{"id":410,"date":"2006-05-23T16:32:41","date_gmt":"2006-05-23T21:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=410"},"modified":"2006-05-23T19:40:10","modified_gmt":"2006-05-24T00:40:10","slug":"somedays-dreamers-final-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=410","title":{"rendered":"Someday’s Dreamers: Ending Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

My wife and I finally got an evening together and finished off the last disc of Someday’s Dreamers<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"Someday's<\/center><\/p>\n

The story takes the familiar “magical girl” theme and turns it on its head. Yume is a mage. Mages are rare. Unlike every other magical story I’ve ever seen, their powers do not lend themselves to combat. Mages don’t fly around, zapping bad guys with colorful energy blasts. Instead, they perform localized miracles. In the series, we see the girls repairing vandalisim, rejuvenating a worn old house, and (in a moment of foolish teenage passion) bending the Tokyo Tower. <\/p>\n

They don’t fight evil. There is<\/em> no super-evil in this story. Instead, Mages work for the government<\/em>. People apply for various miracles (Mage actions) and the Bureau of Mage Labor will dispatch a Mage to show up and attempt to solve the problem. In the series, Yume and her friend Angela are both mages in training, and are working towards their certification exam.<\/p>\n

As part of their training, they learn that there are rules about how they are allowed to use their powers. Mages are not allowed to use their powers to control life. Making someone younger, healing injury, or curing disease are all forbidden. They are also not allowed to do other magic that may cause trouble, such as creating money.<\/p>\n

Magic is hard to understand. In one episode we see Yume try to use her magic and fail. Every other time she tries she succeeds. We never come to understand what makes a particular action easy or hard. I don’t think we’re supposed to.
\n
\nFirst, a few nitpicks:<\/p>\n

\"Someday's<\/center>
\nThe voice of Angela Brooks in the dub is just terrible. She sounds far too old. She sounds like a middle-aged woman, not at all like a teenage girl. Her sour demeanor made her character a bit repulsive to me, and so her romantic sub-plot struck me as uninteresting. (The Japanese voices are all excellent.)<\/p>\n

\"Someday's<\/center>
\nPeople were a little meaner to Yume than really made sense. Lots of people were needlessly rude to her. Yume is a very, very polite fifteen<\/del> seventeen year-old girl (not to mention adorable) and I just found it hard to believe so many people were so eager to heap abuse on her. Perhaps there is an undercurrent of cultural mage-hate that explains this, but as I watched it the whole thing made non-mages seem like a bunch of selfish brutes and fools. <\/p>\n

\"Someday's<\/center>
\nThey call the ability to use magic, and the magic itelf, “Special Power”. As in, “Please! Use special power to do such-and-such”, or , “I wish I had special power”. This exists in both the sub and dub. My problem with this is that “special power” is a bit of a clumsy phrase. Doesn’t the fact that it’s a power make it special? Wouldn’t they have some kind of word for “special power”? It would have been more interesting to leave those words untranslated, and just use the Japanese words for “special power”. <\/p>\n

But all of these are trivial issues. The series is quite enjoyable. <\/p>\n

\"Someday's<\/center><\/p>\n

(A few mysteries remain at the end of the story. For example, what was the deal with the little girl who only Yuma could see? Who was she and why couldn’t anyone else see her? Why did her hair stop sticking up for those few minutes? I really expected this to pay off later, but it was just left as an unexplained mystery.<\/span> Steven has notes on this here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

During her training, Yume doesn’t so much learn how to use special power<\/del> magic as learn all the problems related to the use of magic. She sees that magic is difficult to use not because her powers are unwieldy, but because problems are often more complex than they seem. Sometimes good people have perfectly reasonable yet conflicting goals. Sometimes people don’t know what they really want. Sometimes people know what they want but ask for it poorly, or don’t ask for it directly. Sometimes people ask for things that will not solve their problems. Sometimes they don’t forsee the full results of the thing they request, and end up with a worse set of problems than the ones they started with. All of this is assuming the Mage even understands the request and performs it properly. Magic is not a panacea.<\/em> Indeed, it is a lot like money, fame, or influence: It can often do more harm than good if used foolishly.<\/p>\n

In the series Yume sees people without magic who wish they had it. She sees people who have it refuse to use it. Even with the power to perform miracles, she sees that many problems can’t be solved because the problem is what is in the person’s heart, and she can’t change that. At least, not by using magic.<\/p>\n

The ending was quite unexpected. After the build-up about how powerful her mother is\/was, I was sort of expecting something really huge at the end. Something that broke the rules or even redefined the rules. I thought the ending would be something that altered the world, or at least the city. I thought maybe she would somehow grant speical power to people on a mass scale. Or abolish special power. Or at least perform something that could be seen all over the city. I really expected to see the classic supernova of magic and emotion that parts the clouds and beams down from above. I expected a light show and probably some flying. I mean, we’re watching anime<\/em> here. That’s how these stories end.<\/p>\n

They went the other direction entirely. It was her most successful miracle, and it was perhaps the most subtle and understated. Keeping in mind the limitations of magic, and the fact that most problems are in a person’s heart and have little to do with the physical objects around them, this was a very impressive miracle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My wife and I finally got an evening together and finished off the last disc of Someday’s Dreamers. The story takes the familiar “magical girl” theme and turns it on its head. Yume is a mage. Mages are rare. Unlike every other magical story I’ve ever seen, their powers do not lend themselves to combat. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}