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Some of you, who have been around for many years, may know I have a project on magical girls, or “mahou shoujo”. I used to have Mahou Shoujo Monday posts, for instance, and a brief history of mahou shoujo from the early days to around the mid-2010s. I often call my blog my first “child”, and it was something I started in the autumn of 2006. My second “child” would be this mahou shoujo project, which has been in the making for a while now.

Today I thought I’d give this project a proper introduction and answer some questions you may have, whether or not the project is news to you. I mean things like:

• What is the “Mahou Shoujo Guide”?
• Why mahou shoujo?
• What does it mean?
• How long have you been working on this?
• What do you want to gain from it?

You know, questions like that.

So, let’s start with the beginning: A weekend morning in 1996 or 1997.

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The Backstory

My introduction to magical girls was no different from any other at-the-time future and current millennial weebs. I first watched Sailor Moon on Swedish channel TV4’s morning kid shows when I was pretty young. It wasn’t my first exposure to superheroes, but it definitely hit the right spot to spark a life-long love for them. And I really mean superheroes in general, not just a sentai squad of girls.

I mean, I often just like superheroes. Shows about people helping others with the powers they got just hit a spot in my childish heart. There’s no specific reason for it, except perhaps I just like people doing good deeds. (If they’re also flawed people trying to do it, that’s even better.)

Others might have gotten especially attached to the Pokémon anime or Digimon, but Sailor Moon truly became something I absolutely adored to death. I still have similar feelings for the show now, but it’s 90% childhood nostalgia. Aside from loving the show, though, I also didn’t have anyone who shared my love for Sailor Moon.

(As a side note, my favourite characters were Mizuno Ami, Kino Makoto, and Hino Rei, and I early began shipping Rei and Ami. Chiba Mamoru is also the first fictional character I thought was really aesthetically pleasing. This show has truly formed me as a person at my very core.)

I got into W.I.T.C.H. at age 11 or 12, and then manga at age 13. I mostly read Detective Conan and D.N.Angel when I was a young teen, but my introduction to manga came from the fact that my mother knew I loved Sailor Moon and she fed that, at the time, not-quite-healthy obsession.

I liked it so much that I had been a subscriber to the issues of anime-to-comic adaptation for some time. I watched every Swedish re-run of Sailor Moon, even if it meant running to school, because the show ended at 8:05 am on weekdays and the first class of the day would start at around 8:10 am. I was like 14 at the time too, because the animanga boom had just begun in Sweden. (That boom only lasted for a few years before it crashed and burned.)

Getting into anime and manga meant I was exposed to the Full Moon wo Sagashite anime, the first season of Pretty Cure, or Precure as it would come to be called later on, and even further in time Tanemura Arina’s works like Time Stranger Kyoko. Naturally, I also came across Ghibli with even more time, and Kiki’s Delivery Service is noteworthy when speaking of mahou shoujo.

While superheroes in general had gotten my attention, girls doing magic and saving the day, just spoke to me at a different level. It wasn’t that it was cute or that boys were more prominent in the media and this felt new and exciting. The media I consumed at the time was, for me, irrelevant of gender. I sought out what spoke to me out of habit, and a lot of media I had consumed that was chosen by my mother was in fact girl-targeted, like middle-grade books about girls and some 80’s animated films, all leftover from when my older sister was younger. At this time, I had no sense of gender either, so I honestly didn’t register gender much.

I think the point in my life when I started seriously seeking out mahou shoujo specifically was right before the animanga crash in Sweden. Cardcaptor Sakura ran on Barnkanalen (“Children’s Channel”) with subtitles in the afternoon, and I had to hurry home to catch the episodes, but unfortunately missed some of them due to it not working with my schedule with school around 2007 to 2008. This was also the height of torrenting, so it wasn’t too difficult to seek out more. But the important thing is that I decided to seek out mahou shoujo specifically at this time, both newer and older series.

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Why the Mahou Shoujo Guide?

So I wanted to watch mahou shoujo, but I quickly noted a problem.

While a lot of genres had lists on what to watch, on classics, on influences, and so on… Mahou shoujo at this time was incredibly kid-show-coded. Which makes sense, but it also meant people didn’t really cover it much in the same sense. If people talked about mahou shoujo, it was usually Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, with maybe something else, like Precure and Ojamajo Doremi. 

So I had no list that was all-inclusive of the umbrella. I understood that the little I did find in terms of “lists” obviously wasn’t all. I had watched other shows that could somewhat count as well. So instead, I had to dig through tags on various sites, forums, the MyAnimeList clubs, and so on to make a list of mahou shoujo titles.

This sparked the decision to make a list for everyone.

That later changed as I understood how broad the scope of the genre actually is, but also that the definitions of mahou shoujo are incredibly varied, and a lot of people have faulty perceptions of mahou shoujo. Back then, many thought that Cardcaptor Sakura was the newer type and Sailor Moon was the original, but Cardcaptor Sakura is just kind of the oldest formula made for a more, at the time, contemporary audience with an overarching main plot. It definitely has elements of mahou shoujo from way back.

