Mary Cagle, lead writer of Sleepless Domain, has confirmed/stated numerous things outside of the comic itself, usually via the Sleepless Domain community Discord server and in her artstreams. This page attempts to index them all.
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Jossed
She has denied a few themes in fan speculation:
- There's a particularly famous set of four confirming that it's not particularly close to Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
- Monsters aren't dead kids.
- There's no Time Travel.
- It's not All Just a Dream.
- It's not Madoka (a catch-all for any Specifically Madoka tropes not part of the prior three, generally used to mean that the magical girls haven't sold their souls to a Satanic Archetype or a main character won't become God).
- Cassidy has no diagnosable mental illnesses and does not have a crush on Heartful Punch.note
- Cassidy did not have secret information justifying her actions in Chapter 14. Her line "How did you REALLY get that pink in your eyes?" is meant to imply that there was an official story about Alchemical's deaths mentioning everything except for Goops.
- Cassidy's powerset (a separable pair of scissor blades) is emphatically not a Kill la Kill reference.
- The alt-text on the second Q&A page, which proclaims that the government nerd who matches athematic girls with partners is named Fate, is not a Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha reference.
Magical Girls
- The total number of magical girls is somewhere between 100 and 10,000.
- The age at which magical girls gain their powers is roughly normally distributed, centered around 12-13 with occasional 11 and 14-15. They lose their powers at "18ish."
- Magical girl powers are similar to artistic media; two magical girls with the same powers will likely develop different fighting styles over time, and are likely to have a hard time describing exactly how they use them.
- A magical girl can never have a sigil located on her butt.
The City
- The City's government is a democratic republic, and its economic system uses a combination of socialism and capitalism. Cagle has described it as being similar to the United States, but leaning slightly more towards socialism.
- The City's head of state holds the title of "Mayor."
- Bicycles are common in the City. The only reason they are not seen in canon is that they're annoying for her to draw.
- Guns do not exist in the City because, while the knowledge of how to make them survived, nonmagical weaponry is useless against monsters.
- Sometimes, a monster just sucks. There is nothing anomalous about a monster that's bad at its job.
- Anemone consciously enters the state where she creates the Inner Barrier. She doesn't have to rely on falling asleep at exactly 10pm.
Future's Promise
- Future's Promise does not divide classes by year. Instead, incoming students take placement exams, and are sorted into classes according to their individual ability.
- Future's Promise does not attempt to be a magical girl training school. It is, rather, simply a nicer and fancier school as a perk of registration.
- Classes at Future's Promise are sorted into periods, which use the same timeslot each day.note
- Future's Promise holds classes every day, though Saturdays and Sundays are slightly shorter. This is because part of the attendance requirement's purpose is to keep an accurate headcount of its students, so that a magical girl who goes missing on a Friday night doesn't go unnoticed for two whole days. Within the comic, Anemone alludes to this in the Chapter 15 interstitial
. - If a second Foundationist-run magical girl school exists, its name is Founder's Blessing.
Specific Characters
- In the present day, Kokoro's dad works in the corporate sector in an art-related job.
- Rue's surname is "Bahia" (like Reed from Kiwi Blitz).
- While there is usually some significance to a magical girl whose eyes don't match her hair color, Sally's gold pupils are a purely stylistic choice to complement her red hair and irises. However, the author has conspicuously refused to comment on Tessa's gold pupils.
- Sally's natural hair color before receiving the Dream is the auburn color seen in Page 3 of Chapter ???. The black/red fade seen in prior flashbacks was imparted by hair dye.
- As there is no Germany for Steffi's mother to move back to as she did in Kiwi Blitz, the Frohlich parents are still in a miserable marriage or something.
- Tessa's power is the manipulation of raw mana, which she used primarily to create lasers.
- Tessa is Latina.
- If Zoe ever burnt out her powers, she wouldn't get a "weird scar tissue eye thing."
- In terms of pure GPA, Sylvia > Undine > Tessa > Gwen > Sally.
- What Japanese Pronouns/speech patterns characters would use:
- Tessa, Zoe: watashi
- Undine, Sylvia: atashi
- Gwen, Sally, Rue: boku
- The Woman in White would use Keigo.
Clarifications of the Comic
- The running track from Chapter 2, despite looking like it's on the roof, is not on the roof. (This was a minor meme in the Discord for a while, and the source of the alternate name "rooftrack" for the Code.)
- In the panel where it looks like Beth is contemplating her nails, she's actually checking her watch. Cagle just drew it from an odd angle.
- Zoe is variously either 1 or 1.5 inches taller than Undine; she just looks shorter because she's continuously hunched over.
- The calendar as calculated by Epele et al, which places Chapter 1 on September 2 and Chapter 16 on October 4 the same year, is accurate. At one point Cube even asked for details on how it was encoded to make sure the calendar was right.
- By her own admission, some of the Word of God (such as the aforementioned height difference between Undine and Zoe) may be later rendered inaccurate:Cube Watermelon: i say many things
Cube Watermelon: and then i forgets them
