroism. We might in addition say that this tonal shift indicates a
change of genre, from shoujo to seinen anime, that the mode of address has
changed, and with it the implied viewership. Finally, we might suggest that there is
also a change of audience, again from shoujo to seinen—that is to say, from girls in
their early teens to boys and men in their late teens and early twenties. It is tempting
in fact to assume that each of these three potential inferences implies the other two,
but the situation is rather more complex, and for the moment it is helpful to keep
them distinct. The dual function of terms such as “shoujo” and “seinen” in
describing both genres and audiences is a potential source of confusion and
ambiguity here, much as “child” and “adult” are within children’s literature
criticism.
In subsequent episodes, the initial optimism of PMMM continues to be
undermined. It turns out that Kyubey is not after all a helpful mascot in the
tradition of Sailor Moon’s Luna. Rather, he is a predator who lures girls into a
Faustian contract for his own ends, knowing that (as well as the enticement of a
wish and magical powers) he can rely on his victims’ familiarity with the mahou
shoujo genre itself and the attraction of fighting evil while looking fabulous. The
genre-savviness of Sayaka and Madoka is thus revealed as wrong-genre-savviness
(TV Tropes, n.d.). That is why, for example, the term “Soul Gem” causes them no
alarm. After all, Sailor Moon possessed a lot of magical paraphernalia with similarly
grandiose names, such as Spiral Heart Moon Rod and Moon Power Tiara. Anyone
familiar with mahou shoujo anime might expect magical girls to be issued with
accessories of this sort. What Kyubey fails to mention, but is lying in plain sight, is
that the Soul Gems are actually containers for the girls’ souls, which he “rips out of
their bodies” when he makes them into magical girls, leaving their bodies as mere
“exterior hardware” (Episode 6).
Thereafter, the emphasis of the series is on the inescapable tragedy of life as a
magical girl. Not only are magical girls slaves to their fate of fighting witches
(which they must do in order keep their Soul Gems from becoming corrupted), but
when they inevitably succumb to despair they are destined to become witches
themselves. This metamorphosis is in fact the point of Kyubey’s system: Kyubey is
an alien, who uses the anguish of magical girls, and specifically the emotional
energy generated by their witch-transformations, as a power source. The device of
aliens harvesting energy from humans is not in itself an innovation (energy-sucking
aliens were regular antagonists in Sailor Moon) but here it is an industrial process.
Magical girls are created precisely to fall into despair and become witches, and are
then recycled as fodder for new magical girls.
One of the favourite manoeuvres of PMMM’s writer, Gen Urobuchi, is to take the
tropes of the mahou shoujo genre and explore their possible rationales. Should we
assume that mascot creatures are benevolent, or might they have ulterior motives?
Where do monsters-of-the-week come from? Why is it that magical girls (like other
cartoon characters) are able to withstand so much physical punishment in fights
without suffering serious injury? (Here, it is because their bodies are merely
animated corpses, sustained by magic.) Why is it always magical girls, rather than
boys, women or men? Kyubey explains that he chooses teenage girls because

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“females in the second stage of development” have the greatest fluctuations in

