Chatty AF 223: Magic Knight Rayearth Rewatchalong – Part 2 (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

MEGAN: It’s also really holding the audience’s hand a lot. It feels like more than ever they are dumbing things down for the kids. Like, we gotta repeat ourselves a lot, in both sub and dub, we gotta hold their hands… I mean, JRPG tutorials are not this bad.

[Introductory musical theme]

CAITLIN: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. Today we are discussing Episode 1 through 15 of Magic Knight Rayearth Season 2, or, as it’s listed on Crunchyroll, episode 21 to 35. I am joined by shoujo YouTuber extraordinaire Colleen and returning hero and longsuffering manga reviewer Megan. How about you guys introduce yourselves?

COLLEEN: Sure. Hello. I am Colleen of Colleen’s Manga Recs fame on YouTube. [I] talk about shoujo and josei manga and anime. And I’m reasonably not as excited to talk about Magic Knight Rayearth Season 2! [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

MEGAN: And I am Megan D, who, of course… I’ve been on this site more than once, on this podcast more than once, talking about a great number of things. And this is my—

CAITLIN: Almost blew out my eardrums drunkenly talking about the Hot Gimmick movie, for example.

[Chuckling]

MEGAN: Ah, good times. This time, it’s not quite such good times.

CAITLIN: Mm. We’ll still have fun.

MEGAN: We will!

CAITLIN: I would say that this is— I’d say that this is better than the Hot Gimmick movie.

MEGAN: Oh, definitely.

COLLEEN: I think that’s a very low bar.

MEGAN: Indeed.

CAITLIN: So, Magic Knight Rayearth Season 2 is a little bit of a weird case because even though this is supposed to be a rewatchalong, I barely remember the anime. Colleen, I believe this is your first time with any version of the second half of Magic Knight Rayearth.

COLLEEN: Yes. I don’t even know if I knew there was a second half to this series, because I vaguely remember the first half because I read it, and this, I’m like completely new to. I do not remember or know of anything that’s happening.

MEGAN: This is my second time around with this. It’s also the first time watching it subbed. I’ve been alternating sub and dub. My memories of it were vaguely positive, but if you asked me up front what I remembered more strongly, it would definitely be the manga over the anime. And rewatching it? Yeah, there’s good reason for it.

CAITLIN: Yeah. [Chuckles] So, the second season is notable because, although it is significantly different, it is, unlike the first season, written entirely by Ohkawa Nanase, who is the leader and head writer of CLAMP, who took over around Episode 14 of the first anime.

MEGAN: I was gonna say, I should note this is probably the first—no, not the first time they’ve helped actually adapt the anime, because if you look at their credits, she’s had a hand in pretty much every CLAMP adaptation both before this and afterwards, but often it’s more of a supervisory or advisory role, sometimes with script. But in this case, she is series composer. She’s the head writer. And previous to this show, the only other time she had done that was the two-episode RG Veda OVA. And if you are old enough to remember that, you will know that (1) that OVA has very little to do with the actual anime, it’s basically just a one-off gag story, and (2) it’s not very good.

CAITLIN: Notably, she was not involved in the script for Angelic Layer, which I believe is one of the best CLAMP adaptations and also is significantly different from the manga.

MEGAN: But curiously enough, just a couple years after this season, she’s also gonna take a strong hand with the adaptation of Cardcaptor Sakura.

CAITLIN: Which is a great show.

MEGAN: Which is a great show. She also wrote 50 episodes of it, so she’s not just adapting the episodes that are taken straight from the manga. That’s a lot of anime-original material, too.

CAITLIN: So, this aired shortly after the conclusion of the first part, because I believe in the ‘90s anime were not as strictly tied to the seasonal cour system as they are now. Shortly before recording this, I found a translation of a conversation between Ohkawa and the director, Hirano Toshihiro, where Ohkawa says… They kind of talk about how CLAMP felt about the first season, what drove a lot of the changes. We can kind of go into those as we talk about the show. It does sound like CLAMP was… when they saw Hirano’s changes, they were going, “What? No, wait, what are you doing? No, that’s not— That’s not— That doesn’t make sense! What are you doing?” For example, with killing Presea or making Zagato more explicitly a villain, like showing him kidnapping Emeraude, which I don’t think they ever really worked around. They just kinda shoved that one under the rug.

So, the changes to the second season were more collaborative. It did sound like Hirano still wanted to tell his own version of the story that Ohkawa was helping bring to fruition, and he would send scripts back if they weren’t what he wanted. One thing I thought was interesting was that Ohkawa decided that they were going to avoid the formulaic structure for this, which they do. There is no formula here, which the first one did. And it does make sense kind of thematically, with the first one being like, “This is a very typical ‘kids going on an adventure’ kind of story,” and this one grapples with much darker, kind of more complicated concepts.

COLLEEN: While the first season was formulaic, I feel like this one doesn’t know what it wants to do for the first half either. So, I think they ran into another problem with avoiding the “Oh, they are walking around and they run into this thing, and then they have to figure out this thing, and then that thing is over, and the episode’s over. Next time, let’s do it again!” But this time, it’s like, “Nothing happens. Okay, nothing happens. Okay, nothing happens. Something happened! Okay, let’s go back to something else.”

