Tomoe Mami no Heibon na Nichijou

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There's a question that has plagued mankind for many years: what is the worst Madoka spinoff? Is it Suzune Magica? Kazumi Magica? The original run of Oriko Magica that looks like it was drawn by a six-year-old? However, Mami Tomoe's Everyday Life has ended those debates by being such an embarrassment that most of the scanlation groups I've seen dropped it on purpose.

Hoo boy, let's not beat around the bush: this is the most heterosexual Madoka story ever written. Painfully so, even. The starting-line concept is that everyone except Mami has gotten married or engaged to men, often with kids on the way. Thing is, ... since there were like two male characters in the original story, Kyouko, Madoka, and Hitomi have to get unnamed and unseen spouses; we don't even see Hitomi's husband at her wedding. It goes so far as to marry Homura off to Tatsuya, Madoka's brother who was basically an infant in the original series; apparently Homura married him right out of high school.

Now, I'm not going to say that all Madoka fans are yuri shippers, but it's hard to deny that the whole "girl's love" thing is kind of fundamental to the series, especially when you delve into spinoff territory. The fact that Homura loves Madoka is fundamental to the plot of Rebellion, and multiple other stories have featured implicit or explicit same-sex relationships at their core. This story essentially takes that whole idea, the emotional throughline of about 80% of the franchise, and smacks it to death with a stick. The fact that it's credited to them getting older bears an ugly line of erasure, as well--what, Homura repeated a hundred timelines and endured years of strife and hardship all for the sake of a friggin' phase? Madoka stories don't necessarily have to be yuri or even carry undertones of it, but this story goes the other direction and essentially declares that the girl's love elements that did exist actually didn't.

And once you get away from that whole ugly concept, what do you have? Well, nothing, really. As the title suggests, it's a slice-of-life, so there's no plot. It's not particularly well-drawn--not awful, but far from a selling point--and all the jokes in it are, essentially, the same jokes you've heard a thousand times from such fine icons of comedy as Cathy. Its vision of the grown-up cast shows them as a bunch of boring housewife cliches, acting catty about their husbands and pressuring each other to get married and talking about fashion and whether or not they look fat. It takes an energized, tragic, extreme bunch of characters and turns them into a gang of insipid cardboard cutouts. Even the magical girl side of them is gone, to the point that the opening chapter has them criticizing Mami for still putting on her uniform, never particularly elaborating on why they have not all died due to Grief Seed withdrawal.

And so the bulk of the story ends up being every "Christmas Cake" joke you've ever seen. Mami angsts about not getting married! Mami goes on a diet and tries to lose weight! Mami cleans the house! Mami doesn't have her life together! This has been done a thousand different times, and it's been done better, and at this point the main character scarcely resembles Mami at all. If you're not a fan of Madoka Magica, you could probably find a dozen other cases of this exact same story premise and they'd probably be done far better. And if you are a fan of Madoka Magica, then, past the initial wave of confusion and disgust, there's so little of the original story on display here that I can't recommend it at all. I suppose if you're the sort of person who really hates the yuri side of the fandom and wants to piss it off, then you might get a thrill and some laughs out of it, but I'd recommend just sticking to porn doujins, because this whole thing puts me very much in mind of a porn doujin that's had all the sex removed.