emotional state and thus make the most abundant energy sources (Episode 9).
This approach has led to PMMM being widely discussed by Western fans as a
“deconstruction” of the mahou shoujo genre,2 in that it follows the consequences of
the genre’s assumptions through and attempts either to find explanations for them or
to consider how they might play out in a real-world context—for example, showing
the mental trauma caused by witnessing a sudden violent death. For those who are
dismissive of the mahou shoujo genre, PMMM’s strength lies in its ability to expose
the genre’s supposed absurdities; for others, it validates the genre by stress-testing
its possible weaknesses and resolving issues apparent in earlier series. Some fans
see the show’s change of direction at Episode 3 as a disclosure of its true nature, a
pulling away of the “cute” mahou shoujo mask to reveal the nihilistic truth behind,
making it “a seinen that’s cleverly disguised as a shoujo” (MasterKingJC4ever,
2012), in the words of one Youtube reviewer. In this discourse, the seinen and
shoujo genres are placed firmly in opposition.
Nevertheless, the conclusion of the series arguably rehabilitates what one might
call mahou shoujo ideals and aesthetics. At the start of the final episode, the
notebook containing Madoka’s magical-girl sketches, which she had abandoned in
Mami’s apartment, is returned to her, suggesting that her first, idealistic vision of
magical girlhood is not after all to be definitively discarded. When she finally
becomes a magical girl in that same episode (in which incarnation she appears in a
pink costume stereotypically bedecked with ribbons and frills), Madoka makes a
wish to erase Kyubey’s system, rearranging the universe in consequence. Under
Madoka’s dispensation evil still exists, but now takes the form of wraiths (魔獣,
“majuu”, literally “magical beasts”) rather than witches (魔女, “majo”). When
magical girls’ Soul Gems are exhausted in fighting wraiths, instead of turning into
witches they simply disappear from the mortal world and are led by the now-godlike
Madoka to a comfortable afterlife. “Magical girls make hopes and dreams come
true” (Episode 12), declares the transformed Madoka—a line that would not have
been out of place in Sailor Moon. The ending of the series is not entirely happy:
magical girls still die in battle, and Madoka’s transformation means that she is
forgotten by almost everyone she loved; but it is far less inconsistent with previous
mahou shoujo anime than the wholly bleak trajectory of Episodes 3-11. The final
generic status of PMMM is thus debatable: does it come to praise the mahou shoujo
genre, or to bury it?

The Reception of PMMM

The traditional audience of mahou shoujo anime (as of shoujo anime generally) is
pre-teen and early-teen girls, and PMMM has a considerable following from that
demographic. Yet there is also a large Western seinen audience for the show,
attracted in many cases by the presence of the darker elements that I have outlined

2
For a few examples among many, see Glass Reflection (2011), Bridges (2014) and JaredMithrandir
(2015).

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above. In practice, this latter group’s reception of the show is far easier to trace,
since they are more given to recording their opinions on discussion lists and bulletin
boards such as 4chan, personal blogs, and sites such as MyAnimeList and Youtube,
where both reviews and “real time” reactions to PMMM are plentiful. These are
useful sources of data, which I have supplemented by means of a small online
survey (for the results of which, see Butler 2016), but it should be borne in mind that
those who leave comments on public fora such as these are a self-selecting group,
not necessarily representative of the show’s audience as a whole.
Seinen discussions of PMMM often begin with a claim for PMMM’s exceptional
status amongst mahou shoujo series. This can be a pre-emptive defence against
charges of feminization and infantilization: the author does not normally watch
shows about magical girls, he explains, nor does he expect his viewers to be in the
habit of doing so; but he exhorts them to give PMMM a chance because (unlike, by
implication, most mahou shoujo anime) it will be worth it (MasterKingJC4ever,
2012; Crowe, 2012; Lelouch Killuah, 2013; Departed Reflections, 2015). This
exceptionalist rhetoric, which elevates one particular show at the expense of the
genre of which it is an example, is far from universal in seinen discussion, but is
more common than the alternative approach of embracing the mahou shoujo genre
in general. In this respect, discussions of PMMM contrast with those conducted by
adult male admirers of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic [2010-present]
(the so-called “brony” fandom), which often convey a liberatory sense that giving
oneself permission to like a “cute” show affords access to pleasures and emotions
normally repressed by the demands of traditional masculinity. For many seinen
commentators on PMMM, however, the show’s mahou shoujo designation and the
fact that its dramatis personae consist primarily of middle-school girls are regarded
as obstacles to be overcome, although the contrast between the initial appearance of
the show and subsequent events may then go on to form part of its appeal. For
example, the German Youtube reviewer Lelouch Killuah (2013) begins by showing
an idealised image of Madoka and her friends, voicing the words “Awww, how
sweet! Magical girls. Aren’t those the little girls with magical powers who save the
world and cheerfully—”.3 At this point the video cuts abruptly to a visceral clip
from Episode 7, showing Sayaka in the midst of a mental breakdown, hacking again
and again at the body of a witch while blood splatters onto her face, and crying, “I
don’t feel pain anymore!”
In addition to this appreciation of the contrast between the anime’s early episodes
and the later ones there is frequently a sense that, when the series’ “turn” occurs in
Episode 3, the naı̈ve idealism of mahou shoujo anime is confirmed as mistaken and
limited, and thus inferior to the more cynical or nihilistic worldview by which it is
superseded. In this way, seinen viewers are also positioned as more sophisticated
and skilful viewers. The naı̈veté of Madoka and Sayaka regarding the nature of
magical-girl life is implicitly replicated in the hopes and expectations projected onto
the show’s putative shoujo audience.

