Minami-kun spots a poster recruiting new members for the Magical Girl Club. Thinking "Cosplay cuties woohoo!" he decides to join... What the hell!? It's not cosplay—we actually become magical girls?
A slice of life love-comedy by Yutaka Kashii revolving around magical girls and slippery slopes, the manga was serialized in Minna no Comic from 2015 to 2019.
The author's Twitter account can be found here
. The manga can be read here too in English, Polish, and Spanish.
This manga provides examples of:
- A-Cup Angst: Karin, especially when Minami's Magical Girl form turns out to have a bigger cup size than hers (D cup, to be exact).
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Minami doesn't just take a physically-female form for the club, but enthusiastically embraces being a girl, to the point of seeming more attached to Magical Curry than his original identity. Though there's a lustful element to Minami's enjoyment, he also acts feminine for its own sake. Karin tries to rein in his use of the app, lest he "lose track" of his gender, but that quickly makes him so miserable she decides to stop standing in his way. By contrast, Minami appreciates being able to become male again, but was far more accepting of the idea of being permanently female. All of this suggest Minami is (mostly-likely unconsciously) heavily genderfluid and leaning feminine, if not outright female-identifying.
- Beach Episode: Chapter 29 to 31. Naturally, Minami is going out as a girl. Kaiserk (under the "alias" Kaitani Zakuro) is there, too and joins in, but doesn't recognize Karin and Chiyoko since they're not in Magical Girl forms.
- By the Power of Grayskull!: Due to Minami overusing the app, Chiyoko enforces this by giving him a password to activate the transformation.
- Childhood Friends: Karin Saku and Minami Maki have been friends since childhhood with the former having a crush on the latter.
- Chuunibyou: Chiyoko (and Kaiserk) created their magical girl apps to let them play out their fantasies of being a hero and villain.
- Club President: Chiyoko Teruto is the founder and president of the Magical Girl Club.
- Cross Player: Karin first assumes Minami has to crossdress as a magical girl should he join the club, which he's actually cool with. So it becomes a shock to them when Minami actually gets transformed into a girl upon first using the app. Chiyoko also finds that idea shameful.
- Embarrassing Cover Up: When the group is hanging out at Teruto's place and her younger sister Kurumi finds Minami's shoes, she naturally asks why Maki wears men's shoes. Teruto claims it's a fetish.Yeah, exactly, I'm a men's shoe fetishist! Shoelaces are the best! What am I saying?
- Fair-Play Villain: Kaiserk is... disappointed to say the least when she discovers that the Magical Girl Club are a bunch of pushovers in comparison to herself, bemoaning that she'll be unable to "reach her true potential" like this. As such, she goes easy on them and leaves after winning.
- First Law of Gender Bending: Chiyoko designed the app to turn anyone into a magical girl, so it won't turn females into males. However, besides a Shapeshifter Mode Lock that last a single day, it so far has not been permanent at all. Minami is free to change back and forth, constrained only by the club's rules and the need to keep it a secret. Breaking the rules would merely result in the app's deletion and presumably unable to access the form. He does spend a lot of time in female form, but only a voluntary basis.
- Foreshadowing: Kaiserk having issues with Curry unbuttoning her uniform despite being also female (and getting flustered upon seeing her panties) makes more sense when it's realized that her unpowered form is a guy, just like Minami. A shorter foreshadowing to the above is when Sonnen slaps Curry's breasts and Kaiserk immediately retreats.
- Forgot I Couldn't Swim: Minami was so excited to go to the beach as Curry that she forgets she can't swim. No Magical Girl transformation can change that.
- Hand Puppet: Chiyoko has one named Obon the Fairy as a stand-in for the usual Magical Girl mascot character. Kaiserk has a standard mascot character, though.
- Harmless Villain: Kaiserk is more interested in being melodramatic than actually hurting anyone.