CAITLIN: They do spend a lot of time wandering around in empty hallways or standing in mostly empty rooms, talking to the same dozen people. It’s definitely still got the issue where Cephiro feels very empty.

MEGAN: It’s also really holding the audience’s hand a lot. It feels like more than ever they are dumbing things down for the kids. Like, we gotta repeat ourselves a lot, in both sub and dub, we gotta hold their hands… I mean, JRPG tutorials are not this bad.

CAITLIN: Yeah, and it’s really a shame, because for the first five episodes or so, we were watching, I was like, “Okay, this is really moving. It’s got in this kind of really emotional territory. The characters are having to work through a lot of stuff.” And then it kinda stagnates, of course, once Nova and Lady Debonair start playing a stronger role. But, you know, we’ll get there.

MEGAN: It also doesn’t quite know what to do with the comedy. They try to insert some comedy here and there, understandably, but it’s very awkward this time, and very little chibis. That’s probably one of the big faults: it needs more chibis!

COLLEEN: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: You know what? When I was 12, that was one of the things that I loved about the series. And this is a show for 12-year-olds.

MEGAN: I am 40 and it’s one of the things I love about this show.

CAITLIN: I don’t remember very much of the original series. I liked the manga more because there were some changes to the ending that I didn’t really like, for personal reasons. Not like “Ah, this is such an ass pull!” I recall seeing (I don’t remember the source) Ohkawa saying that she had felt like she had written herself into a corner with the manga, because the ending of the manga is wild. We’ll get there. But there was one particular change that made me very upset, and we’ll talk about it, but that’s my main memory.

MEGAN: I’m still kind of impressed by the second half, if simply because it’s a story about pacifism, because the girls are so traumatized by the events of the first season that in the manga, they spend most of their time going around to various people, being like, “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to be the Pillar. You don’t want to fight this! Don’t do it!” And that’s certainly an interesting choice as a writer. You could also clearly tell that Ohkawa got told, “No, you can’t do that for an anime. We got mecha fights here. We gotta do something with this. We need, like, an actual, physical big bad.”

CAITLIN: Nova was Hirano’s addition. I did notice that.

COLLEEN: I mean, I think we’re going to get into it more later, but just the fact that they’ve really kind of written out Umi and Fuu, and I really enjoyed the dynamic between the three of them in the first season, and this season has just been like… They’re always apart, they’re never really doing anything… I mean, even in the beginning, it seemed like they didn’t even talk to each other and they only were gonna meet up for that one Tokyo Tower visit to kinda be like, “Oh, hey. You remember when that thing happened? That was crazy.” So, I really… I missed the dynamic between the three of them.

MEGAN: Even as someone who likes Hikaru, this is very much the Hikaru show, very much to Umi and Fuu’s detriment.

COLLEEN: Yeah. And just as a Hikaru-and-Umi shipper, it’s been unreasonably dry for me! [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Well, Umi has been, like, pacing around and worrying about Hikaru. Umi’s clearly feeling very worried. But they are pushing the Hikaru/Lantis ship very hard.

COLLEEN: Well, I can’t say it’s not semi-convincing, but [Chuckles] just the visual of those two standing next to each other is truly one of the funniest things.

CAITLIN: Well, and Fuu’s got Ferio, and Umi currently has a choice between the old man who looks like a baby and the child who looks like an adult.

COLLEEN: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: So, you know.

MEGAN: I don’t know where they got the idea of shipping Umi with Clef of all characters, especially since the grown-up blushy-crushy Ascot is so cute! Why don’t they lean more into that? But it’s CLAMP. They never met an age-gap romance they didn’t love.

CAITLIN: I just… Every time Clef puts his little baby hand over Umi’s hands, I just laugh. He’s just got this little pudgy toddler hand.

COLLEEN: And he’s just got paws. He’s got little, like, cat paws.

MEGAN: So, did either of you watch the dub for this show?

CAITLIN: Uh-uh. I stuck with Japanese for this one.

COLLEEN: And I watched entirely dub for this, so…

MEGAN: So, yeah, I mean, for the most part, if you like the dub for the previous season, it’s pretty much the same cast, the same quality carrying over. And indeed, a lot of the same actors are doing double duty here, playing different characters.

CAITLIN: For example, Presea’s actress.

MEGAN: Indeed.

[Laughter]

MEGAN: I personally like the scene where Lantis has a flashback of him talking to Zagato, because it’s Lex Lang literally talking to himself.

CAITLIN: I mean, you do get that in the Japanese, too.

MEGAN: True. But there’s one big addition to the sub that is a definite improvement.

CAITLIN: Would that be Eagle being played by Ogata Megumi, who is also Princess Emeraude?

MEGAN: Yes.

CAITLIN: Which, I mean… [Sighs] So, when Eagle appeared, I kind of gesticulated at the TV, and Jared came over and said, “Ah. That makes sense.” And I said, “Why?” And [he] said, “He’s got that kind of soft voice that you like.” And I’m just like, “That’s Megumi Ogata,” and he’s like, “Yeah.” Yeah. So…

MEGAN: Look, stan a seiyuu monarch.