3
German text: “Oh wie süß! Magical Girls. Sind das nicht diese kleinen Mädchen mit Zauberkräften, die
die Welt retten und fröhlich durch die—”.

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The prioritization of seinen over shoujo perspectives takes place against a wider
cultural backdrop, in which the experiences of adults and males are prioritized over
those of children and females. This is not, of course, an exclusively Western
phenomenon, as Laura Miller has pointed out with reference to Japanese otaku
culture (Miller, 2011).4 Beautiful Fighting Girl (2011), Tamaki Saitou’s classic
psychoanalytic study of manga and anime featuring “sentou bishoujo”, or girls
depicted as skilled fighters (of whom magical girls make up a sizeable proportion),
predates PMMM by a decade, being first published in Japanese in 2000, but his
focus is telling in this respect. The one occasion on which he briefly acknowledges
the existence of a shoujo audience is in the book’s preface. In discussing such
characters as Sailor Moon and Nausicaȁ from Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the
Valley of the Wind (1984), he notes: “Japan’s beautiful fighting girls were originally
icons with which their intended audience of young teenage girls could identify.
Now, however, a group of consumers has emerged that far exceeds that one in scale
—the otaku” (Saitou, 2011, p. 7).
As a numerical claim, this is debatable. A 2005 survey puts the number of
Japanese otaku with special interest in manga and/or anime at 460,000 (Nomura
Research Institute, 2005). By contrast, at the end of that year the population of 10-
to 14-year-old Japanese girls, the traditional audience of mahou shoujo anime such
as Sailor Moon, stood at just under 3 million, more than six times as many (Statistics
Bureau, 2007). The suggestion that the otaku audience “far exceeds” the shoujo one
is thus considerably wide of the mark, but it says a good deal about the respective
visibility and cultural capital of these two groups. (If one thinks in terms of spending
power rather than numbers, Saitou’s assertion begins to look more credible.) It is
significant that in a book largely devoted to material originally marketed to a shoujo
audience, Saitou devotes just one sentence to that audience, reserving the rest for an
analysis of the psychology of male otaku who fit the seinen demographic. The
psychology of young female viewers, who are said simply to “identify” with
heroines such as Sailor Moon, is, one might conclude, considered so straightforward
as to warrant no further comment.
Not all young male Western adults who enjoy anime would see themselves as
otaku; but in the West, too, shoujo viewership of anime such as PMMM is generally
less visible. This is partly because shoujo viewers appear in general less inclined
than young adult males to share their views on public media.5 My own attempt to
disseminate an online survey (Butler, 2016) canvassing viewer reactions to PMMM
via sites such as MyAnimeList, Facebook and Youtube came up against this
problem: although I was able to garner numerous responses from female viewers
(28 out of 72), 64% of these were adults. It is likely that many were long-term anime
viewers raised on earlier shoujo shows, but the opinions of current shoujo viewers
proved more elusive.

4
“Otaku” is “a general term referring to those who indulge in forms of subculture strongly linked to
anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime figurines, and so on” (Azuma
2001/2009, p. 3).
5
There are exceptions: for one articulate example, see “Top 10 Reasons Why I Love Madoka Magica”,
by the 14-year-old Youtuber, Sugarmist (2016).

