Magical Girl Warrior

The Power of Friendship as delivered through a Wave-Motion Gun.

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The intersection of Magical Girl with Super Heroine, and what happens when you combine Magic Knight with Frills of Justice.

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 power and weird outfits (usually a glammed-up Mini Dress Of Power) and called attacks, and very prone to Kicking Ass in All Her Finery.

The origins of this trope as a genre date to early manga, with Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight generally regarded as the modern Trope Codifier of the genre's most basic defining trait: a cute and perky heroine defeating bad guys and engaging in magical adventures. Most series that followed it, however, focused on the magical part and avoided fighting, creating the more whimsical Cute Witch sister-genre.

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In the early '70s, however, Go Nagai created the groundbreaking Cutey Honey, and in doing so threw the Slice of Life plot of your typical Magical Girl series out the window. A parody of different Henshin Hero series ^note most noticeably Warrior of Love Rainbowman, this series codified many of the tropes associated with the Magical Girl Warrior genre to come: giving the heroine the ability to transform into a powerful alter ego activated with a magical phrase and/or a Transformation Trinket, an armory of weapons and abilities to use in battle, an evil organization to fight against, and a heroic introduction. In a notable example of an Unbuilt Trope, however, the show is about a Robot Girl and all of her power relied on technology instead of magic.

The genre gained the remainder of its defining characteristics with Naoko Takeuchi's series Codename: Sailor V and its More Popular Spin Off/Sequel Sailor Moon, which took all these elements and blended them with classic Magical Girl tropes and some Sentai characteristics like a team of different heroines with balanced abilities and personalities. The result was a series simultaneously aimed toward and empowering to girls with large amounts of character building and storyline that still gave focus to the battles and allowed for fanservice. A virtually-unheard-of combination at that time, the series quickly attracted a rabid fanbase with a ridiculously-wide demographic. While many early anime and manga of the genre which followed were accused of being (and often were, at the start) rip-offs of Sailor Moon trying to repeat its success by copying the formula, eventually they evolved into unique works and a novel hybrid genre.

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The action-oriented Magical Girl Warriors have the extra bonus of being marketed to male demographics, so they can be very lucrative; in this case, they often resemble Distaff Counterparts of Japanese superheroes, particularly the male-dominated Sentai genre as well as other Henshin Hero characters. This contributed significantly to the associated franchises being exported to the West. Due to sharing many of the typical teenage-superhero tropes, these characters ended up being much more representative of the Magical Girl genre outside Japan, as opposed to, for example, Cute Witches.

Characters frequently appearing in this type of franchise include the Dark Magical Girl and The One Guy in the Improbably Female Cast, who is frequently a Magic Knight or Badass Bookworm himself.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• While Cardcaptor Sakura is of the Cute Witch variety of magical girls, she also uses the Clow Cards to fight others that are causing trouble, particularly in the movies.
• Corpse Princess is a rather dark variant—the magical girls are undead corpses who must kill 108 other corpses in order to get into Heaven. Or so they're told. Actually, they become unkillable monsters and are bound in a coffin for eternity. Also, they use guns.
• Corrector Yui is a sci-fi themed magical girl show, with the heroine's powers only existing in cyberspace.
• Parodied and Gender Flipped in Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! and its sequel, which feature teams of Magical Boy Warriors who frequently lampshade the ridiculousness of all the magical girl-associated tropes.
• The earliest prototype was Go Nagai's Cutey Honey franchise, which slowly mutated and grew to have an unexpected female fanbase whenever the Fanservice level fluctuated heavily. Interestingly, she's a sci-fi-based variant: instead of magic, she has a device planted in her body that rearranges the molecules around her, transforming her clothing into her hero outfit or many other costumes as needed. This means that instead of a G-rated Sexy Silhouette being part of a Transformation Sequence, she really is naked as her clothes are temporarily a cloud of atoms, hence the high Fanservice level. Honey ''Flash'', indeed.
• Cyber Team in Akihabara starts as a standard magical girl show before veering into darker territory.
• Devil Hunter Yohko was the second big Magical Girl Warrior series, with its eponymous heroine just as adept at martial arts as she is with her sword and magic. She isn't afraid to get physical if that's what it takes to get the job done.