CAITLIN: They’re amazing. I do wonder if that’s a deliberate parallel, implying that Eagle and Lantis have a similar relationship to Emeraude and Zagato.

MEGAN: Oh, ho, ho. Mostly, my thought on Megumi Ogata is that, while I don’t entirely buy them as masculine in the same way I do when they play Shinji or even a couple years down the line when they play Yukito in Cardcaptor Sakura, they’re still really good, and I’m still happy to hear them whatever they talk.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm.

COLLEEN: Hearing you say that this voice actor is the voice actor for Yukito, I’m like, “Okay, that makes sense,” because I didn’t watch the dub at all, but that fits this character. He’s very much like the Yukito of this series.

CAITLIN: Lantis and Eagle are a little bit proto–Yukito and Touya. Just a little bit.

COLLEEN: I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be Lantis or if it was meant to be the Geo guy, because it seems like he’s always, like, falling into his arms.

MEGAN: I mean, why not both?

COLLEEN: [Chuckles] All three!

CAITLIN: Yeah, listen, we have reasons to believe that Eagle isn’t monogamous. But let’s talk about the story! Season 2! Season 2! So different from the manga!

MEGAN: So very different.

CAITLIN: [bright] Everyone has PTSD and survivor’s guilt!

MEGAN: [crosstalk] And survivor’s guilt.

CAITLIN: They’re so sad!

MEGAN: [bright] For kids!

CAITLIN: The girls reunite to reflect on their experiences. They’re all really still suffering from the trauma that they went through, of having to murder the person they thought that they were there to save. And they gather together at Tokyo Tower, there’s a flash of light, and they’re back in Cephiro, but it’s different. While Cephiro before was troubled but still beautiful, Cephiro is now dark and it is literally crumbling without a Pillar. Three neighboring countries are invading Autozam, which is a technological society, looking for an energy source. Chizeta, which has an Arabian Nights motif, is suffering from overpopulation in their cramped country. They could just stop cloning identical women. That would probably be a good solution, but we’ll go with colonialism instead. And then there’s Fahren, which has a Chinese motif, and it’s run by a spoiled princess who wants to do whatever she wants to do. However, none of them realize that being the Pillar sucks. It’s really terrible. Meanwhile, Zagato’s younger brother, Lantis, has returned from the country of Autozam, where his boyfriend, Eagle, is the leader of the nation and also the leader of this invasion. Eagle has a giant robot called the FTO. It’s pretty cool.

MEGAN: I have to say, all the mechanical designs for this season, all the robots, all the ships, are incredibly slick. Even the girls’ new costumes. Like, their battle armor is sweet. I would cosplay that.

CAITLIN: I believe that’s the same battle armor as they had at the end of the season.

MEGAN: It’s still sweet.

CAITLIN: It is still cool.

COLLEEN: And we finally get to see more of it, too, because we only got it for like two episodes.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm, that’s true. That’s true. Hikaru— They resolve to help Cephiro find the Pillar, but Hikaru is having nightmares where there’s a girl like her named Nova who wants to take possession of her and destroy everything she loves. Meanwhile, Alcyone has come back to ruin their day, and she is on the side of the evil Lady Debonair, who, despite her silly name, is a great threat to Cephiro, who wants it to fall apart and is connected to Nova. And that is the story so far. Everything else in between kind of feels like slop. Hikaru’s sword breaks at some point. Where we currently are, Umi and Fuu have been taken captive by Chizeta and Fahren, respectively. Eagle has anime wasting disease.

[Laughter]

COLLEEN: He coughed blood!

MEGAN: He’s got the consumption!

COLLEEN: [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Oh, it’s a vague illness where he is fully capable of doing everything he can normally, except sometimes he coughs blood and has to lie down for a while.

COLLEEN: But only at points where someone else might see him do it.

CAITLIN: Only when it’s dramatically relevant.

COLLEEN: We didn’t need to know prior. We found out when the other guy did.

CAITLIN: So, yeah. That’s the story so far.

MEGAN: I also have to say, because this is a new season, we got a new opening, new ending; they are both major downgrades from the last one.

CAITLIN: Still pretty catchy, though.

MEGAN: Eh, the ending song in particular reminds me way too much of “Mystic Eyes” from Escaflowne.

CAITLIN: Yes!

MEGAN: And I do not like “Mystic Eyes.”

CAITLIN: Oh, it’s true. Every time it starts playing, I’m just like, “Oh, no!” I just get flashbacks to “Mystic Eyes.” And then I do start thinking about how it would be so nice to watch Escaflowne, which is a better anime…

COLLEEN: I was thinking it kinda sounded like—

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] … which we also have a rewatchalong of. Sorry, Colleen, go ahead.

COLLEEN: No, you’re okay. I was just gonna say it sounded like Persona music for me.

MEGAN: [Laughs]

CAITLIN: Hm, I could see it.

COLLEEN: I don’t know, really, anything about Persona except for the music from 5 because my husband played it with me on my computer, and I absolutely hated the music. [Chuckles] So…

CAITLIN: Wow. That’s a hot take, hating Persona music.

COLLEEN: When you’re not playing the game and you are sitting and having to hear the same song over and over and over again, you’re gonna get tired of it.

