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 Princess Knight generally regarded as the modern Ur-Example of the genre's most basic defining trait: a cute and perky female 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.
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 , 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 Super 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.
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.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- 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 naked 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.
- 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.
- Pretty much cemented by the enormous popularity of Sailor Moon, which introduced the Sentai elements to the genre.
- Wedding Peach and its anime follow the conventions of Sailor Moon.
- 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).
- Parodied in the seinen series Pretty Sammy, a Spinoff of Tenchi Muyo!
- Parodied within the shojo demographic with Ai to Yuuki no Pig Girl Tonde Buurin, which is about a girl who transforms into a super-powered... pig.
- Parodied and Gender Flipped in Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! and its sequel.
- 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.
- 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.
- Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is a cross of this and Magic Idol Singer.
- Senki Zesshou Symphogear goes further and crossbreeds The Power of Rock with Magitek. Net result? Powered armor that runs on singing.
- 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.
- Mahou Sensei Negima!: 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.
- Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome
- 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.
- Kamichama Karin
- Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, which is often considered a forerunner to Lyrical Nanoha.
- Sweet Valerian features three girls who transform into superpowered monster-fighting...bunny rabbits.
- 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.
- Magic Knight Rayearth crosses this with Swords And Sorcery and the Super Robot Genre.
- 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.
- Makeruna Makendo adds a kendo theme.
- Hyper Speed GranDoll is a very close follower of Sailor Moon with a sci-fi feel.
- Dream Hunter Rem is one of the earliest examples.
- Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel
- Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA, part of the Nasuverse.
- Magical Canan uses this term to describe their magical girls (mahou senshi).
- Fushigiboshi No Futagohime starts off as a Cute Witch series before becoming this.
- 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.
- 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.
- Il Sole penetra le illusioni is a darker take on the genre. The main girls' powers are tarot-themed.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tokyo Mew Mew mixed the idea with Catgirls and a pro-environmental theme.
- Shamanic Princess: Tiara is what happens when you take a Cute Witch and make her a badass while bypassing the super hero element.
- 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.
- 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.
- Dai Mahou Touge 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!".
- Corrector Yui is a sci-fi themed magical girl show, with the heroine's powers only existing in cyberspace.
- Cyber Team in Akihabara starts as a standard magical girl show before veering into darker territory.
- 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.
- In Matoi the Sacred Slayer, the magical girls have exorcist powers and fight inter-dimensional demons called "Nights."
- Megami Paradise.
- Yohko in Genmu Senki Leda becomes one akin to the Magic Knights.
- 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.
- Black★Rock Shooter
- Ray from My Celestial Family. Also a Gender Bender, as he's male in civilian form.
- 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.
- Prétear
- Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka emphasizes on the Warrior aspect. The girls wear military-grade accessories such as utility belts and pouches, combat knives and such on top of the conventionally girly costumes.
- 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.
- Jubei-chan, albeit less "magical" and more "ninja" than other examples.
- Mahou Shoujo Ore gender-flips it slightly — the girls turn into magical boy warriors due to a couple of transformation complications.
- In Oops! 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.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Parodied in Mahou Shoujo Pretty Bell - the warrior in question is a 35-year-old male bodybuilder and weight trainer.
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
- Possibly originated with Shazam superheroine Mary Marvel in 1942.
- W.I.T.C.H. was inspired by these kind 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.
- Zatanna, especially in later years.
- The title character of Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, as DC Nation demonstrates
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- 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.
- 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.
- The crystal-wielding heroines of the Crystal Cadets comic book series.
Fan Works
- In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Nonoko temporarily acts as one, equipped with Kyon's Badass Longcoat and Morph Weapons.
- 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.
- The concept behind the Fuku Fic sub-genre is turning Ranma Saotome into one of these, usually a Sailor Senshi.
- Sailor Hellblazer makes John Constantine of all people, into a Sailor Senshi.
- Gender inverted in the Cardinal King series, where Mamoru Chiba is the magical boy warrior.
Literature
- Most mages from Avalon: Web of Magic, but Adriane (the designated "warrior mage") especially.
- Keeah of The Secrets of Droon.
- Sophie of Sophie and the Shadow Woods.
- All of the magical girls in Mahou Shoujo The Glowing.
- A very dark take on the subject in Sailor Nothing.
- In Princess Holy Aura, five magically super-powered teenage girls battle Lovecraftian monsters, and still have to go to high school.
- 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..
Live Action TV
- The heroines of Yuugen Jikkou Sisters Shushutorian.
- Bishoujo Kamen Poitrine.
- Balala the Fairies.
- 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.
Podcasts
- The Sequinox girls are all magical girls chosen by Gaea to defend the Earth from the invading Stars.
Tabletop Games
- High School Girls RPG has the Magical Girl extension, allowing you to play just that type of character.
- 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.
- The Princess Race in Bleak World is all about this. They are an alien race of Princesses who's home world 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Video Games
- Mystica from Fading Hearts. Ryou meets her in the forest while he is fighting shadow monsters.
- Nearly everyone in Touhou. 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.
- Joan of Arc herself in Jeanne d'Arc, being a Lady of War who transforms into her armored form thanks to her magic armlet.
- Pecan Apple of Banzai Pecan, also doubling as a Henshin Hero.
- 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 protecting her family and friends.
- Elodie can become one in Long Live the Queen.
- Magical Warrior Diamond Heart, a visual novel featuring magical girls and magical boys.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Web Comics
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Misfits Of Avalon is an American 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The heroines of At Arm's Length are basically magic-powered superheroes.
Web Original
- 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.
- The AO3 series Stellar Ranger Dark Star features a few combat-oriented magical girls on the team.
- Saga of Soul is a rationalist take on the premise.
- The Spirit Guard in Magical Girl Policy.
- SCP 2006-j, which is apparently a female Eldritch Abomination from another dimension. Who is a magical girl. Yes. A magical tentacle monster.
- 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.
- Princess Oishi of Shut Up! Cartoons.
- Most of the cast in Jake And The Dynamo, particularly the titular character Magical Girl Pretty Dynamo.
- Tokyo Magic Star combines this trope with Magic Idol Singer.
Western Animation
- Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders
- Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic: Tenko and her friends (even though the rest of her teammates are guys).
- She-Ra: Princess of Power is an early one, and many fans argue that her brother, He-Man, is a gender-inverted example.
- Winx Club is an academy of these.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- LoliRock is a combination of this and Magic Idol Singer.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil is about 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.
- 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.
- 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; those are simply the first letters of their names.
- 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.
- Mysticons is about a group of teenage girls who transform into legendary magic-powered warriors.
