✧OneWithManyNames✧ :
I’m going to take a stand for the Midori anime as someone who has seen it. It is grotesque because THAT IS THE POINT. This anime was all done by one man in the end: the voice acting, the animating, the budgeting, EVERYTHING. The anime didn’t romanticize/glamorize the SA like other animes were doing at the time, he showed it was horrifying. As for the magician the girl marries, he is still someone who takes advantage of the girl by providing a sense of security & giving her kindness as she was still a child & he was an adult. Yet, he was somewhat better as, from what I can remember, he didn’t force her to do anything with him (except keep her for himself as his wife & pretty much sabotaged her, he’s still no better). So, it makes sense the girl would still stay with him when they do decide to leave together from the circus & become devastated when he doesn’t return, believing he abandoned her like everyone else not realizing he was killed which makes the ending just as tragic as her entire story. The point of the anime is to show how fragile, delicate, & precious the human psyche is & how easy it is to manipulate, corrupt, & hurt an innocent soul like a child’s. I would have liked the relationship between her & the magician if he adopted her as a daughter rather than married her as a wife, a father-daughter dynamic would have worked so much better & been more tragic but there was probably a reason why the director wrote the relationship the way he did. So, in other words, this anime is meant to be grotesque, it is meant to be gut wrenching as it is not glamorizing the horrors the girl went through but rather showing us what she sees, hence why she grew to love the magician & was devastated despite the relationship still being inappropriate. He was all she had & completely broke when she found herself alone again. This story is from the perspective of her & the way a child going through such horrors would view their reality & would take whatever remaining hope is left then shatter when met with disappointment/heartbreak again. It takes a level of media literacy to understand this.
2026-02-18 19:15:53