Questionable Questing

The fights happen in this alternate dimension called a nest the monsters form in, and if given enough time and power they can break free from that and start affecting the real world instead of just vanishing entirely once their defeated. Magical girls get stronger based on a few core tenets and emotions, not just training.

Here's another awesome pic.

What are the tenets

Classic.

Azula is having a family therapy moment with that ecstatic face

Bravery, love, determination, and wonder. Wonder represents the childish urge to explore and be amazed by new things, determination is self explanatory, love very specifically is about childish crushes and the obsessive kind rather than stable relationships, while finally bravery is about feeling scared and doing something anyway not necessarily about risking your life.

So with Bravery, you could be risking your life but if you're used or trained to resist that feeling of danger it doesn't count. And in case you didn't pick up one the not so subtle criticism, all of these tenets very specifically revolve around deliberately picking someone childish and a little unstable.

But yes, Azula is definitely exercising some demons and speed running through a couple years of therapy and repressed anger with how hard she pounding that ass. lol.

Bruh how do people get into this super fuzzy magical girl ideal system. Boggles my mind as a hard-core Shonen fan of the bloodier ones

That's kind of the point for my story. It's deliberately a self destructive and stupid system that all kind of ties in with the fractured relationship with their mom. Although I do agree with some of the other Magical girl shows.

How is this idealism romantic notions destructive and dumb?

Getting in shower talk after

Because it venerates innocence and purity even as it's forcing literal children to fight in life or death battles by themselves. It also has a predetermined time limit that also tends to destroy people's lives because as it turns out if your super busy all the time as a magical girl, which by the way you can't tell anyone thanks to a magically enforced gesis.

It's hard to build stable relationships, focus on college, the start of your career, or a lot of other things. Which is basically what happened to Ragyo, the big bad and mom to Satsuki and Ryuko. She was the best magical girl, sacrificed everything in her life to be the best, yet she could stop the march of time to the inevitable end of her powers even as she tried desperately to work around it.

Experimenting on her body and her former friends/family with darker and darker magic. Even her relationship with her kids was colored by the idea they would grow up to be magical girls which she could live vicariously through, or else they aren't her family anymore. Constantly pushing them to go stronger and be better.

Did she start out truly heroic and grow bitter?

She was genuinely heroic for awhile, but she did have a bit of an ego and a kind of perfectionist streak where she felt she had to be the very best no matter the cost to her mind or body.

So wanted to save people but with the source of her greatness coming from heroic flaws. To do all that and no reward after must be devastating

That's what really set her off the deep end. It's not like she even got to talk to someone about her lost powers or even got some kind of award or recognition of what she did, just the knowledge that some day she would forget the one job she loved and spent most of her life obsessing over.

She loved it? Why. at first and how did that love evolve