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Some evidence of the Western reception of the show by younger female viewers
is to be found in the comments left at sites such as the “Magical Girl Confessions”
Tumblr, which posts anonymised thoughts about mahou shoujo anime by fans of the
genre. Below are two samples of Magical Girl Confessions devoted to PMMM, one
drawn from the early months of the site in 2011, shortly after PMMM first aired, and
the other from the turn of 2015–2016.
First, from 2011:
Puella Magi Madoka Magica made the thought of wanting to become a
magical girl some day depressing to me.
Magical Girl has always been my favourite genre and I feel bad because I just
don’t want to watch Madoka Magica.
I wish we had more backstory of Mami Tomoe. She seemed like an amazing
character and I would love to know more about her.
I really like how everyone has individualized outfits in Madoka Magica
instead of similar looking ones. (Magical Girl Confessions, 2011)
And from 2015 to 2016:
While I hate how dark PMMM turned out, I love how human-like the
characters seem (instead of being stereotypes), and also how cute the
characters/design/artwork is. I just wish the story was a little happier.
I currently feel like Madoka. My long-distance friends are going through some
tough times and there’s little I can do to help. I’m sad and worried about them,
even if for me it’s “second-hand”. I want to be able to help more, but all I can
do is listen and cry for them like Madoka.
To be honest, I would totally contract with Kyubey, despite how I might end
up. If I ended up saving even one person it would be worth it.
I’d like to have Kyoko Sakura as my older sister. She is just so cool.
I adore Homura’s hair, the flip she does with it, and the way it’s animated.
Homura makes me feel like I’m beautiful just the way I am. I’m so grateful
[for] her character design and the animation helped me see that my hair
doesn’t have to be blonde to be good. (Magical Girl Confessions, 2015-16)
This is a small but fairly representative sample. (I have excluded comments that
focus on specific plot points, that appear to have been written by older viewers, or
that relate to other parts of the franchise such as the sequel movie.) Many of the
comments are evaluative or aesthetic (is it a good story or not? are the costumes
well designed?), or take the opportunity to compare PMMM with other shows in the
mahou shoujo genre; but others focus on the feelings of the commenters for
individual characters, relationships or situations. “Confessors” may project them-
selves into the plot, speculating on how they would react in a similar situation; or
draw analogies between the story and aspects of their own lives. Notably, while the
confessions often acknowledge the darkness of the series they do not generally
valorize it or give it priority over other aspects. They may even underplay it in
favour of finding other ways of engaging with the show. From the point of view of
some seinen viewers a confession that “I would totally contract with Kyubey … If I
ended up saving even one person it would be worth it” may miss the point of the

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series’ subversion of such naı̈ve idealism, but it nevertheless highlights the

importance to the show of empathy and the wish to help others, aspects that a more
cynical interpretation may fail to give due weight.
Reviews by younger female viewers are also to be found elsewhere on the
internet. For example, the site Common Sense Media (“We rate, educate, and
advocate for kids, families, and schools”) contains more than 40 overwhelmingly
positive reviews of PMMM by children aged ten and up, each listing the age of the
author, and some also specifying the writer’s gender in the body of the review. The
site’s in-house review and rating of the show is also illuminating (Ward, 2012).
Common Sense Media performs a gatekeeping role in vetting content marketed to
children, and assesses that content according a number of criteria. PMMM contains
little sexual content or “bad language”, and its violence tends to be silhouetted,
stylized, or off-camera. These factors, along with the show’s “Positive messages”
(“The underlying message is that one should be grateful for what one has, and that a
normal life is preferable to a magical one” [Ward, 2012]) and “Positive role models”
(the tender-hearted Madoka herself) mean that PMMM passes Common Sense
Media’s inspection with high recommendations and few caveats, despite its
reputation among seinen viewers for “really scary Freddy-Krueger-level shit”
(MasterKingJC4ever, 2012). Existential horror and crushing despair are not, it
seems, among the qualities that the site specifically tests for—a telling demonstra-
tion of the extent to which critical categories (especially when deployed in a
gatekeeper role) are always open to subversion and evasion.
It should be noted that PMMM’s “dark” elements do not make it unique among
mahou shoujo anime. Even Sailor Moon frequently featured death and grief, and
other anime such as Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) and Princess Tutu (2002-2004)
anticipated PMMM both in their engagement with dark and depressing topics and in
their willingness to subject the genre to critical examination. The emphasis evident
in much seinen discussion of PMMM on its departure from mahou shoujo norms,
and particularly the habit of praising the show by contrasting it with its supposedly-
sentimental predecessors, has engendered a degree of resentment toward PMMM
from long-term mahou shoujo fans who view such admiration as founded on an
ignorance of the history and diversity of the genre. Others, more sympathetic to the
show, have attempted to emphasize its continuity with previous developments (CJ
Vs. Manga, 2015).
This discussion of PMMM’s reception by seinen and shoujo audiences has
naturally involved some consideration of what these audiences perceive as the
nature of address within the show, but it is now time to turn back more squarely to
Barbara Wall’s categories of single, double and dual address, outlined earlier. Does
a text like PMMM challenge the applicability of Wall’s terminology?

