Crunchyroll was acting up yesterday so I started watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica on Netflix. I'm most of the way through now and I've also done some reading up the series in general (I rarely care about spoilers). I'm going to spoiler-tag my current thoughts.
From my understanding, Madoka is a deconstruction of some 'magical girl' genre. Despite TVTropes describing it as an anime that's regularly recommended to beginners, I feel like I'm losing something by not knowing anything about that genre to begin with. The first three episodes were easily my favorite when they were learning about everything and it seemed like a semi-lighthearted story about friends coming together to battle witches. Then the end of the third episode happened and it's been increasingly grim ever since. I understand that's the whole point of Madoka and I'm certainly appreciating it for what it is (I just finished Episode 10 and timeline shenanigans always appeal to me), but I can't shake the feeling that I would've liked it better if it stayed semi-lighthearted instead. Magical girls beating progressively more dangerous threats while slowly coming together as a group was what I thought the show would be at first, and that sounded pretty good to me! I guess I should look into other magical girl shows in the future that play the tropes straighter. ---