Magical Girl Warrior

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Young, magical, and about to deliver a world of hurt... and possibly friendship.

Many magical girl shows don't really present too many hard laws. Time? Easily traversed. Light years in space? You can fly that. Black holes, the most inescapably dense gravitational fields around? You can walk out if you try really hard. So if power levels are less important, what do the series focus on, from a meta-contextual sense? What is the point of reading a magical girl series, if it isn't to see characters grow stronger? It's very simple: love. The point of a magical girl series is to see the interaction between characters and the extreme lengths friends and lovers will go to secure those who matter to them.

The intersection of Magical Girl with Superhero(ine).

In Japan, the extended growth-to-maturity metaphor Magical Girl archetype can mean a variety of things; some do more than use their powers to improve or complicate their lives. Some go out and battle Dramatic Evil, usually with a lot of mystic firepower, weird outfits (usually a glammed-up Mini-Dress of Power, sometimes crossed with School Uniforms Are the New Black), a Battle Intro, and called attacks. This is not magic for magic's sake; the character rarely finds this enjoyable but gets morally cowed into it.

The action-oriented Magical Girl Warriors have the extra bonus of appeal to male demographics, so they can be very lucrative; in this case they often resemble Distaff Counterparts of Japanese superheroes, particularly Sentai and other Henshin Hero characters. Importers of Magical Girl series to the West tend to favor these characters, so Magical Girl Warriors tends to become the established trope over Cute Witches.

They can also be Kicking Ass in All Her Finery, if the girl is outright Badass and her dress is frilly enough.

The Dark Magical Girl mostly appears in Magical Girl Warrior series. Not to be confused with the unrelated Magic Knight.

The Other Wiki calls this character type a "transforming heroine".

Cutey Honey is the Trope Maker, and Sailor Moon is the Trope Codifier.


Examples of Magical Girl Warrior include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Fan Works

Literature

Tabletop Games

Video Games

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Fey of the Whateley Universe. Down to the backstory, the ancient Faerie who rides along in her head, her ability to summon armor magically, and a magical battle in Boston in which she and The Necromancer spent most of the fight trying to intimidate each other by calling their attacks.

Western Animation