We can all agree that things would be a whole lot better if there were more Magical Girl elements in our day-to-day lives, right? I mean, yeah, you'd probably spend a lot of time being lectured about the power of love and justice when you were just trying to get a cup of coffee, and those extensive transformation sequences are probably going to make you late for work at least twice a week, but that's a small price to pay for a better, more glitter-streaked world.

At least one major corporation agrees with me, too. In honor of Anime Festival Asia, Microsoft released a video introducingInori Aizawa, an anime magical girl personification of the Internet Explorer web browser. You did not hallucinate anything in that last sentence. Check below for the video, which is actually pretty awesome.

 

 

I have to say, if their goal was convincing me to try IE again, then having it kick the living cuss out of robots was a pretty good way to do it. For interested parties, more information about Inori can be found at a Facebook page -- because of course she has a Facebook page -- linked to internetexplorertan.com, a reference to the truly bizarre internet phenomenon of creating anime lady mascots for operating systems. You won't find out exactly what she's supposed to be fighting in the video, but you will her introduction, which, bizarrely, is both accurate to Internet Explorer's problems and also basically the first page of every shojo manga ever:

Hey everyone! My name is Inori and you can think of me as a personification of Internet Explorer. When I was younger, I used to be a clumsy, slow and awkward girl.

However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that I have really matured and changed over the years. I feel confident in my abilities now, and I'm eager to show you what I can do.

It is, needless to say, a little weird, but it's also pretty fun, and as much as I realize that it's a marketing ploy, there's a part of me that hopes tech firms can put capitalism aside for a bit and team up with a whole Sailor Scout-style roster of browsers teaming up to battle against vague Internet threats. Chrome is totally a Sailor Mars, and Firefox is already halfway to being a talking pet mascot already.

That said, if you told me that the new version of Internet Explorer opened a few seconds after you clicked on it, but was hurrying onto your screen with toast in its mouth, I would be downloading it right now.

 

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