Why Mara?
I love the Oh My Goddess! manga. I've been a fan for years. And I've always wanted to make an OMG! fansite, to reflect my obsession with this incredibly awesome series. But, like I normally try to do when I make a website, I wanted to do something that hadn't been done before - to fulfill some niche in the online fandom that had yet to be filled. And then I recalled how much I liked Mara...
Mara hardly ever gets more than a passing mention in most of the fansites out there, even the large, comprehensive, in-depth ones. For being such a major character, she certainly seems to be ignored an awful lot. But then again, that's understandable, in a sense. The series is called Oh My Goddess! for a reason. The Goddesses (and, to a lesser extent, their angels) are the real stars of the story. Even a recent, relatively minor character like Rind gets more attention from fans, simply because she is a Goddess (and because she kicks butt!). The only other major character who gets the shaft from fans the same way that Mara does is, well, Keiichi. Poor guy. Few fansites bother to give Keiichi, a complex and interesting character in his own right, the type of attention that he deserves.
So I wanted to give Mara some attention. Thus, I began work on a Mara shrine.
Well, it wasn't until I was well on my way to completing this site that I realized that there are already other shrines to Mara out there. And there used to be more, although most went missing a long time ago, presumably deleted, or perhaps devoured by an imp from Niflheim.
The Mara sites already out there are good sites because they each have their own unique, creative take on the demonness in leather. And I want my site to stand out for exactly the same reason. So on this site, I try to explore aspects of Mara's character that you might not have thought about before, or that you (hopefully!) haven't seen discussed anywhere else online. Of course, there's the normal amount of basic, essential, rehashed info as well. But I've tried to take this site beyond the basics, and I hope I've succeeded.
And now, to explain just a bit more... What do I find so darn fascinating about Mara? For one thing, I seem to have this tendency to always list the villains and the anti-heroes as my favorite characters in any given series. This is just me personally, but I usually find the ambiguously villainous characters, like Mara, to be the most interesting. She's fun when she's being a bitch, but at the same time, she's all the more interesting and sympathetic during the few moments when she is shown actually struggling with her own inner demons.
Mara is often used a comic relief, is often the butt of jokes, and, to be perfectly honest, she is a little bit loony. But despite all of that, she can be a quite shrewd and formidable opponent to the Goddesses, something that the manga often needs to keep the story from descending into pure suspenseless silliness. Mara is actually good at her job, and succeeds quite often in seeing her evil plots come to fruition - for example, just look at the Devil Urd and Queen Sayoko story arcs. But, then again, since Mara is a villain, plot mechanics dictate that Belldandy & Co. have to always thwart her somehow at the very last minute. I am thoroughly convinced that Mara is actually a competent and successful demon, or at least, she would be if she would pit herself against anybody but Belldandy.
It's observations like that, that Mara is actually good at her job, that I wanted to express on this site, among other things. Mara is an interesting character. Mara is a complex character. Mara is, despite the fact that the fans often joke otherwise, quite good at her job.
And all of that, in short, is why I created this website.