MEGAN: Fair.

CAITLIN: Fair enough. It’s all video game music.

COLLEEN: Some video game music is good, but they choose the worst music for, like, the stuff that you sit and do nothing on. Anyway, that’s my only thing about the ending, is just that it kinda sounded like Persona music.

CAITLIN: So, we have several new characters to talk about, for example, Eagle, who was an early anime crush for me. Still pretty… pretty great.

MEGAN: I mean, he’s one of the few new characters who gets any sort of actual development as a character.

CAITLIN: Yeah, that’s kind of the thing, is that I really feel like they could have distilled this down so much. Cut out the other countries, cut out Lady Debonair and Nova, and really focus on how Autozam is coming in because Eagle has these reasons for wanting to become the Pillar of Cephiro and dealing with the tension between him and Lantis, between wanting to defend Cephiro but also this guy who has a very valid reason, because Autozam has an energy crisis. I mean, he doesn’t have a valid reason. There’s no valid reason for colonialism. Don’t get me wrong. But he has the kind of reason that would make a character in an anime aimed at young teens go, “Oh, yeah.” Anyway… But also, wanting to help Cephiro but also the injustice of the Pillar system, all while dealing with the emotional fallout of the end of the first season. I really feel like you could have gotten all of this down into those key plot points, and it would have been very solid.

MEGAN: Yeah, it’s telling that, while Autozam is just as much of [an] antagonist force as Fahren or Chizeta, they’re played purely for comedy while the Autozam gang is played a lot more sympathetically. And even the vibes between Eagle and Geo and Zazu, you know, his mechanic and second-in-command, is much more casual, naturalistic, friendly.

CAITLIN: Zazu’s so cute. He’s all girl crazy. Aw, adorable.

MEGAN: [crosstalk] Doubly so in the dub because he’s voiced by Brianne Siddall!

CAITLIN: Oh, I love her!

MEGAN: A.k.a. Jim (am I remembering the character’s name right?) from Outlaw Star.

CAITLIN: Jim Hawking, boy genius.

COLLEEN: I didn’t have much thought on Eagle, actually. And it’s mostly because I feel like right now all of the countries are just kind of like… The Autozam is the one that has the most reason behind what they’re doing, and they’re the one that’s more played seriously, but I feel like right now, we still haven’t really gotten into enough about any of the countries for me to really feel anything about any of them. But Eagle is the one that you feel the most like, “Okay. I can be sympathetic towards you. You’re still doing a really bad thing, but I get it.” But yeah, I feel like it’s one of those characters where you kinda have to wait until the end to see what happens to be like, “Okay, I get you now.” It’s just a little too early for me to have any sort of thoughts on him—other than anime death disease. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Anime death disease. Alright, I don’t want to dwell on the new characters too long because I do feel like there is a decent amount to dig in with the themes and motifs just from the first five episodes, before I started to kind of get off track. I just want to say I hate Primera a lot.

MEGAN: Ditto.

CAITLIN: She is the worst. She has served no purpose in the narrative so far except to break up any potential romantic tension between Lantis and Hikaru. Lantis is very pretty. He’s got, you know, both his boyfriend, Eagle, and his new potential girlfriend, Hikaru, although Eagle and Landis don’t feel like teenagers. And I know Cephiro is weird that way, but once again, CLAMP, CLAMP, can we please have some actually age-appropriate relationships? Because Eagle is a whole-ass adult. We know that for a fact.

COLLEEN: I was wondering how old Lantis was.

CAITLIN: I mean, they give this whole talk about how in Cephiro you can never know anyone’s true age because it’s according to their will. So I don’t know how old Lantis is.

MEGAN: I mean, old enough to have been around before Zagato ran off with Emeraude. So, he’s an adult. That is safe to say. He’s an adult. Eagle is an adult. You know what Hikaru is? Not an adult. She explicitly says she’s 14. And she only comes crotch high to Lantis because he’s extremely tall and noodly, even by CLAMP standards.

CAITLIN: He’s got those big shoulders! That’s classic CLAMP.

MEGAN: Oh yeah, he’s got those enormous pauldrons.

COLLEEN: [crosstalk] I will say, the one funny thing about some of the character designs for this series is they are “beefier,” quote-unquote, [Chuckles] than most CLAMP drawings I’ve seen from the more recent stuff, so it’s funny to see that they’re, like, beefy because of their armor.

CAITLIN: Yeah, well, I feel like this era of CLAMP designs, before there was a shift—because I remember talking about it with people—they were known for the guys having these very broad shoulders and these itty-bitty waists. They are like Chris Evans squared.

COLLEEN: [Chuckles]

MEGAN: Yes, very much.

CAITLIN: So, it is a little awkward, but when I was 13, I was all about that. When I was Hikaru’s age.

COLLEEN: I would 100% have been all over Lantis as a kid. This is the type of dude in a series that I’m like, “Oh, my God!”

[Chuckling]

MEGAN: Yeah, because he’s stoic, almost to the point of emotionlessness, but, oh… but deep down, he’s suffering, and he’s so pretty!

COLLEEN: And when he smiles… the, like, two seconds that he smiles.

