The Different Life Spans of Magical Girls
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Woman wearing dress and lying on teal cloth by Alice Alinari from www.unsplash.com
The different life spans of magical girls.
Magical girls have different life spans. Some are tasked with saving the world; some fulfill smaller tasks like resolving troubles in the daily lives of normal people, and others may have a much bigger or deeper purpose to fulfill, but they all require magic to save the day. Hence, magical girls. They can be short lived magical girls’ series or long running magical girls’ series that never seem to end. There are three basic essences that make up a magical girl within a franchise. One, they have a secret identity, two, they can transform, and three, they have magical creatures that guide them. I had split them up into three categories to make them easier to follow and explain.
1. One-year limited magical girl life span.
These magical girls are often featured as a single main character in a story. These magical girls are either grade schoolers or middle schoolers who live in the modern era, where there are no threats to the world, instead they’ll use magic to help those who are dealing with the daily troubles of life, like helping a kid catch the bus, magic, fixing the ceiling, magic, doing the chores, magic, etc.
They often gain the ability to transform into someone older or someone else entirely, forming a secret identity, which often becomes the plot of the story. They then try to balance their work and normal life in between keeping their secret identity and usage of magic a secret. Their powers are lent to them for a limited time only. Generally, there’s a one-year time limit, but it could be extended if the franchise intends for it to continue. Their powers are usually returned at the end of the series, they grow up without it, and move on with their lives.
2. Saving the world magical girl life span.
These magical girls are often featured as a group together; they are either middle schoolers or high schoolers who fight evil and save the world. They often gain the ability to transform and have magical abilities to fight evil. They also try to keep their identities a secret and balance their life out.
These girls are generally chosen based on stereotypes, like the main character who is the first to become a magical girl is often clumsy, is the transfer student, and or the not so talented one. The other girls that join them afterwards can be smart, cool, athletic, or popular.
They may never age. The series may end, but the franchise can do many things with their productions, like crossovers with similar magical girl groups, a sequel, a side story, and many more. They might also reuse plotlines and themes to keep the consistency of storytelling for future magical girls.
3. The suffering magical girl life span.
They can be featured as a single main character or a group of main characters. These magical girls range from middle schoolers to high schoolers. They are deceived into becoming magical girls in the disguise of saving the world. They remain oblivious until they uncover the truth for their purpose. The discovery is often too much for them to handle that it pushes them to become berserk, crazy, and lose their will to fight.
They are forced to fight at the risk of losing their limbs, sanity, or lives. This category has violence, blood, and ethical ideas about what they are achieving as magical girls. Death is a common theme within this genre, including psychological shock, horror, despair, depression.
They may recover from such pain and return to their normal life, but it will be a very long journey. Some may never get their normal life back after becoming a magical girl in this category.
Closing:
I’ve watched many magical girls shows before and I will say that there are many more categories out there considering magical girl life spans, but it can get complicated as the genre is forever expanding and reconstructing. I believed I did my best in summarizing and explaining the three general life spans for most magical girl series out there.
Art piece and photo by Emily Chow (EC)
Hi, I’m Emily Chow and I have a deep passion for fantasy. My passion for fantasy started when I stumbled upon the dark side of Fairy tales and since then I have never been able to crawl out of it, but this opened me up to the vast world of fantasy and imagination. I daydream a lot thinking about fairytales, how each fantasy genre and sub-genre has their own unique charms. I even go as far as to reflect upon the philosophy and morality subjected around the characters within the genre. This is how I got into the world of fantasy.