Finding all this out, I decided I needed a guide. not just for myself, but naturally for others as well. I also wanted this guide to cover a lot of things, including the history and a canon for people to watch and read to get a sense of the trends in the genre.

And that’s what I’ve been working on for over a decade now: a helpful guide to explain mahou shoujo, the different definitions and sub-genres, and how to determine whether a show is or isn’t mahou shoujo based on various definitions, as they are in the historical context and general perception. All the while trying to avoid bias traps (knowing I still will have a bias, and I will never claim the research and conclusions to be perfect).

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What is included in the Mahou Shoujo Guide?

The plan for the Mahou Shoujo Guide is that it should be informational for those who want it, but also work as an introduction to the various subgenres in mahou shoujo. Those who want to get information on the history itself and dive deeper should have that option, while those who just want a list of some key titles should also be able to get that.

So the Guide is currently structured to have a summary of the history, as well as a deeper dive into it, a smaller canon of titles to get introduced to the genre and its subgenres but not necessarily the historical bits, and a greater canon that includes influences and key titles through history. I also want to share a collection of all sorts of titles that may be interesting because they’re all related and which includes the data I’ve collected. And naturally I want to list my sources to the degree I can, in fact, share sources.

So to summarise, the table of contents looks something like this at the moment:

• What Is Mahou Shoujo? (basic terminology and introduction)
• History
  • A Brief History of Mahou Shoujo
  • The Background Influences of Mahou Shoujo (pre-mid to late 1960s)
  • The Early Decades of Mahou Shoujo (1960s to 1980s)
  • The Sailor Moon Revolution (1990s to around 2010)
  • Modern Mahou Shoujo (around 2010 to today)
• In-Depth Definition
  • Various Definitions and Common Misconceptions
  • Sub-genres and How to Spot Them
  • Common Tropes
  • Past and Current Trends
• Content Lists
  • Introductory Guide (Titles that give an idea of what one can expect from Mahou Shoujo)
  • Mahou Shoujo Canon (Titles that represent the history of Mahou Shoujo from before the 1960s to today)
  • Database (all titles I’ve gathered, from influences to grey-area content to key titles, of all types of media from around the world)
• Sources

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What work do I do?

I jokingly call this my thesis for my Mahou Shoujo PhD. I also, on more serious notes, call it the groundwork or precursor for my Literary Science paper, and not without reason, since I might do something related to this when the time comes in a hundred years.

But for this project, I’m doing a lot.

I obviously watch shows and read titles. Not just Japanese ones that are from modern times, but I actually have gone back in time and looked at influences, and I try to find information for all sorts of related work and inspirations. I try to find what exactly influenced different works and how creators were inspired, by consuming the content to draw my own conclusions.

And as someone interested in Lit Sci, looking at the historical context, cultural movements and trends, and the like matters a lot. You can, of course, look at fiction out of historical context, but I think that for this project that wouldn’t be beneficial, so I want people to understand the society in which these works were made, even if it’s just somewhat surface-level.

So I look at influences to explain the trends and the creation of subgenres. It means looking for all sorts of material, from interviews to academic material as well as history books, not just in English, but also in Japanese. A lot of Japanese.

But to be fair with my assessments and to actually get a more accurate representation of trends, and the changes, developments, and borrowing of tropes, I’m taking data very seriously.

I keep spreadsheets with data like the year of publication or airing, media types, titles, target audience, plot structure, tropes, subgenres, if it’s an adaptation, original or parody, and whatnot. I need to transfer all that data to Notion for better organisation, since I can make a database instead that’s much more searchable, but I’m trying to collect as much data as possible and I do this on my own watching shows. I also include “mahou shounen” titles too, because they’re a trend that comes from mahou shoujo, and that matters too.

Naturally, aside from data collection and research of background and influences, I also write the entire guide, collect sources and try to have offline copies of all the sources I’ve used. And since mahou shoujo has gathered a little more notice in the past decade, I also try to look into what conclusions and understandings other people with an interest in the genre have come to.

Additionally, I have made one survey in the past. While that is relevant to my research, I still need to make a new one, to get more recent data on what people think mahou shoujo means and what they consider mahou shoujo and the like. Just to get a bigger picture.

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All of this is a lot of work, and it’s always been a side project, so this has taken a lot of time to do, and it’s far from finished. Not to mention, the trends have changed vastly in these years. And now I have a child. For now, I’ve set Mondays as my day to work on this. All of it, from data collection, to research, to pouring over spreadsheets, to groaning about poorly aged anime… It’s my Monday chore. So this is going to take very many more hours. I have over 60 years of content to go over, but I hope that now that I’ve properly explained what this is and why I want to do this, maybe some people would love to encourage me on a near-weekly basis.

Not that I need it. I’ll still do this, just like I keep blogging, even if I don’t frequently get comments or engagements these days.

I think, aside from watching anime and reading manga, my most important step right now is creating that Notion database, and making it available for people to check out, so people can see where I’m at in my research of the content itself. If this is of interest, please do tell me in a comment or on Twitter or Bluesky. I would also love to receive plenty of feedback as I continue my work.