Madoka tips a hat to her ancestor.
Official art.
Color, Part 3: Posses
So my last two posts focused on the colors worn by Magical Girl protagonists. Now it’s time to bring secondary characters into the fold and talk about how colors are doled out amongst the various members of a Magical Girl team.
Pink and red may be popular clothing choices for Magical Girl leads, but they’re even more popular for heroines who are part of a girl-posse. If you’ve got a group of three or more color-coded Magical Girls who work as a team, then it’s practically written in stone that the main girl must wear pink or red. The only posse-leaders I’ve found who flout this law are the heroines of Galaxy Fraulein Yuna (blue/white), Nanoha (blue/white), Ultimate Girls (white), and St. October (black/purple).
A team-up of famous Magical Girls: Madoka, Sailor Moon, Sakura, Amu, and Mew Ichigo.
By 2154476
The PMMM girls cosplaying! Sayaka is Magical Emi, Kyoko is Akko, Madoka is Sailor Moon (blasphemy! she should be Chibiusa!), Homura is Kiki, and Mami as uh… Mami!
By 781018
Anonymous asked:
My current faves, including both real lesbians and in-my-dreams lesbians:
Anonymous asked:
Out of the shows that I’ve seen enough of to make a recommendation:
Dark Magical Girls, Part 1
This week on the Magical Girl Project, I’m looking at the genre’s answer to the hot-blooded shonen rivalry: the Dark Magical Girl.
Dark Magical Girls date back to 1974, with Majokko Meg’s blue-haired rival Non as the first one, but the trope didn’t really become a staple of the genre until the 90s. However I have to stop the history lesson almost immediately because as soon as I started examining this subject in depth, I became stuck on a very important question: What exactly is the definition of a “Dark Magical Girl”?
Is it simply as it sounds, a female antagonist with magical powers? That can’t be right because plenty of Magical Girl shows have characters who fit that description but aren’t Dark Magical Girls. For example, Sailor Moon has Queen Beryl and Nehellenia, both of whom are evil, magical, and female but are definitely not Dark Magical Girls, although maybe that’s because they’re adults — Dark Magical Girl implies someone young. But continuing with Sailor Moon, each villain has under his/her employ a team of underlings, most of whom are young women with magical powers — the Weird Sisters, the Witches 5, the Amazoness Quartet, and the Animamates — but none of them are Dark Magical Girls.
After much pondering, I think I’ve hit upon the key ingredient that distinguishes a Dark Magical Girl: parallelism. For a character to qualify as a DMG, the text must set her up as the mirror image of the heroine — strikingly opposite but at the same time undeniably similar. In aid of this parallelism, the heroine and the DMG will often have contrasting color schemes — white vs. black, red vs. blue, etc — and contrasting personalities — extrovert vs. introvert, optimist vs. nihlist, down-to-earth vs. arrogant, red oni vs. blue oni — but they’ll also use the same or similar magic systems and will have a deep, intense, personal rivalry that occupies a large chunk of screentime and nearly always results in the DMG either getting permanently redeemed or at least defrosting a bit and teaming up with the heroine on some missions.
To elaborate, here are a number of common traits I’ve noted amongst Dark Magical Girls:
Magical Girls and the Men Who Love Them, Part 2
Now that I’ve laid out the history of male-aimed Magical Girl shows and their gradual rise to success and popularity over the past 20 years, the question arises: how has the increased presence of these shows affected the genre as a whole?
The main thing I’ve noticed when comparing MG shows of the 2000s with those of the 90s is that the visual age of the average heroine has sunk like a stone, especially in Magic Warrior shows. The heroines of 90s girl-aimed shows (Sailor Moon, Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Cutey Honey Flash, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, Corrector Yui) were usually leggy willowy girls who looked to be in their mid-to-late teens, and the heroines of male-aimed shows looked even older, ranging in visual age from late teens to early twenties, since male-aimed shows of that era usually relied on large racks to sell themselves (Moldiver, New Cutey Honey, Hyper Doll, Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, Jewel BEM Hunter Lime, Shamanic Princess). Mixed in with these were a few younger girls (Super Pig, Nurse Angel Ririka, Saint Tail, Pretty Sammy, Cardcaptor Sakura) as well as some younger girls who would transform into older bustier alter egos (Akazukin Chacha, Jungle de Ikou, Cyberteam in Akihabara, Fancy Lala).
5. Knocking off the ping: The logical companion to “putting on glaze.” Here, the heroine smacks a body part to knock the glaze off. Doremi (00) was the first to use this.
The bow and arrow is another common choice for Magical Girls who prefer conventional weapons, probably because it has mildly feminine connotations. Sometimes the bow and arrow are ethereal, being entirely made of glowy energy stuff, as with Sailor Mars’s Flame Sniper and Cure Aqua’s Sapphire Arrow. Other times they’re more realistically corporeal, as with Akazukin Chacha’s Beauty Serene Arrow or Juna’s bow, which is a reference to Hindu mythology.
Other archers in the genre include Fuu from Rayearth, who briefly used a bow before getting her sword; Mew Mint, whose miniature Fisher-Price bow would expand to normal size when she performed her Ribbon Mint Echo; Yukariko from Mai-Hime; and Loli Red from St. October. As for Sweet Mint, she’s pictured here because she was the first bow-user in the genre, although to my knowledge, she never used it as a weapon — it was just a fancy transformation trinket.
Cure Aqua fanart is by 184346
Yo, this blog is super dead, but I’ve resurrected my Twitter and I’m livetweeting some Sailor Moon Crystal Season 3.
tokusequence
[HENSHIN] Liveman.
Senshi: Yuusuke/Red Falcon, Jou/Yellow Lion, Megumi/Blue Dolphin
Transformation device: Twin Brace
Transformation command: “Liveman.”
From: Choujuu Sentai Liveman - Episode 12
Source: tokusequence.tumblr.com