BenQ Momo died. longevity BenQ Momo. After 46 episodes of telling the story of a scarred Japanese child dying in a truck due to a magical girl, the show has 17 episodes left, well beyond its original schedule of 50. That meant the writers had to come up with something relatively quickly — should the focus be on Momo growing up as the child of Earth parents? Should she pretend she never died and treat her death as a nightmare? Or should it try to do something different and essentially reboot the story as a metaphor for Momo coping with death?
If you guessed the last one, you’re on the right track. While episodes 47 and 48 are clip shows that allow everyone to get the series back on track, the remaining 15 episodes focus on the new adventures of Princess Fenarinas. The story begins with her father mourning the death of his child. While he was at a pond in Fenarinarsa, he noticed some strange diamond-like stones in the water that he had never seen before. He fished them out and took them home, where the Queen suggested trying to place one of them into the center of the crown that had been vacated by Momo’s death. As he does so, the gem is pulled into the crown and compressed into a laser disc, which begins to play a slightly different scene of Momo. Neither parent knows what’s going on, but as the adventure continues, a dark force grows closer – a vague black mist that eventually gains a face and purpose. By episode fifty, we can see a strong hint that the scene they’re watching with us is in some way Momo’s dream as a baby; the king notices that Momo is still a baby after reincarnation.
This opens the door to what these episodes are really about: giving both BenQ Momo and the way audiences process her death. Momo died without completing his mission; Fenarinarsa remains far from Earth, and its status as the guardian and source of dreams and miracles remains threatened. Momo is fully aware of the importance of her mission, even though she behaves like a typical child, playing her own way through the encounter. This shows that she feels guilty about dying before completing her mission, and now as a baby, she has no real way to deal with her problems – after all, she can’t exactly talk about them. Thus, the dark clouds that would later be named “Nightmare” represented her guilt and fear that she had caused irreparable harm to herself, and her adventures could all be seen as her trying to come to terms with what had happened to her.
The main way we see this is through the amount of death Momo encounters in his dreams. In episode fifty-one, Momo meets an actor known for performing his own stunts; he suffered from a terminal illness and eventually died off-screen. Momo must come to terms with the fact that she helped him fulfill his dying wish and he is gone, living only through his movies. In the next episode, a penguin in the aquarium loses her chick, and Mocha must help the grieving mother – who ends up forgetting about her chick when she meets a handsome male penguin. This illustrates Momo’s fear of being replaced. Yes, she is now the child of true Earth parents, but she is also a human, not a magical princess. Does this mean her Fenarinarsan parents will replace or forget her, just like the penguins replaced her chicks? These fears are addressed in the following episodes, as Momo helps a woman change her tragic past by allowing her to board a ghostly version of the train she never rode the first time; by helping Cecilia , Momo is thinking about how to redo her life, change her destiny, and have a happy ending just like she did for Cecilia.
Another major thread in these episodes is the Devil Queen, aka the Evil Queen from Snow White. Episode 50 strongly implies that Snow White is dead (as far as the Queen and the dwarves know, she was indeed dead in earlier versions of Grimm), with Momo twice trying to placate people’s feelings by pretending to be Snow White. The Demon Queen then becomes the Demon Aunt, a woman who attempts to atone for her actions, primarily by selling the delicious apples from the fairy forest and using the profits to benefit others. The Demon Aunt could represent Momo, even now as an ordinary person, still eager to help others, dreaming of finding a way to still change the world even without her magic.
Of course, all of that was almost lost when Nightmare caught up with her. The last three episodes of the series are dark, with episode 62 being truly terrifying, with the nightmare picking off Momo’s friends and family one by one, forcing her to question herself and all the good she did before her death. It’s not a spoiler to say that she and her friends emerge victorious in the end (the statute of limitations for spoilers will certainly expire in forty years), but it’s not an easy one for Momo, emotionally. journey. She must accept the end of her old life and embrace a new one, and so must we as the audience. It’s a hard lesson to learn even for the special era of after-school children’s entertainment (not to mention the era of toy sales), but I do think it works.
In addition to the recurring character “Demon Auntie,” Momo also encounters a pink dragon named Kajira, whom she encounters in a tongue-in-cheek series about Momotaro, as the anime calls it. As “Peach Boy”. Kajira, who looks like the pink Spike from the original My Little Pony franchise, indeed has a very important purpose. For much of the show, he’s just a chewy comic relief, chewing up everything he can while emphasizing the production values with his ever-changing body shape. Momo’s new outfit is cuter than her old one – her tank top is now a hoodie, to great effect – and her new transformation has 100% less butt, looking more like something from a later magical girl series Light show transformation. There’s still an interesting specificity to her transformation – at one point, she points out that she’s a jet pilot, not a regular pilot, and therefore unable to fly an older biplane. Of course, there are some issues with less enlightened era media; Episode 51 has a very horrific stereotype of Aboriginal people (with “how” as a greeting).
Fairy tale princess Minqi Momo Requires more twists and turns than initially expected. Momo’s death and the episodes that helped her deal with it may not have been different from other international children’s media in the 1980s, but the turning point in episode 46 left an indelible mark on the show’s finale . It’s a must-see for animation historians, and it’s a good, if occasionally weird, story in its own right.