Address in PMMM

It is of course possible to argue that PMMM exhibits single address. For example,
the fact that it originally aired late at night in Japan might be taken as evidence of an
implied seinen viewership. As Stevie Suan notes, “the anime productions that

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support Akihabara and the larger (otaku [fan]) industry—which might be commonly
described as ‘late-night TV anime’ in Japan—are locally (and globally) considered
very distinctive products from the other popular animations” (Suan, p. 64). In
addition, some aspects of PMMM imply a viewership with knowledge of relatively
obscure literary and philosophical materials. In Episode 2, for instance, the girls
pass a wall bearing a quotation in German from Goethe’s Faust, an unlikely choice
perhaps for a Mitakihara City graffiti artist, though an appropriate one given the
nature of Kyubey’s contract. There are numerous such allusions in the series,
executed through its plot, artwork and language, and discovering and discussing
them has been a regular activity among seinen and adult fans of the series, the most
sustained such analysis probably being Jed A. Blue’s self-published volume, The
Very Soil (Blue, 2015).6
In other respects, however, the marketing and merchandizing of the series—both
before its broadcast and subsequently—imply a shoujo viewership. The abundant
“kawaii” merchandise associated with the franchise includes such items as
ornamental Soul Gems, costumes and accessories, figurines, plush toys and
stationery, just as one might expect with a conventional shoujo anime. When
Madoka and the other girls appear in Japanese anime magazines they are typically
engaged in innocent and wholesome pastimes (skating, playing on the beach) not to
be found in the series itself—accommodating a desire, sometimes articulated in fan
comments and fan fiction, to give the characters some relief from their canonical
lives of suffering and engage with them as “normal” magical girls. The 2012
novelization of the anime, too, seems to be aimed at a younger readership, being
written from Madoka’s first-person viewpoint in simple Japanese and making
extensive use of furigana (the superscript used as a crib for children still learning
kanji) (Ninomae, 2012).
Perhaps, then, we might consider PMMM as exhibiting double address? This
would be to say that the show addresses itself to both an implied shoujo and an
implied seinen audience (analogous to the implied child and adult readers of
children’s literature criticism), but does so in parallel, constructing both a dark,
psychological, depressing story and a tale of friendship, romantic love and idealism.
Ultimately, however, such a model is unconvincing, because these readings do not
run in parallel but actively engage each other. The dark and horrifying aspects of
PMMM that one might see as addressed to implied seinen viewers are not
independent of its shoujo-orientated aspects, but depend in large measure on their
subversion; indeed, a full appreciation of PMMM’s “darkness” requires familiarity
with (and some investment in) the conventions of mahou shoujo anime. Conversely,
an implied shoujo viewer, engaged by the show’s initial promise of an idealistic
fantasy adventure, must also have sufficient distance from that promise not to balk
at the series’ abrupt turn from the mahou shoujo aesthetic and worldview.
This image of mutually exclusive implied readerships, defined by distaste for
each other’s aesthetic and moral preferences, thus not only fails to correspond
closely to the reality of PMMM’s viewership (a matter of reception), but leads to a

6
The original 4chan discussion conducted when the series aired from January 2011 can be found in the
Archived.Moe website, beginning at: http://archived.moe/a/thread/44782290

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degree of incoherence in the account of the anime itself (a matter of address).