• Yohko in Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko becomes one akin to the Magic Knights.
• The heroine of Cinderella Knight is given the power to transform into the beautiful and heroic Cinderella Knight by her fairy godmother. With these powers, she seeks to protect the man she loves from the evil Spider Corps of the organization "MURDER".
• The heroine of Seizei Ganbare Mahou Shoujo Kurumi is a young girl who is given the power to become the angel warrior Prima Angel to fight the evil Darkness Whales organization.
• Every single woman in Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere; however, how much "mage" or "warrior" there is depends on the person and their abilities.

• Jewel BEM Hunter Lime combines this trope with Cute Witch - she's a natural-born magical user and a clueless newcomer to the human world, but she's also tasked with saving the world from evil Monsters Of The Week and has transforming powers.

• Kämpfer adds a Gender Bender twist — main character Natsuru turns into a girl whenever he transforms and the Kampfer don't defend anything, they engage other magical girls in gladiatorial combat.
• Kill la Kill is the team behind Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's take on the genre. It borrows a bit from Cutey Honey, including the fanservicey outfit and having the death of the main character's father as a starting point for their mission. It's particularly heavy on the "Warrior" part, as there are very few blaster- or wand-type weapons (the most powerful weapons being melee-based, like the Scissor Blades), and beauty is MOST DEFINITELY tarnished, as the main character (as well as several others) is realistically beaten bloody and bruised during some fights (sometimes unrealistically).
• Lyrical Nanoha started as a standard Magical Girl Warrior anime but quickly found its true calling as Seinen Military Science Fiction, of all things. By the time of third season, StrikerS, the entire cast are Space Police enlistees, making them magical girl soldiers, or, more accurately, living equivalents of tanks and jet fighters. Not that this prevents Nanoha from using her magical abilities to befriend the living hell out of people.
• In Machimaho: I Messed Up and Made the Wrong Person into a Magical Girl!!, Kayo isn't so much a warrior as she is a berserker. Combined with her crass delinquent attitude, the monsters she fights barely stand a chance.
• Magic Knight Rayearth crosses this with Swords And Sorcery and the Super Robot Genre.
• In Magical Change, Manaka Hiromi is given the magical power of the Red Garnet Princess to defeat the Devil King. As he is a boy, this involves making him a Super Gender-Bender.
• Magical Canan uses this term to describe their magical girls (mahou senshi).
• Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka emphasizes on the Warrior aspect. The magical girls are literal special forces operators and wear military-grade accessories such as utility belts and pouches, combat knives and such on top of the conventionally girly costumes.
• Magical Witch Punie-chan is a parody. The Magical Girl in question (who is a Villain Protagonist, taking after her evil queen of a mother) is vulnerable to getting her magic suppressed, which sounds quite inconvenient until you realize she also happens to be a master of unarmed combat specializing in crippling submission wrestling techniques. Her magical incantation is "Lyrical Tokarev, kill them all!".
• Mahou Shoujo Ore gender-flips it slightly — the girls turn into magical boy warriors due to a couple of transformation complications.
• Parodied in Mahou Shoujo Pretty Bell - the warrior in question is a 35-year-old male bodybuilder and weight trainer.

• Makeruna Makendo adds a kendo theme.
• Invoked in Mao-chan, where Earth is being invaded by aliens so cute that fighting them is viewed as bullying, forcing the heads of Japan's defense forces to have their cute granddaughters fight the aliens.
• In Matoi the Sacred Slayer, the magical girls have exorcist powers and fight inter-dimensional demons called "Nights."