MEGAN: And maybe this was just me, but the interactions between him and Primera reminded me a little bit of very early Berserk, like the dynamic between Guts and Puck. So, yeah, we’re talking like the first few volumes, before they even start the Golden Age Arc, where Guts is going around, you know, being grim, and Puck is trying to liven things up and is drawn a little more like this just goofy little sprite. But Puck is actually kind of endearing, and as we’ve noted before, Primera is not, because she is annoying and haughty. And we already have one character like that; we don’t need two!

CAITLIN: On a similar level of annoying, Aska… Don’t enjoy spending time with her.

MEGAN: No.

CAITLIN: She is another character where it’s like I get where they’re going with this… Like, she is a spoiled child. She thinks the Pillar, because the Pillar has full control over Cephiro, means that she’ll get whatever she wants. But oh, my God, I do not enjoy spending time with her!

MEGAN: And here I was worried, coming back to this, that she was just gonna be a pile of Chinese stereotypes in anime, where they tend to be loud, super aggro, maybe speaking in a pidgin, adding “aru” as a suffix to their sentences, because apparently that’s how Japan likes to make fun of Chinese accents. No, she’s just one long, tedious, one-note ojou-sama gag.

COLLEEN: And not even in a fun way!

MEGAN: No!

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] No.

COLLEEN: I don’t know how bad it is in the sub, but the dub— I feel bad for saying this because the voice actor is doing their job well, at the very least. I cannot stand her voice in the dub. Like, it is truly just grating, and I had to mute it at some parts because the laugh would go on for like a minute, it felt like. I could not stand her being on the screen.

MEGAN: She’s not much better in Japanese. Her voice actress there is best known for voicing a whole bunch of Pokémon, which gives you an idea of her range.

COLLEEN: Well, I mean, having this character sound like a Pokémon actually would have been better. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Yeah. And over in Chizeta, we have Tatra and Tarta. Oh, which one is which? [Chuckles]

MEGAN: I never remember.

CAITLIN: Uh… okay. Tatra is the one who is an Inoue Kikuko stereotype, which I can say because she is voiced by Inoue Kikuko.

MEGAN: True. Belldandy herself.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Belldandy, Kasumi from Ranma ½… all sorts of characters who are that exact personality. I have in my notes “Why is Tarta so mean to Tatra?” And then I have, “Well, they are twins. That’s probably reason enough.”

MEGAN: I mean, really, they are just pure gag characters. You know, one of them is the aggressive one, one of them is the unaggressive one. I mean, they’re basically a manzai set. And let’s not even get into their guardian spirits, which are basically giant genies. And the whole thing with them is, because their magic is done through dancing and the djinn do it with them and they also like to flex a lot, everyone’s just like, “Ew, that’s so weird!” and it’s—

CAITLIN: “Ew!” And they’re very gay coded.

MEGAN: Very gay coded.

CAITLIN: Because in the world of CLAMP, it’s only okay to be gay if you are a willowy twink.

COLLEEN: [Chuckles] You can be gay but not too gay. But you can’t say you’re gay, but you can be gay, but don’t say it. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Well, that’s the thing, is that… Like, for a lot of the English-speaking world, the gay stereotype has been the skinny kind of effeminate guys, but—

MEGAN: The sissy stereotype.

CAITLIN: —in Japan, the stereotype is different, and it’s more what we see with the djinns. Like, the stereotypical gay guy is very big and muscley and does a lot of flexing with no clothes on. So, it is a different cultural context, so it is actually very homophobic, as we have noted, that they’re all like, “Ew! What? Oh, that’s bad taste.” No, you’re the one with bad taste, person who wrote those jokes. You’re the one with bad taste.

COLLEEN: Yeah, and the stereotypes for just whatever amalgamation of Arabic they decided to throw in, the vaguely Arabic music that played any time they did anything… it was just… When it started playing, I was like, “Oh, okay, this was a choice.”

CAITLIN: Mm, if you want vaguely Arabic isekai, I recommend El-Hazard, which has its own problems, but is overall a good show.

MEGAN: Better dub, too.

CAITLIN: Very good dub, famously good dub.

COLLEEN: I will also say it’s very disconcerting to watch two people who sound like Dolly Parton with Arabic music playing behind them as if I was supposed to know that their Dolly Parton Southern accents made them, like, Arabic in some way.

CAITLIN: Because they speak in Osaka dialect.

COLLEEN: Yeah. I just thought it was very funny they kinda had to… because Caldina is from Chizeta, so they had to stick with the Southern accent because they already did that. And now having this, I’m just like, “This is very funny. They’re mixing a lot here.” How many different kinds of, like, weird racism can we throw in? [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Yeah. It’s not the best. I try to— My charitable way of thinking is that, well, Cephiro is kind of like a European fantasy stereotype, so it makes sense that the other countries are stereotypes. But that’s not my call to make, so… you know. It is not something that I need to have a definitive opinion on.

COLLEEN: Surprising, if anything, to just be assaulted with it.

