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#if you watched madoka magica you know what's up in the last comic and I'm sorry :( poor luka
ladycibia · 2 years
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when you think about it, witchers are just magical girls
what about sorceresses though
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I'm pretty sure those are not Yen's clothes
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mysticdragon3md3 · 3 years
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I just saw this on Twitter and there's a discussion over sucking it up and starting at the beginning, no matter how old it is or what medium (videogames, comics, movies, series, etc.).
But I'm like, it's difficult for lots of people to be accustomed to older games when they're so used to current gen realism or at least smoother textures/animation. I mean, I started with DMC3 and turned out fine. Lots of people started with Kingdom Hearts II instead of KH1. And maybe you don't want to read Batman from the 1940s. Maybe you want to see more modern art or at least less misogyny (or whatever other bigotry you *know* unconsciously got into those 1940s stories). When I first started reading X-men, my brother accidentally bought a random issue (Fabian Nicieza; Andy Kubert) and I got hooked through the cliffhanger at the end of that issue. I went back and bought X-men volume 1 (Jim Lee), but I mostly went forward from that random X-men issue. So I think people can get hooked in the middle of a series, then go back, or even continue forward from where they personally started.
But yeah, manga is _SO_ much easier. It's a little sad knowing there's an end, when a series is so serialized and planned out. But it's a cohesive story. (Usually.) And I've been so steeped in manga for years, that I actually feel kind of alien to this concern about "starting from the middle? Or go find the beginning?". Because when you get into manga/anime, you just find the beginning. It's not too much to catch up on.
Though...I may have to admit...Lots of weekly serialized manga seem to lend themselves to people accidentally running into a chapter (maybe while they were reading the weekly anthology for another series), and getting hooked, even though they're not reading from the beginning. There is something about the manga industry's pressure to hook an audience every week, with every 10 (or so) pages, cramming in as much impactful art/story/character into those dense 10 pages every week, that does lend itself to being easy to pick up anywhere in the story. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if manga editors _mandated_ that manga-ka make every one fo their pages and chapter eye-catching, intriguing enough to hook someone who has no idea what the series is. But it doesn't really matter if you get hooked in the middle of a manga/anime. Once you get interested in one chapter, it is fairly easy to just go find volume 1, chapter 1.
...Though an anime like One Piece might be easier to start at the beginning of one of the story arcs. ...Maybe go back to watch the first few episodes to get all the character introductions, then read some Wiki to fill in some major story milestones, skip the filler episodes, and get back to the specific storyline that initially hooked you. Am I the only one who does that?
I feel like some long-running anime/manga get by, on the strength of their cast dynamics and/or the strength of the author's episodic storytelling. If you have either of those, then it's kind of unimportant to go back to the beginning. If the whole cast is entertaining, every moment they're together, playing off each other, then going back to the beginning before the regular cast was fully formed, can make a fan impatient to get through the beginning volumes. I know I felt that way about a lot of harem anime. Madoka Magica may have inspired the "3 episode rule" to evaluate an anime series, but when the entertainment of a series depends on the cast dynamics, I always waited until the regular cast was fully formed, before I formed my opinion, regardless of how many episodes that took. I wanted to see all their usual relationship dynamics, because that would define the series, in every episode. And if every episode is constructed as well as a one-shot story, then how important is it to start at the beginning (other than to get character backstory)? Then again, I guess that latter condition only really applies to episodic series. An overarching story and character growth probably won't hit as hard if you don't know the character/story from the beginning.
But can you know americomi character arcs from reading the very beginning of a series? If the point of reading from the beginning is to understand the full emotional impact of the character's growth and the story's progression, but every run of an American comic book pretty much restarts a character, then is there a point to reading Batman #1 from the 1940s? Especially if you got hooked on a specific run of Batman? Maybe you won't need to start at the beginning of that specific run, with that specific author's conception of Batman's character, so you can see Batman's character growth and understand his character arc. Because in another author's hands, that's just a different Batman. Often, may as well be a whole other character, with just the same franchise name slapped on.
---Though that last claim sounds grossly over-simplistic. We all have a broad concept of Batman and other long-running americomi characters. There is a persisting, common denomination image of a franchise character, or else their popularity wouldn't have survived through time. Maybe if a reader is interested in that, then go all the way back to the beginning with issue one from the 1940s. But if you just want to know what's going on with the specific storyline, if that was already enough to hook you, maybe it's ok to go forward with that. And maybe some of those people, in their spare time, will go all the way back to the very beginning issue #1.
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