• Mei Company focuses on magical girls who retired and opened a cleaning service, while the current generation of magical girls battle the forces of evil in the background.
• Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is a cross of this and Magic Idol Singer.
• Ray from My Celestial Family. A Gender Bender, as he's male in civilian form.
• Kosaki, Chitoge and Marika are given the power to transform into magical heroines in order to preserve world peace in the Nisekoi spin-off Magical Pâtissière Kosaki-chan.
• In the Not Safe for Work anime Mahou Shoujo Erena, protagonist Erena is given the power to become a magical girl and battle a race of evil tentacle monsters named Zoid.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: The Show Within a Show Magical Girl Biblion is a parody of this, complete with in-universe Rule 34 doujinshi that typically follows these character types. Since Chisame cosplays the characters featured there, her Pactio Card turned her into one with a cyberspace theme.
• Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, a product of the 90s magical girl boom, features a heroine that mostly fights solo unlike the many sentai-style series of its day, and it gradually becomes Darker and Edgier as it goes on. It is often considered a forerunner to Lyrical Nanoha and Magical Girl Genre Deconstructions like Madoka Magica.
• Parodied in Butt Attack Punisher Girl Gautaman, where devout Catholic Mari is given a magical fundoshi (sumo wrestling loin cloth) by Buddha and transforms into a scantily-clad heroine in order to battle the evil Black Buddha cult.
• Parodied inMahou Shounen Majorian: two boys, one of whom bullies the other, are transformed into girls in order to battle alien invaders.

• The most popular show of this type in Japan is the entire Pretty Cure franchise. Taken to extremes in HeartCatch Pretty Cure!, where the battles looks like something straight out of Saint Seiya (character designer Yoshihiko Umakoshi went on to work on Saint Seiya Omega).

• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: A darker take. Teenage girls are recruited to combat Eldritch Abominations known as "witches", and use anything from bombs to swords to ribbons to accomplish this. Because of the nature of the contract every magical girl makes and how magic generally works, every magical girl is doomed to ultimately become a witch. If they don't die horribly first. It also deconstructs their general durability in combat; a normal human body simply cannot take that kind of punishment from combat, and one of the awful truths is that they're Liches in all but name.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena particularly embodies the "growing up as a struggle" metaphor, with the added bonus of Gnostic metaphor thrown in for good measure. This was emphasized way more in the anime than in the manga, however.
• Pretty much cemented by the enormous popularity of Sailor Moon, which introduced the Sentai elements to the genre.
• Saint Seiya is a Magical Boy Warrior series in all but genre. Flashy transformations, Frilly Upgrades, and stylish combat are the name of the game. Some of its anime incarnations even had staff members that would go on to do animation and character design work for Pretty Cure, while people who worked on Pretty Cure and other similar works would end up bringing their work back to Saint Seiya, like the above-mentioned Yoshihiko Umakoshi.
• Senki Zesshou Symphogear goes further and crossbreeds The Power of Rock with Magitek. Net result? Powered armor that runs on singing.
• Shamanic Princess: Tiara is what happens when you take a Cute Witch and make her a badass while bypassing the super hero element.
• Parodied within the Shōjo demographic with Super Pig, which is about a girl who transforms into a super-powered... pig.
• Sweet Valerian features three girls who transform into superpowered monster-fighting... bunny rabbits.
• Tokyo Mew Mew mixed the idea with Catgirls and a pro-environmental theme.
• Towa Kamo Shirenai: Himiko and Kosumo, the latter via organ donation.
• Umi Monogatari takes this type of show and tweaks it; among other things, the revelation of what the Big Bad really is allows for a conclusion that's more true-to-life than most shows of this genre.
• Vividred Operation: Technically, the heroines are empowered by technology, rather than magic, but they otherwise fit this trope point for point. It certainly helps that their technology is advanced to the point that it may as well be magic anyway.
• Wedding Peach and its anime follow the conventions of Sailor Moon.
• Yuki Yuna is a Hero has four (later five) middle-school girls fighting monsters bent on destroying the local World Tree. It later reveals itself to be much darker than originally suggested.
• Yurara has elements of this - the titular Yurara is able to transform into a tall darkhaired beauty and battle evil spirits with powerful magic in order to send them to the afterlife.

