I don't mind it if it's not done in a jarring way. The movie Avengers Infinity War balances between 30-40 different characters, and three extremely important story lines simultaneously, and it's extremely good. Albeit all of these characters are introduced in the 18 movies that preceded it and only the main antagonist is the new character here.
The shounen anime I've seen that aren't more than a hundred episodes have been good for the most part. The pacing get a bit too fast for sure, like in the case of Food Wars season 3, but the first two seasons are extremely good, as are Haikyuu and My Hero Academia. Studios have gotten better at adapting shounen manga seasonally.
Is it though? In Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura Kinomoto is a normal girl who gets powers, and her life is constantly on the line and she has to defend herself. Madoka has deaths for sure, but that's subversive, it doesn't destroy the genre. It's merely modifying the elements of the genre. And those deaths are trivial if you take into account the fact that there's a being who jumps across multiple timelines. Madoka still has a mascot character, a magical girl transformation, a weapon to fight and she saves the day at the end. It's just that it pushes the boundary of the magical girl genre and is more darker. Madoka isn't commenting on the nature of the genre or taking it apart in any way. I'd even say that it relies on shock value, like Attack on Titan, meaning it wants to like dark compared to other shows. And of course, its focus on certain themes, selfishness/selflessness, Kyube's practicality and not being concerned about free will, etc.
One Punch Man is more of a parody in my opinon, of one trope of the genre, the fights being extended to an endless amount of time, and an adult like Saitama ending it in one punch. And Saitama at the end is no different from Naruto or Deku, he's still good, he's a hero and he wants to save people by risking his life.
That is very good argument =) And the fact of the matter is, the difference between expanding the genre's boundaries and decomposing it depends on your definitions and on what you perceive as important part of the genre. I think the game here is to find definitions that give you a better insight to how the story function, rather than trying to defend definitions that are, well, just nice and good, but not necessarily useful.
For example, all this details that you mentions, the girls fighting evil in dangerous fights, using transformations, having a mascot, all that is part of the mahou shoujo genre, and Madoka used these details to establish itself as a magical girl show. But these two aspects, turning from a normal person to a "magical girl" and fighting dangerous fights, these were pushed beyond the genre's limits. I heard what you said, that they weren't, so let me explain why I think they were.
The essence of the mahou shoujo, I think, is empowerment of the girls. Not just in the literal sense, the whole story tries to focus on them solving both their personal problems and the external ones, saving the world and the like. We watch a mahou shoujo show to see the protagonist develop and change. By the very nature of the genre you have your main characters in a situation where they need to learn to deal with all sorts of new challenges, learn to accept a new part of their life, etc. All these things are uncomfortable and can easily be emotionally negative, and so when things eventually go well it feels even better. It is a simple story structure, you start low and you go high.
So what Madoka did was changing this pattern. Instead of empowering its characters, the contract took away their humanity. The fighting they had to do was not a part of their personal growth, but a survival game. And not just that, the characters are essentially trapped and sentenced the moment they sign the contract. Magical girls don't survive long in this universe, and none of them have a future. Instead of starting low and going up this story started low and went into a free fall to n abyss.
Deaths are important part of achieving what the show wanted to do, but it is just one of the many things it did. One of the most powerful details of Madoka is that the whole plot revolved around the protagonist deciding whether of not to become a magical girl. So for her the whole journey of growing, accepting the new life and learning to deal with new and old problems, all that didn't even come to exist. This whole life was like a life of a convict waiting for an execution. Instead, the show focused on her trying to avoid this fate. This would be a joke if it wasn't that serious.
So that is why I think it is a decomposition. It does not follow the genre in its most important features, rather, it goes fully against it, while following some of the genre's own tropes and conventions. Did not provide more room for the "mahou shoujo anime", cause what Madoka did is incompatible with it. However, Madoka's popularity creates a ton of follower shows, some of which probably bridged the gap and so modern magical girl anime probably span the space of both the old pieces and the territory Madoka explored. In this sense you can claim that Madoka expanded the genre's borders.
I guess for me the big difference between shows like Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, etc., that expand the boundaries of their genres and Madoka which decomposed its genre, is that first ones try to find new themes and idea consistent with the old conventions, and the second tries to find a way in which the old convention breaks itself. So while the first ones could be enjoyed fully on its own, the second require you to know about the old conventions, otherwise you wouldn't get what the show is doing.
By the way, I haven't seen nearly enough of these anime to have an informed opinion, I am mostly speaking from what I heard others say about different magical girl shows.
Yeah, doing a Madoka-like take on the hero genre would be a really difficult task. Would have loved to see it done though.
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