The Anime Fan Blog

The Magical Girl genre capitalizes on “Happy Moments” and is partly the reason it’s so successful and addicting. In each anime, the storyline begins all happy with each episode beginning happy, face a few challenges but it always ends happy and many happy and funny moments occur during the episode. In the middle of the storyline things start to transition over and it becomes more intense but still has your usual happy ending and beginning.

Towards the second half of the storyline the writers do away with all the happiness, each and every episode afterwards is sad, tragic, and dramatic making you miss the small happy moments. It ends sad and starts off sad, tragedy after tragedy happens in each episode. People get killed, Homes destroyed, hostages taken, main characters die or get captured, cities get blown up, etc… it really just stays like that continually getting worse until the end.

What makes Magical Girl so popular is the brief introduction of small happy moments, after several tragic episodes they introduce one heart-warming inspirational 5 minute moment in a seemingly random episode that brings you to tears but then proceeds on through more tragedy until then next moment. The parts you begin to miss the most are the parts they showed at the beginning of the storyline, this is exactly what Magical Girl capitalizes on

Compare the following 2 videos below for a good example, both are of of Sailor Moon S “Sailor Moon Infinity Story Arc” but one is an episode toward the beginning and the other is an episode toward the end.

(Note: It was impossible for me to find any YouTube English dubbed or English subbed clip of the last 10 minutes of the episode in the first video [I did find one after 30 minutes searching but embedding was restricted] so after 45 more minutes of searching I found a small portion of the clip)