Asian Animation

• The heroines of Flowering Heart are young girls who have been given the ability to transform into adults with a variety of magical powers to collect hope energy in order to stop the Big Bad.

Comic Books

• The title character of Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, as DC Nation demonstrates. Interestingly, most of the comic runs after the first maxi-series go out of their way to avoid the concepts, such as the original ongoing being a horror title and the most recent miniseries being a political thriller.

• Possibly originated with Shazam superheroine Mary Marvel in 1942.
• The Enchantress (not the one from Marvel comics) can be considered a prototype - the heroine, June, goes to a party in a haunted castle, stumbles into a secret chamber, and is given a transformation word by a mysterious being, which transforms her into a blonde witch so she can battle a Monster of the Week.
• W.I.T.C.H. was inspired by these kinds of stories.
• Wonder Woman has resembled this at times, with her magic origins, Transformation Sequence, and such. Most especially in the early Silver Age, when she was depicted having adventures as Wonder Girl, just as Superman was once Superboy. Later, a separate Wonder Girl character, Donna Troy, was introduced.
  • The promotional comic Wonder Woman and the Star Riders for the TV show that never came to be showed a version of Wondy that took this concept and ran with it. She was dressed in more frills than normal and lead a group of girls in similar but different colored get-ups who rode winged horses and used magical crystals.

• Zodiac Starforce is an American take on a Magical Girl team. Artist Paulina Gauncheau is a huge fan of the genre (and especially Sailor Moon), and it shows.

Fan Works

• Since Archetypal has Magical Girl as a possible Archetype, and most of the Archetypes with superpowers are known to be frontline fighters, this trope pretty much applies.
• Gender inverted in the Cardinal King series, where Mamoru Chiba is the magical boy warrior.
• The concept behind the Fuku Fic sub-genre is turning Ranma Saotome into one of these, usually a Sailor Senshi.
• In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Nonoko temporarily acts as one, equipped with Kyon's Badass Longcoat and Morph Weapons.
• Sailor Hellblazer makes John Constantine of all people, into a Sailor Senshi.
• Taylor Hebert in the fanfic A Skittering Heart acts as near the epitome of a Magical Girl Warrior. Wielding a Keyblade Taylor is perfectly happy to mix it up in melee combat, augment herself and her allies with defensive and healing magic, or go on the attack at range with a variety of Black Magic spells.

Literature

• The Effigies series by Sarah Raughley is a Western take on the concept, inspired by a mix of Sailor Moon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• Asha of The Licanius Trilogy plays this straight by the end, albeit of the sword-and-armour variety of warrior rather tham just plain spells.

• In Princess Holy Aura, five magically super-powered teenage girls battle Lovecraftian monsters, and still have to go to high school.

Live-Action TV

• Cutie Honey: THE LIVE is a tokusatsu Live-Action Adaptation of the Cutie Honey series. Since it's aimed towards men, expect a lot of Male Gaze and Fanservice.
• The Girls x Heroine! Series, created by Takashi Miike, is a tokusatsu series centered on middle school Magical Girl Warriors.
  • Idol x Warrior Miracle Tunes!
  • Magic x Warrior Magi Majo Pures!
  • Secret X Warrior Phantomirage!
  • Police X Heroine Lovepatrina!
• The heroines of Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer could almost be a complete example, with a high school girl who is enlisted to fight supernatural forces of evil, possesses an alter ego ("The Slayer"), and has a magical mentor who aids her. Really the only difference is that Buffy doesn't have a Transformation Trinket and dresses in casual clothing.

Podcasts

• The Sequinox girls are all magical girls chosen by Gaea to defend the Earth from the invading Stars.

