Screw The Quake Victims, Give Me My Anime.
Admission up front: I'm in here a couple of times as sevendials. I stopped posting before I wrote this up and will not be saying any more.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is one of the currently-airing shows in the winter anime season. It's a deconstruction of the Magical Girl concept, created by Gen Urobuchi and Studio SHAFT. Ten episodes of the projected twelve-episode run have been shown so far, and it's pretty obvious that however bad things already look for Madoka and her friends, they were only going to get worse. It's been on hiatus since the Tohoku earthquake, for what many fans feel to be obvious reasons.

madokamagica is a Livejournal community that discusses aspects of the episodes, shares icons and fanmixes. It's usually fairly low-pressure, and has been pretty quiet since the show went on hiatus. That all changes when doctorcasey makes a community post about the show's status, suggesting that the last two episodes may not be screened at all out of sensitivity to the victims of the quake. First red flag: the tone of the initial post was rather entitled, but it appears to be a direct quote from another message board so it was easy to assume he was simply spreading the word.

Things remain reasonable until people start to post in support of the decision. Whereupon it becomes obvious doctorcasey made the post because he disapproves of this kind of "political correctness" and was hoping the rest of the community would agree with him.

What. The. Hell.

ETA: doctorcasey has left the building. Really! He's going right now!

ETA 2: doctorcasey has been in contact with me via Livejournal messaging, and has requested that I post the following apology here on his behalf. Everything below the cut is him:


Oh, uh, wow. I haven't read all the comments; I doubt I'm exactly wanted here, but...

I was wrong to say the things that I said, and I'm sorry. I didn't understand the kind of impact the episode might have on the Japanese people, I was operating under the (stupid) assumption that it would do nothing to change the feelings of those already hurting from what happened and that MBS was doing this for no other reason than to avoid bad publicity from people that were annoyed, but not exactly hurt (Though just to clarify, I don't think many of the things people accused me of thinking in that thread, such as 'The Japanese people should handle their own suffering better' or whatever; I don't believe that at all, it was a terrible disaster and it's okay to feel whatever they feel for however long they feel it. Honestly, there's so many misunderstandings and people thinking me guilty of things I never said that I'm not sure where to start). Now I understand the feelings that the episode might have drawn, though, and if such an episode could serve as a trigger for those with PTSD then I have to agree there is nothing wrong at all with the decision to delay the episodes until the September DVD release.

I know that by making so many posts about the subject, I gave the impression that I care about the episodes more than what's going on in Japan. That's not the truth, though - I intended to just make that original post of mine (The original anti-censorship post, I mean, not the opening announcement) and be done, but a lot of people replied to me and I replied to them in turn, and ended up belaboring the point in the process. The delay was never something I felt too strongly about in the first place; I might have given that impression in my opinionated rants because I'm an opinionated, obnoxious person, but it really never was. What's happening in Japan is something I've given a lot of thought to every day since March 11th, it's something I've kept up with actively. I'm always happy whenever I hear any kind of good news and dejected when I stumble upon the alternative. I'm far from indifferent. (Of course, I don't think that everyone's treating me entirely fairly here... I might have been annoyed about the Madoka delay at first, but it's not as though annoyance over episode delays and concern towards Japan are mutually exclusive. It's possible to have mild annoyance towards the mild problems concerning Madoka delays, and something deeper for the more important problems facing Japan - or at least, it is whenever you misunderstand the nature of said delay the way I did - and that's where I stood at the start).

As for the 9/11 thing I said, I'm understanding of self-censorship and withheld episodes from whenever the incident was still fresh, but I think the movie laronmi was talking about was released years and years later. If I'm wrong on that, then never mind what I said. And for the 'sure why not' I gave in response to that one guy later in the thread, I was burned out and shitposting because I was stressed out from people acting like I'm Ishihara or something saying the tsunami was divine punishment.

tl;dr version: The delay is okay and understandable, I'm an idiot, everyone else was right. I'm sorry.