Double address, with its reification of the divisions between groups of implied
viewers in terms of interests, desires, taste, knowledge, and capacity, depends on an
assumption of difference, an assumption that often finds its way unacknowledged
into critical discussion. Labels such as “a seinen … disguised as a shoujo”
(MasterKingJC4ever, 2012) take genre divisions for granted and indeed entrench
them, but in doing so undersell the degree of overlap between the seinen and shoujo
genres. Rather, I suggest that PMMM is both a shoujo and a seinen anime, and the
seemingly strict divide between these genres, and between the tastes of the
demographics to which they are supposed to appeal, is in fact fuzzy and highly
permeable, despite the apparently firm genre (and corresponding audience) divisions
of anime outlined earlier in this article. In my online survey (Butler, 2016), many
respondents appeared to find little contradiction between considering PMMM a
magical girl and a seinen anime, being happy to identify it to various degrees as
both. (Although there was a statistically significant tendency for female respondents
to emphasize its magical girl status, this may reflect their “angle of approach”, that
is, the fact that they came to PMMM in the first place because they were mahou
shoujo fans.)
One way to put this is to say that a lot of what appears to be double address in
PMMM is in fact dual address. It is worth adding, however, that if it is an example
of dual address it is a very self-aware one, that incorporates anime’s conventional
genre divisions into the structure of its narrative, to catch both viewers and
characters by surprise. The coups de théâtre represented by Mami’s death in
Episode 3, the discovery in Episode 6 that “Soul Gem” is a literal rather than a
metaphorical name, and the revelation in Episode 8 that magical girls are merely the
immature form of witches (another fact lying in plain sight: as Kyubey points out,
the Japanese word for “witch” [魔女, “majo”] literally means “magical woman”),
all depend on the viewers as well as the characters misreading the situation. It is not
only Madoka and Sayaka who are wrong-genre savvy, it is also the implied viewer
of PMMM.
I suggest that this implied viewer has internalized many of the generic
conventions of shoujo anime, but also possesses the ability to enjoy (rather than be
repelled by) their subversion by means of the conventions of seinen anime. In other
words, the generic and aesthetic repertoire of the implied viewer of PMMM is far
broader than is suggested by either “shoujo” or “seinen”. This observation about
address is echoed in the evidence for the show’s reception: it seems that not only do
fourteen-year-old girls and twenty-year-old men both enjoy PMMM but that there is
substantial overlap in the ways that they do so, even if the latter group in particular
sometimes feels the need to distinguish its mode of consumption from that of the
show’s young female fans. Ultimately, the show’s demographic includes anyone
who can appreciate a cleverly plotted, emotionally engaging and intellectually
stimulating narrative. Akiyuki Shinbou’s generic misdirection may have challenged
marketing sense by appearing to pitch this work (through its character designs,
trailer and marketing) to the “wrong” audience, but in doing so he created a work
that had great success with a far broader audience. That strategy was a daring act of

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trust, but paid both artistic and commercial dividends, and generated a rich and
various fictive space shared by many viewers of all ages and genders.
The sophistication of PMMM in this respect is in many ways an object lesson to
those who assume gatekeeper roles in the promotion of children’s literature, but also
to academic critics. “Implied child reader” and “implied adult reader” may be useful
terms, even if these hypostatized constructs are inevitably informed by normative
Western assumptions about what real children and adults are (and should be) like;
but their having been coined in contrast to each other inevitably feeds a tendency to
minimize the areas of intersection between them. I suggest that Wall’s conclusion in
The Narrator’s Voice that dual address is “very rare” (35) can in part be attributed to
this tendency to default to binary thinking.
Even in the West, the strictness of the division has been felt less acutely in other
media. Within film studies, the term “undifferentiated address” carries much the
same meaning as Wall’s “dual address” (Brown and Babington, 2015, p. 8), and it is
not difficult to think of numerous examples of “family films”, from The Sound of
Music (1965) to Toy Story (1995), that have offered similar pleasures to both adults
and children without being burdened by any oppressive need to distinguish their
audiences through separate modes of address. PMMM is unusual in its self-
consciousness about genre divisions and the audience divisions they conventionally
imply, but in subverting some aspects of its own genres it ultimately manages to
subvert the divisions between genres, and indeed between viewers. In this way, I
suggest, it also indicates the more general possibility (and necessity) of a productive
relationship between investigations of reception and address. It may play on a
discourse of difference, but ultimately PMMM argues for kinship.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, dis-
tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s)
and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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