Tabletop Games

• Big Eyes, Small Mouth: creating a Magical Girl Warrior is part and parcel of this system. The first worldbook for the system was a licensed Sailor Moon RPG.
• The Princess Race in Bleak World is all about this. They are an alien race of Princesses who's homeworld was destroyed by The Darkness. They now protect the Milky Way Galaxy with a giant force field made of hope and fight back Brainwashed and Crazy dark princesses who are in service to the darkness.
• In GURPS Wizards, one of the worked examples of the superhero-mage template is an Ordinary High-School Student with a magical sceptre (the Sun Wand) which transforms her into Bright Sun Angel, who fights evil with the assistance of her talking cat.
• High School Girls RPG has the Magical Girl extension, allowing you to play just that type of character.
• Pathfinder: Regardless of how well they'll ultimately fit, the Magical Child archetype for the Vigilante class is explicitly meant to cover the Magical Girl trope (the switch between the public and secret identities becomes a Transformation Sequence that is much faster, but also flashier and louder, for instance), and being in a system like Pathfinder it'd be hard to avoid fights being a fairly large part of their repertoire. Regardless of how the archetype will turn out, it is, of course, possible to build towards this trope with the right other magic-using classes.
• Princess: The Hopeful, a New World of Darkness fan supplement, adds magical girls to the mix. No Princess is going to last too long without being able to survive a fight, but the Calling of Champion has an extra dose, as their purpose is literally to fight evil. There is also extra emphasis of this style in the Courts of Swords (as heroic larger-than-life figures), Storms (as an Ax-Crazy version), and Hearts (with an emphasis on noble traditions, which includes warrior traditions).
• Magical Burst is a mahou shoujo game that takes primary inspiration from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Magical girls in this game are tasked with killing enough youma to collect 13 Oblivion Seeds so that they can make a wish. But as in Madoka, things are not always what they seem, and the Mentor Mascots known as Tsukaima keep horrible secrets from the Magical Girls they give power to.

Video Games

• Pecan Apple of Banzai Pecan, also doubling as a Henshin Hero.
• Yunou of Crescent Pale Mist is a magician who uses a deadly and forbidden form of magic known as Pale Mist to battle the dangerous monsters and her former comrades as she seeks to put an end to the source of the Pale Mist that's seeping throughout the country of Gasyukal.
• Leanna of Crystalline is a "Mage-Knight", meaning she's skilled with both magic and her sword.
• Mystica from Fading Hearts. Ryou meets her in the forest while he is fighting shadow monsters.
• In Fire Emblem Fates, Odin's daughter Ophelia can be very easily considered as the Fire Emblem take on this trope. She's very cute-looking (and bouncy), very flashy in battle, and very dedicated to her role as a Black Magician Girl and to protect her family and friends.
• Galaxy Fraulein Yuna is a teen celebrity/Idol Singer who is tasked with saving the entire universe from the forces of Darkness as the Savior of Light.
• How To Date A Magical Girl! has magical girls whose role are to banish evil, but it's downplayed; as evil occurs more rarely, they spend the majority of their time contributing to society instead.
• Joan of Arc herself in Jeanne d'Arc, being a Lady of War who transforms into her armored form thanks to her magic armlet.

• Magical Warrior Diamond Heart, a visual novel featuring magical girls and magical boys.
• This is the main premise of MGCM, a fanservicey game for PC and smartphone (there’s an official NSFW version for it). The game features twelve girls who are chosen to be magical girls by Kamisaman, a mysterious girl genius who appears to have invented Kamisaman System, and the player protagonist Tobio to fight human-devouring demons who have emerged on Earth and The Multiverse. A magical pet named Omnis guides and scouts the new magical girl members.
• The Shinobi in Senran Kagura take pride as ninja warriors, but with all the Costume Porn, (Which is susceptible to Clothing Damage) the Gainaxing, attack name screaming and the TransformationSequences, they're really more Magical Girl than warrior. (Although most of them are badasses in their own right.)
• Nearly everyone in Touhou Project. The only characters who don't have some sort of magical combat ability (e.g., Akyu and Rinnosuke) only appear in the Expanded Universe or one-off games (e.g., Rika and Rikako). Deliberately invoked by Marisa, who uses a Flying Broomstick (even though she, like everyone in Gensokyo, can fly unaided) and always wears a comically-large witch hat because that's what Cute Witches are supposed to do, which doesn't detract at all from her passion for huge explosions.