- Humanity Ensues: While practicing combat magic against a magically-animated Opon, a Combination Attack resulted in Opon turning into a "magical girl" after absorbing the energy from the attacks. Draining Opon's magic by fighting turns him back.
- Instant Costume Change: A staple. However, it only transforms the user's current clothing (down to underwear), allowing for other clothing to be worn. However, should the user change back while wearing the other clothing... let's say it can cause problems when the body is different, as Minami discovered. On a different note, his transformed clothing do change back even if he wasn't wearing them upon turning back.
- Karaoke Box: The club go into one of these at the start of Chapter 11. Chiyoko immediately starts crying when the theme song for Mahou Shoujo Pretty Sugar begins because it's showing scenes from the finale. One of the songs Minami sings to he does in a duet with himself (a recording of his boy voice while he as a girl sings along). Chiyoko one-ups this by singing a duet song with herself (her own voice and Opon as her second via ventriloquism).
- Loves My Alter Ego: Minami's friend Naoya Takeda has an infatuation for his female form, who is called "Maki Karii".
- Magical Girl:
- Chiyoko as Foret Noire
- Minami as Magical Curry (Magikaru Kari).
- Karin as Pretty Saku-Nyan (Magical Karin sounds too similar to the above.)
- Magitek: Somehow, Chiyoko created a mobile application that can transform its user into a Magical Girl. She even has a record system that tracks when it's used.
- Man, I Feel Like a Woman:
- When Minami firsts asks to be changed back after the first transformation, Chiyoko invokes this by asking him to place his hand on his chest. When he does, he thinks it over, much to Karin's ire.
- He does so again in a Twitter special where he watches Your Name, presumably a scene where Taki does the same while in Mitsuha's body.
- The Masquerade: One of the caveats of the Magical Girl Club.
- No Antagonist: Chiyoko created the Magical Girl app to indulge her interest in the genre, not to defeat an actual evil force. Even when an "evil" Magical Girl shows up to oppose them, it becomes immediately obvious she is not dangerous in the slightest, and is just playing a "villain" for fun.
- Not What It Looks Like: In Chapter 34, Karin sees Minami in guy form eating at a cafe with Chiyoko and worries that they're on a date. When Chiyoko seemingly embraces Minami, she runs off in jealousy. In reality, Minami just wanted to hang out with someone and Chiyoko was the only person available. Chiyoko brought him to the cafe just because it was promoting Mahou Shoujo Pretty Sugar, Minami didn't go out as Magical Curry because he thought it was too hot to wear a bra, and what looked like a loving embrace was really just Chiyoko tripping, causing her to painfully bash her nose on Minami's chest. Minami clears the whole thing up in the next chapter.
- Prehensile Hair: Well, Prehensile Ribbons, technically, but Kaiserk has a pair of these called Abyssal Hands, which she first used to grab and suspend First Noire, and then tries to do the same to Curry, only for her to swat it away.
- School Club Front: Subverted; despite the magic, there aren't any threats the club needs to handle. The club is just for showing their love for magical girls by transforming and doing related activities. And even when Kaiserk shows up, there's no real urgency to battle, and she (thankfully) doesn't take them seriously enough to try and eliminate them, especially when Chiyoko is actually ecstatic when she marked them as her enemies.
- Real Men Hate Sugar: One thing Minami tries to do to act more feminine in Magical Curry form is eat a bunch of sweets, but he discovers his appetite isn't any different as a girl.
- Second Law of Gender-Bending: Minami loves using the app, and it pretty quickly goes beyond his interest in magical girls. Besides the usual activities, he's used it in the bath, in trying out clothes, and even sleeping as a girl. It's so bad that when Karin asks for a temporary disabling of the app (under the guise of maintenance), he gets borderline withdrawal symptoms as a result. Karin had been worried Minami might be forgetting himself. Ultimately, she decides to trust him once the disabling is lifted.
