Quoted By:
Buckle up retards, I'm reviewing Scarlet Guardians.
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Scarlet Guardians unabashedly and shamelessly sells you its tags from cover to cover. It is the Lake Guardians turning anime school girls into magical girls as they contend with a monster of the week plot. I use “unabashedly” and “shamelessly” in the positive as much as the negative sense. It is confident about what it is doing and uncompromising in that pursuit.
As such, ScarGuards misses out on multiple instances where it could have built itself differently, approach problems and character interactions differently, and on the whole, could have produced a more compelling and complete narrative.
The problems within the prose do not come from the concept, but solely from the execution. There are many moments where the two intersect with precision and produce the intended effect, and there are moments where the two intersect with that same precision and produce something that is ill-suited to the world of literature. Simply put, reading mahou shoujo that clearly is leaning on its animated influences more than any kind of light novel influence makes for odd decisions and hiccups.
If this feels like I’m belaboring the point, “This is magical girls,” it’s because it is important to recognize that. I thought I knew what I was in for when I started, but as I continued to read, I began to more properly understand what that really meant. You are reading magical girls taken wholesale from the screen and translated into prose. Understand this. [1/3]