Web Comics

• The eponymous Agents of the Realm fight less with magic and more with BFSs, giant hammers, glaive or bow and arrows. The bleeds are hard to beat otherwise.
• The heroines of At Arm's Length are basically magic-powered superheroes, though they're a couple centuries older than most examples.
• Apricot Cookie(s)!: Fighting shadowy enemies as a magical girl is something nearly every youth in Japan experiences. The only exceptions to the rule are non-virgins, who immediately become Office Ladies when they lose their virginity, boys, who get a deck of magical cards to fight with instead, and Apricot, who mysteriously can't transform at all...but only because she was born with Dark Magical Girl powers she hates.
• El Goonish Shive: In the later comics, Elliot gains a superheroine spell after already having the ability to shapeshift into virtually any conceivable female human form including transformation of clothes. The spell comes with three "secret identities" that shift the user's personality somewhat to help with staying under the radar.
• Last Res0rt includes a faction known as the Galaxy Girl Scouts, which seem to be a cross between the sailor senshi and the Green Lantern Corps (i.e., alien girls in whatever the alien version of "schoolgirl" happens to be). Daisy, one of the protagonists and a Condemned Contestant on the titular game show, is suggested to have been a former member turned supervillain, and a squad of Galaxy Girl Scouts out to kill her and whomever stands in their way form the opposition for the second episode. It doesn't end well for them.
• Magical Boy: A more Coming of Age take, as the main character is a trans boy from a family that transfers powers to genetic females only. While the experience starts out giving him major dysphoria, the powers learn to adapt to his identity as he comes into his own.
• Magical Girl Neil: The only child of a woman descended from a long line of magical girls gets stuck with the job despite being a boy.
• Magick Chicks: Teenage witch Melissa Helrune, the daughter of a former Magical Girl Warrior and her former Evil Overlord archnemesis, ends up literally torn between the good and evil sides of her heritage.
• Emi Arai, the deuteragonist of Metacarpolis, is a former Magical Girl Warrior who became a Magic Idol Singer after her team defeated their big bad and eventually burned out when she got tired of being Not Allowed to Grow Up. She moved to the titular City of Adventure because the Weirdness Censor there allows her to live a quiet life off her residuals and a job as a cleaning service maid.
• Misfits Of Avalon is a European take on the genre; the heroines' powers derive from Celtic mythology, their costumes are based off Catholic schoolgirls instead of Japanese ones, their Mentor Mascot is a large wolfhound rather than a cute little cat and there is much less focus on prettiness and feminity.
• Princess Chroma: A parody of the genre in which the magical girl is most definitely the hands-on type. She prefers fighting giant monsters with a mace over resorting to spells, despite magic being the more effective, easier way to end a fight.
• Shattered Starlight is about a former magical girl struggling to hold down a job and trying to get her life together a decade after the breakup of her team.
• Sleepless Domain: a nameless city is defended by Magical Girls from the monsters that stalk it during the night. The girls earn fame, fortune and the admiration of their city, but this is war... and war has casualties.
• Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki is an Affectionate Parody of the genre with a Norse Mythology theme. It also is a Gender Bender series, like the Kämpfer example above.
• Sweet Dreams follows a trio of magical girls fighting the physical manifestations of people's nightmares, which take the form of goopy purple monsters. Some of them are much larger and more dangerous than others, even to an experienced adult magical girl.

Web Original

• Most of the cast in Jake And The Dynamo, particularly the titular character Magical Girl Pretty Dynamo.
• The Spirit Guard in Magical Girl Policy.
• One could call every female character in RWBY this, if you count using Dust powered weaponry as magic. The one who fits the archetype the best is Weiss Schnee, who has a frilly outfit, the ability to make glyphs that alter gravity and a rapier loaded with Dust capsules that she can use to enhance her attacks or as projectiles. Ironically she behaves more like a Dark Magical Girl at first.
• SCP 2006-j, which is apparently a female Eldritch Abomination from another dimension. Who is a magical girl. Yes. A magical tentacle monster.
• Saga of Soul is a rationalist take on the premise.