CAITLIN: Yeah, there’s a lot kinda coming at you at once with it, for sure. So, something interesting I found while I was kind of googling… And looking for information about older anime really does emphasize the importance of the historical importance of fan sites and what we’ve lost since people don’t really make fan shrines anymore. But I found a post of someone calling the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth the anti-monomyth. I didn’t read the post, so I don’t really know what this discussion was, what their reasoning was, but seeing that expressed did strike a chord with me, because the classic monomyth cycle is, you know, you go into this other world, you have this adventure, you go through trials, and then you come out, you know, coming of age, a stronger person for it. 

And I think a lot of modern isekai are kind of anti-monomyth in that— I mean, the monomyth is a flawed idea to begin with. You know, just get out of the way. But a lot of isekai are kind of anti-monomyth in that you go to this other world and you chill out or you don’t come back or, you know, whatever. Or all of the skills that were useless in the real world are actually super useful in this other world. So, they are kind of against that pattern. This is an anti-monomyth in that… what if you went to the other world and the trials you went through were incredibly traumatic and left you feeling broken? And I thought that was actually a really interesting idea, because what they went through was incredibly traumatizing. They’re 14 year[s] old, and without knowing it, they basically got turned into assassins. They had to assassinate the leader of this country.

MEGAN: And the amazing thing is they address this in the show explicitly, but it’s one of the few things I feel like they don’t dumb down. They express it and the characters are trying to work through it, and a lot of the cast is just trying to reassure the girls, you know, “Don’t blame yourself. This is not your fault.” I’m kind of impressed with its emotional intelligence.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah! That’s why I really liked the first few episodes that we watched here, because they were mostly about dealing with these feelings.

COLLEEN: Yeah, I did really like that Hikaru had to have that conversation with Lantis and be like, “Hey. I killed your brother. What do we do here? How do we talk to each other?” I thought that was a really interesting thing to do, because usually you’d just be like, “Oh, well, your brother was a bad guy.” So, this show brings up a lot of good stuff, but I feel like they just don’t focus on it too much—after the fact, at the very least.

CAITLIN: And Hikaru is so compassionate that—and she was the one who delivered the killing blow—that it would be really hard for her to go through. You know, and the other Knights are also— The series is very Hikaru focused, but everyone’s working through it, you know? Ferio is grieving his sister. Clef is grieving not just his leader but also his student—his students, these people who he taught and mentored and who he saw grow up.

MEGAN: Lantis is mourning his brother.

CAITLIN: Yeah, Lantis is grieving his brother. Everyone is just going through all this grief because stories don’t end cleanly like that. And the kind of conflicts that you usually see in these kinds of stories are not these super heroic… Or even if they look heroic, in the real world they leave people with all of these just really horrible lingering feelings. And I love that this show is grappling with that.

MEGAN: Even the villains are dealing with that. When Alcyone comes back, she is still so bitter at how Zagato basically dumped her and rejected her feelings and is working through that any time she sees Lantis because she just immediately fixates upon him as like a reincarnation of Zagato.

CAITLIN: But yeah, Alcyone’s… Her bitterness and anger is… I feel like she’s always been kind of like this… not a joke character, but we talked about it before, how her sexuality is kind of positioned against the Magic Knights’ childhood and innocence. I felt for her here. Her motivations make sense and how she could be kind of taken over by Lady Debonair. What Zagato did to her wasn’t okay. In the manga, he straight-up killed her.

MEGAN: Yes.

CAITLIN: She’s right to be feeling really sad and bitter, because he used her.

MEGAN: He used all his minions.

CAITLIN: Yeah. Yes, he did use all of his minions, but she was driven by this very emotional feeling of devotion, whereas Caldina was looking for money, Ascot he promised a safe place for him and his monster friends, Lafarga was just taken over. But Alcyone was doing it because she loved Zagato. And I don’t know if she even knew that Zagato kidnapped Emeraude because they were in love with each other.

COLLEEN: And I wonder how much she knew after the fact, too, because it’s not like anyone else really explains… well, because she’s not really around. But I just don’t know if she was explained to, like “Oh, yeah, Zagato actually never loved you, and the entire time he loved Emeraude.” So, how much did she even know to begin with?

MEGAN: Somehow, I think learning that would make things worse for her.

COLLEEN: Yeah.

CAITLIN: Yeah. She’s not doing well. I think Lady Debonair and Nova are characters where I see what they’re doing with them. And this is a kids’ show, so maybe… You know, we are, all three, 30-plus adults talking about a children’s show, and we should keep that in mind.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: So maybe it was necessary for them to kind of externalize the negativity in Nova and in Lady Debonair, because Nova is a manifestation of Hikaru’s martyr complex, her survivor’s guilt, and her anger, all of these negative feelings that she is having. You know, in the last episode, Nova’s like, “Hey, aren’t you pissed off that you’ve been put in this position? Like, yeah, you got Umi and Fuu, but you are so sad and you don’t know if you’ll ever feel happy again, because they asked you to come here and do this thing that they did not tell you what it entailed from the start.” And that’s true. And from the point of view of an adult watching a children’s story, I don’t think it needed to be externalized. But also, you know, kids are kids. So, maybe thematically, having them there is necessary. I don’t know. What do you guys think?

