The greatest power of Japan is being able to turn absolutely anything into a battle anime, no matter how mundane it is.
Ranma turned figure skating into a martial arts fighting style
how can such a dower and conforming people create magnificent expressive art?
Princess Tutu is one of the all-time greats.
So is Ben-To.
I love it when people discover Princess Tutu. It's the GOAT subversive series modern writers wish they could write, it goes places you weren't expecting.
Princess Tutu is cinema. It's the show that convinced me that maybe mahou shoujo shows are actually worth checking out, sometimes.
My biggest gripe is how it throws one big set of characters at you and does a shit job getting the point across that all those people have their daily lives and hobbies. And then does it again. Especially with the second set it's really fucking stupid. The story is going on and btw this one is a popstar ?!? for whatever reason and the next one suddenly turned into a wife ?!? No idea wtf was going on with some of the chapters.
The only way to make good subversive media is to actually like that type of media with all the flaws and strengths. If it's not the case it just becomes a shitty parody that seethes on the viewers.
It seemed like the idea was that they were living in a world of illusions where they could be and do anything they wanted, but it was ultimately meaningless and empty. the problem is that the author failed to really show this important latter part and they're portrayed as having lived it up in an endless party for thousands of years then getting their peaceful send-off with no real downsides. I know there's supposed to be a lot of Buddhist themes to the story so it felt like a massive missed opportunity to demonstrate the pitfalls of materialism. I really don't see how the main character wound up any better off than the remainder of the cast after a lifetime of getting the short end of the stick.
Not even that. Everyone already knows about Superman or Batman. It's been 100 years. Basically every story has been told. Meanwhile manga and anime can be about anything. You can go from a battle Shonen, to a romcom, to a cooking show. There are infinite combinations you can do with that, with fresh IP's and even some of the older ones that haven't been milked dry
I think the idea was that both Lustrous and Lunarians are only partially Human and thus were unconsciously trying to emulate Humanity in general. But that didn't really come across. And your point might have also been an underlying idea which wasn't established properly enough.
Japanese comic for Japanese people who do not need a primer on buddhism.
I definitely agree about them essentially being nonhumans or partial humans as the manga explained it iirc trying to live like old style humans. It just seemed like the narrative was teeing up some point where they grow visibly disillusioned with the life of fake luxury and grow up a bit so it wouldn't look like they were handed salvation on a silver platter. Some kind of middle path thing. At the very least the author could have given them a line or two in that final praying scene where they offered her some tangible expression of remorse to her face.
It's usually 16 volumes.