• The AO3 series Stellar Ranger Dark Star features a few combat-oriented magical girls on the team.
• Tokyo Magic Star combines this trope with Magic Idol Singer.
• Fey of the Whateley Universe, who has an ancient Faerie riding along in her head, an 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

• Gender Inverted in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In Underfist, Irwin gains dark mumpire powers, with his appearance and the overall execution of the concept being a lot like a Magical Boy combined with your typical superhero. He uses these powers to save Halloween in the special. Had a Spin-Off been made, the trope would have probably been played a bit straighter.
• LoliRock is a combination of this and Magic Idol Singer.
• Magical Girl Friendship Squad is an adult parody of the genre.
• Miraculous Ladybug is either a Magical Girl show that emphasizes the superhero aspects or a superhero show that follows a lot of Magical Girl Tropes (Transformation Trinket, Transformation Sequence, Mentor Mascot, etc.) The title character also teams up with a magical boy, Chat Noir; the two are actually involved in a Two-Person Love Square, as they also know each other in their civilian identities.
  • We're later introduced to other Miraculous holders, including girls like Volpina (who is actually the Monster of the Week, Lila, and doesn't actually have the Fox Miraculous), Rena Rouge (Alya with the Fox Miraculous), Queen Bee (Chloe with the Bee Miraculous), and Bunnix (Alix with the Rabbit Miraculous). On the boys' side, there's Carapace (Nino with the Turtle Miraculous), Pegasus (Max with the Horse Miraculous), Viperion (Luka with the Snake Miraculous), and King Monkey (Lê Chiến Kim with the Monkey Miraculous).
  • The superhero/magical girl style common to Miraculous wielders notably only seems to be localized to France, as the heroes from America are more traditional Capes.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic slips into Magical Filly Warrior Ponies territory when fighting the major villains, but otherwise is strictly Slice of Life with magical talking ponies. The Equestria Girls movies play the trope a bit straighter, while the girls transforming into magical heroes near the climax of each movie in order to deal with the movie's Big Bad.
• Mysticons is about a group of teenage girls who transform into legendary magic-powered warriors.
• Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders
• She-Ra: Princess of Power is an early one. Its Continuity Reboot She-Ra and the Princesses of Power goes further by making She-Ra an Older Alter Ego for Adora and making the Super Team aspect more apparent.
  • Adora's brother Adam/He-Man is a mix between a magical boy and a Sci-fi barbarian version of a Magic Knight.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil
  • The titular Star Butterfly, a Girly Bruiser princess from the magical kingdom of Mewni who is exiled to Earth until she gets a better handle on the powers granted by the magic wand she was gifted on her fourteenth birthday. Throughout the series, we also learn that some of her predecessors were also these, including her own mother, the current Queen Moon, and the disowned Queen Eclipsa.
  • We're also introduced to Mina Loveberry (who's a very obvious Sailor Senshi Send-Up), an evil version of this trope — she wants to commit mass genocide of the monster race because she believes all monsters are evil.
• Steven Universe has the Crystal Gems, an unaging species of Wizards from Outer Space, who often fight various monsters to protect humanity. Steven's mother was the leader of this team before she "gave up her physical form" to bring him into existence. The series' creator has stated that, while they look like human women, they actually have No Biological Sex, Steven being the exception because he's a Half-Human Hybrid. Steven himself qualifies as a Magical Boy, and even goes through gender-flipped versions of typical magical heroine plot points.
• Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic: Tenko and her friends (even though the rest of her teammates are guys).
• W.I.T.C.H. is about a group of teenage girls who transform into superpowered versions of themselves called the Guardians of the Veil and are tasked to protect the universe. Unlike the series name suggests they are not witches; that is simply an acronym made from the first letters of their names.
• Winx Club is an academy of these.

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