User:Bersayaka
The was a young girl called Miki
Who liked a boy that was sickly
She made a contract
To get his hand back
But he still won't help with the Wiki
Of course, he's too busy being a pretentious violinist with his evil, scheming woman [1] to do anything so useful as keep a Wiki up-to-date. I have to say, as much as I like the series, I'll never forget the bizarre way it showed how romantic relationships supposedly work; boys don't have romantic or sexual feelings at all until a random girl says "I like you!" and then they instantly fall in love despite having never spent a moment with that girl before. The first one to grant permission is automatically made into his wife. It's an even more disturbing contract than the ones a certain Kyuubey likes to hand out. The fact that this utter mishandling of a common, everyday thing like how relationships work leads to the breakdown and death of a major character is a bit of black spot on the series for me, and would be even if Sayaka wasn't one of my favourite characters.
Well I'm doing this all in the wrong order, but here's my introduction: I'm a guy from England who's liked anime on and off for most of my 28 years of being rained on by the wonderful English weather [2]. When you live in a country where the climate leads to rain almost every day, or at least a strong possibility of it, and where Summer is typically three weeks of "not bad" weather, with a possibly lowered chance of rain, you end up having a lot of time to read, watch TV, films and so on. In all my years watching anime, which would be infrequently from the age of 15 onwards but then much more frequently from the age of 21 onwards, I've never really spent much time watching the Magical Girl genre. Sailor Moon wasn't such a standard part of growing up as anime fan in the 90s here as it apparently was in the USA. I tried to watch both Futari wa Pretty Cure[3] and Nanoha Strikers[4] and while I liked the ingredients, I found what they'd done with them kind of dull. I got about 4 episodes into Nanoha and around 20 into Precure before I drifted away from them. Madoka is the only one that kept my interest for the duration, and I came out the other side wanting more - particularly because it doesn't seem to be a concept that lends itself well to lazy rehashing like the average Magical Girl setting, so it's really exciting to see what they think of next rather than "what colours will they use for the dresses next?" or "Will they name the moves after cakes or musical notes?" and so on, as seems to the case for the more generic stuff.