When faced with the possibility of being stuck as a girl, Minami is far less pleased, and points out he was happy exactly because he could change back so easily. Still, within the single day it lasts, he decided he could live with being a girl permanently. - Sex Shifter: Chiyoko's app can let anyone change into a magical girl and back at will, which for a boy like Minami also means changing sex. Notably, while it gives him superpowers, Minami primarily uses it to live as a girl.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: At the end of Chapter 20, Minami finds himself unable to turn back into a boy for some reason. He turns back at chapter 24, and it turns out the "augmentation nullification" interfering. Instead of the "cancel" option turning him back, it was instead suspended on a timeout. Thus, with the option switched off, the cancellation occurred when the timeout concluded.
- Show Within a Show: Mahou Shoujo Pretty Sugar. Chiyoko invites her club members to watch it with her one day (and for Minami to do so as a girl). Her 5th grade sister Kurumi immediately leaves as soon as she sees what her older sister is doing, which Chiyoko states as "growing out of Mahou Shoujo".
- Smashing Watermelons: In chapter 31, the cast partake in this activity. Chiyoko warns Minami that his Magical Girl form's enhanced strength would smash it into tiny little pieces (though that's resolved with the "augmentation nullification" feature). Kaiserk abstains for the same reason.
- Super Gender-Bender:
- As a magical girl, Minami has improved physical strength and endurance. Unfortunately, it can't make him any smarter or grant her swimming aptitude. What's unusual is there's no much need for that strength, as there's essentially no one to fight and Minami just likes using the app to live as a regular girl. Chiyoko even gives him an option to deactivate the power boost to avoid accidentally breaking things.
- Kaiserk the Demon Lord is actually Akira Asaba, the academic and cold classmate of Takeda and Minami.
- Spotting the Thread: Kurumi almost suspects something's up when she spots Minami's (boy) shoes at the doorstep when she's only seen girls in the house today (and she knows it's not her father's). Minami saves it by saying (s)he is a men's shoes fetishist (shoelaces are the best).
- Summon Magic: Kaiserk has this power. However, she's only been able to summon a cute devil moeblob that Saku-Nyan immediately falls for and is ineffectual in battle due to the lack of latent hatred in the school hours after classes. At the very least, it's cuter than Foret Noire's Hand Puppet and she concedes defeat to Kaiserk for it, even if it's not the latter's intent.
- Tan Lines: In chapter 30, Minami and Akira imagine getting tan lines that show they were wearing girl's bikinis. This unnerves them enough that they accept sunblock from Karin to keep it from happening.
- Third Law of Gender-Bending: The app changes Minami into a magical girl outfit by default, but he chooses to wear girls clothes quite a lot besides that. Chiyoko considers acting feminine part of the club's function, so she even starts giving him her relative's hand-me-downs. Getting to act like a girl is the main reason Minami uses the app.
- Training Dummy: Opon gets used as one in chapter 36 for the club to test their new skills on. Karin and Minami are both initially horrified when they think they've flattened or burned him, but Opon just shrugs it off both times, much to their shock
- Trans Relationship Troubles: Karin is constantly displeased with how much Minami gets into being Magical Curry, even if she eventually decided to trust him to make his own decision. The obvious implication is that Karin does not want the person she's infatuated with to identify as female.
- Willfully Weak: Minami's transformation massively increases his strength and endurance, but he mostly just uses it to live as a regular girl. To keep him from accidentally breaking things, Chiyoko give the app's user an option to turn off the usual power enhancement.
- Women Are Delicate: The first time Minami bathes in Magical Curry form, he notes that his skin is more sensitive, and slightly hurt himself scrubbing as hard as usual—which doesn't make any sense, given said form is specifically shown as more durable than any human.
- Yearning for a Nemesis: Chiyoko admits being a Magical Girl is far less interesting when there's No Antagonist. When a (nominally) evil Magical Girl shows up to be their rivals, she and Minami are delighted.