MEGAN: I don’t know. I also found them thematically interesting, but I don’t know if the show’s execution of them is all that great. I mean, as I summed it up, personally, Nova is like “What if someone manifested all your negative feelings into a human being who was kind of gay for you in a very yandere sort of way?” Like, they get about as intense with Nova as they can, considering the audience, in both Japanese and English. She’s got one of the best voice actors in the dub, Dorothy Elias-Fahn, who really just sinks into the performance.

COLLEEN: I did really like the dub voice for Nova. I thought it was good.

MEGAN: Lady Debonair, in some ways, is kind of the anti-Pillar. Like, she is this force of despair, discord, fear, entropy. And yet, most of what she does, at least in this chunk thus far, is stay in the background and ojou-sama-laugh.

COLLEEN: Another just truly awful laugh that I could not stand. It lasts too long.

MEGAN: I mean, she’s much better at it than Aska’s, in both languages. And her design—

COLLEEN: It’s deeper. It’s better because it’s deeper.

MEGAN: Her design is so good. Like, that is straight-up JRPG villain.

CAITLIN: She does have a hint of Edea, the sorceress from Final Fantasy VIII.

MEGAN: Yes!

CAITLIN: But, I mean, she is the anti-Pillar. By the way, her name is just really silly. Lady Debonair is a really bad villain name for a character that you want to take seriously.

MEGAN: Yeah, it’s not necessarily a bad name for a villain overall, but definitely not for as serious as she’s supposed to be.

CAITLIN: But she’s the anti-Pillar. But also, the Pillar… It’s kinda talking about how putting all of the hopes of the world onto one person is really messed up. And I think they could have a really good show of just the characters going like, “What now?” grappling with the idea like “Cephiro is crumbling without a Pillar. We need a Pillar. But who are we going to sacrifice for that?”

MEGAN: Right. It’s only in the latter half of this chunk of episodes where it feels like the show starts to dig in a little into the sheer unfairness of the Pillar system. The manga’s much more explicit about this. Like I said, most of it is the girls going around to the different factions and being like, “No! You don’t want to do this! This sucks!” instead of having actual mecha fights.

COLLEEN: And I feel like Hikaru is really the only one that has been going around telling people it sucks. I don’t think Umi really said that much to Tatra and Tarta. It was like one of the last episodes that would have happened, so maybe I’m just not remembering, but…

CAITLIN: Well, Umi was too pissed off to really…

[Chuckling]

COLLEEN: She didn’t want to be there!

CAITLIN: She didn’t want to be there. She looked really cute in those clothes, though. I gotta say, the— Also, Hikaru looked adorable in the Autozam clothes.

MEGAN: She does!

CAITLIN: That was a really good look for her.

MEGAN: But one of the changes from manga to anime that I did not like is the fact that in the manga, all the girls voluntarily go to the different factions to try to convince them to stop fighting; here, it is involuntary. In all three cases, they are captured. So, it kind of takes away from their roles as active protagonists, which is really kind of necessary for Umi and Fuu considering how little screen time they’re getting.

CAITLIN: Yeah. So, in the conversation between Hirano and Ohkawa, they talked about how they wanted to put more emphasis on Hikaru as the protagonist for this, because in the first half it was very much like, you know, she’s one of three, and it’s an ensemble show. It’s all three girls going through this journey. And Hikaru is, I think, in personality, very protagonist coded, but in terms of her role in the story, up until the moment where she is the one who takes them out, even if all three were involved, she is the one who got blood on her hands from this. You know, it’s all about her. She is the one going through this journey. She is the one who is facing a literal manifestation of all of her feelings of guilt from what she’s done, and Umi and Fuu are just kind of there, along for the ride.

MEGAN: And the show is being extremely unsubtle about the fact, right from the start of this season, that Hikaru is meant to be the next Pillar. This is why she’s having these visions. This is why Lady Debonair and Nova are attacking her. Heck, you could argue they set this up back in Season 1, with her being the only one who could automatically understand Mokona, which the other two never quite did.

CAITLIN: Yeah, she is the most empathetic one, and she has been bearing this terrible burden.

MEGAN: And she just refuses to let anyone else share it, because… I mean, the girls say it outright. She is the kind of person who hides her feelings so as to not burden others with them, so she thinks she has to take this on by herself, which is a very teenage way of dealing with complicated feelings but is also not healthy.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm.

COLLEEN: You could probably even say the first episode hints at it a little bit, because Umi and Fuu are talking with their family and they’re walking around and they’re doing stuff, but then you cut to Hikaru, and she’s sitting there like the princess does when she just has to sit and pray.

MEGAN: I mean, she is meditating at her family’s dojo.

COLLEEN: Yeah, and she interacts with her brothers and stuff. But the beginning of her sequence is her just sitting there and meditating, which is basically what the princess does—er, [Corrects self] not the princess—the Pillar does.

CAITLIN: I do think one of the things that happens with Hikaru being emphasized as a protagonist is that since, you know, Umi and Fuu, they each are dealing with a different country, there is a deep uninterest in Chizeta and Fahren, which makes the episodes that deal with them feel kinda unnecessary.

MEGAN: Yeah.

CAITLIN: You know, like, what are we doing here? I don’t know. There’s nothing as interesting going on here as there is with Eagle, who has all these connections to Lantis. He knows about the Pillar system. Like, Lantis told him a bunch of stuff about the Pillar system. And I feel like in that place, we could do more with what’s going on in Cephiro. Like, apparently almost the entire population of Cephiro is in this castle. We see this one little girl. They are completely siloed off from the, like, half-dozen people who are basically the council trying to find the Pillar. What’s going on? What’s daily life like there? Could the characters assuage some of their guilt by going there and spending time with the people and helping out there, you know? Or would that increase their guilt? Would they see that it was necessary for the Pillar to be removed so that Cephiro’s degradation didn’t continue, or will they feel guilty because these people’s home is now literally crumbling and it’s their fault? Would it be more complicated? Would it be a mix of those two? I don’t know. I think it would have been a really interesting thing to examine.

MEGAN: I agree. And I know, realistically, the reason is because animating more people is hard and expensive and that means coming up with more designs so they want to keep the cast as slim as possible, so the only representative of the populace of Cephiro we get is the adorable little girl, but you’re right. Yeah, having them basically have to deal with a refugee camp on top of everything else would have added so much more thematically, but it also could have added more traumatically.

COLLEEN: Yeah, I mean, even in Season 1, they at least had a village, a village or two. It felt like there were people in this country. But now, it’s just like the main characters are here… and nothing else.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Nothing else matters.

COLLEEN: Yeah, like, no one’s in the bath. The bath is only the main characters. No one’s walking around. It just feels… It feels so weirdly…

CAITLIN: There’s no attendants. Like…

COLLEEN: No one’s reacting to all these countries coming and attacking them. It just feels very empty. Like, they can’t do anything in Cephiro. They have to leave.

MEGAN: And [obscured by crosstalk]—

CAITLIN: Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

MEGAN: It kind of undercuts the message that Hikaru, and the other girls, to a lesser extent, espouse over and over throughout these episodes, that the future of Cephiro belongs to its people, that Cephiro itself belongs to its people, and how—

CAITLIN: That’s exactly what I was gonna say!

MEGAN: —and how they’re trying to basically defend themselves from colonialist forces!

CAITLIN: Yeah, no, Hikaru gives this whole speech about how Cephiro belongs to the people who live there and what happens to the land will be determined by them. Free Palestine! [Chuckles] You know? It’s got this anti-colonialist message, but we don’t see any of the people who are affected by the colonialism. You know, what does it mean for the people of Cephiro? Maybe they just want a Pillar. Maybe they just want their land to stop crumbling. I don’t know. You’re absolutely correct. And I was literally gonna say the same thing, Megan. Like, we don’t know anything about the land. We don’t know anything about the people. How are we supposed to care about the future of Cephiro?

MEGAN: I do at least appreciate that it’s not like a huge flashing theme but the show does make it clear that even if you do have sympathetic reasons like Autozam, colonialism is still bad. You are taking something from someone else for your own reasons. Don’t do that.

CAITLIN: Okay. Might be just about time to wrap up. So, do we have any other final thoughts that we want to discuss?

MEGAN: Was it just me or did the animation quality of this season kind of go down a little?

CAITLIN: It goes up and down a little bit, for sure. There are some very weird, awkward moments. There was a—

COLLEEN: I forgot to mention. So, the walking scene. I don’t know if you guys were going to mention it, but there’s a scene that I timed because I could not believe it lasted as long as it did. It was 12 seconds of them walking from the door up to everyone else with silence. Nothing was happening. It was just 12 seconds of complete silence and them walking down a hallway. It was truly baffling! I was so confused at why they did that.

CAITLIN: The pacing is very strange.

MEGAN: It is. And I realize that they have not only more episodes to deal with this season but also mech battles, which if you want to do even competently, you have to allot your resources carefully. But yeah, there are definitely some episodes, particularly in the middle stretch, that got a little dodgy with the character models. They definitely don’t get as elaborate with them in this season as they did with the previous one.

CAITLIN: There was an episode where I started laughing at Umi’s bangs, and I did a little doodle of how far they stuck out in my notebook.

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: Like, they were just out there! They were like the length of her skull away from her face!

COLLEEN: She had a skirt for bangs. [Chuckles] Yeah, it did not look good or was paced well, and I hope that gets fixed for the last half of this season, because I did enjoy the first season, even if there was some really slow episodes. But a lot of this season has been slow. I feel like they repeat themselves a lot, they repeat lines a lot, like they don’t know what to say at some times or what to have a character do, so they kind of just have them walk around.

CAITLIN: We’ll see how it brings things to a close next episode. Thank you so much for joining us, AniFam. If you like what you have heard or—if you’re reading the transcript—read, go to animefeminist.com to see more from the team.

And if you enjoyed it enough to pay us some money, go to patreon.com/animefeminist or ko-fi.com/animefeminist. Don’t go through the Apple app. (Boy, that’s a tongue-twister.) They’re charging way too much money. Patreon covers our monthly expenses and costs, and Ko-fi allows us to do bigger things. We’re now paying our contributors $75 per article instead of $50. We’d really like to be able to continue doing that, but it is a 50% increase and money is tight.

Our socials are on Linktree, /animefeminist. Come visit us. Come talk to us. Send us a comment. Next episode, we’re going to talk about the second half of the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth. Thanks for listening. Free Palestine!