What would you like to see more of in the Magical Girl genre?

• What I want to see is less Les Yay. It feels like a copout, as if the writer wanted to put in a relationship but didn't want to bother with actually writing one.
• With that said, I'd also like to see a normal relationship, not in the manner of gender matchup but in execution. That is, no relationship for relationship's sake, no last-minute hookup, no romantic false leads or love triangles purely for drama's sake, just a normal fucking relationship.
• The magical girl's boyfriend knows about her identity right from the start and is supportive of it, with a Loved I Not Honor More setup. Preferably without a gender-reversed Damsel in Distress scenario thrown in for drama's sake.
• Or the girls' boyfriends have supernatural powers of their own and form their own team, with the two teams cooperating as needed.
• Less fanservice. Yes, less.

edited 22nd May '15 8:24:56 AM by amitakartok

Number 3 was done in Happiness Charge Precure but relationships are specifically banned in the series.

Having a Magical Boyfriend let alone a second gender flipped team defeats the purpose of most magical girl series, unless they get in trouble a lot or just show up very rarely.

As for the Fanservice, it all depends on if it is a Seinen or Shōjo series.

edited 22nd May '15 4:47:25 PM by Memers

Nevermind magical girls, that's rare in media in general. Because it's boring

Fanservice really only shows up in the comedic seinen series :/

Actual adult magical women, more magical boys shows, already plenty of lesbians and cute animal mascots so keep that up (Definitely no boyfriends! Unless it's a magical boys show.)....A magical fluffy animal series where a cute girl is the mascot??? A magical girl series where a wizened, rugged old man is the mascot??? Kung fu magical girls??? And, happy family backgrounds and actual healthy parent-child relationships I suppose. (p.s. This season's magical girl anime, Houkago no Pleiades, is decent.)

Check out our Deconstructing the Magical Girl Subgenre thread. It left "deconstruction" behind pretty quickly.

edited 22nd May '15 6:15:10 PM by SKJAM

Less Les Yay

I hate you and everything that you stand for.

Nah, I'm just joking. But I would like to see an actual, explicitly romantic Les Yay romance play out over a series. Madoka and more recently Yuki Yuna came pretty close, but are still a bit inside the realm of subtext.

edited 22nd May '15 8:53:25 PM by MoreThanBored

The thing is, with magical girl series "les yay", they explicitly are more than friends, and they aren't just playing up the gay for laughs or whatever. But it still seems the only thing they could do to "prove" their intimacy to everyone is making out. And I don't like watching people kiss. That little bit of subtlety is nice.

Less Les Yay

I hate you and everything that you stand for

Why are your arrows pointing to me ;_;

Uh, MadoHomu is kind of canon as of the movie. In other stuff, HibiMiku is pretty undeniable

A long, bloated, filler infested 50 episode monster of the week type that isn't Precure ala Tokyo Mew Mew or the less bad Sailor Moon. Those are good for relaxing. The junk food of anime you may say. Too bad those don't get made anymore unless you're part of a big established franchise.

Honestly, despite my dissatisfaction with the genre in recent years (Yuki Yuna is the only thing I really liked, and I have to overlook that lousy ending), I can't think of much I want. They've trended darker since Madoka, but it's not universal. Maybe a more mature protagonist, or more willing to make pragmatic (not necessarily evil) decisions. So I guess a nicer Homura protagonist would be nice. The leads have been really uncreative as of late. Too many ditzy and ultra nice pinks that want to play messiah.

I'd like to see a work that plays around with the Light Kingdom/Dark Kingdom concept. Most of the subversive magical girl shows have left out the trope entirely. The only one's I've seen that play around with it are Dai Mahou Touge, which is a comedy, and Sailor Nothing, which plays The Heartless completely straight.

My bad Hylarn, I'm still not too used to this sites' forum system.

You're right, Homura's attraction (to put it lightly) is confirmed by Rebellion and AI YO. I guess some people could technically argue that Homura didn't specify romantic love, or that she was feeling specifically romantic love toward Madoka, but those people are dumb. The end of Rebellion has left their relationship pretty one-sided though. And HibiMiku is pretty undeniable on Miku's part, seeing as how her Relic Song was basically a Yandere confession.

I would like something that's a bit more explicitly romantic though, something undeniable. I'm actually a little optimistic for Yuki Yuna since they're pushing the yuri really hard in the supplementary materials. Yuna and Togo really need one of them cute couple names, now that I think about it.

edited 24th May '15 10:20:47 PM by MoreThanBored

From what I heard, Yuuna doesn't reciprocate Togo's feelings...

Lots of one-sided sometimes tragic yuri love in magical girl anime. Even back in Cardcaptor Sakura there was Tomo's one-sided crush on Sakura!

Yuna doesn't actively reciprocate Togo's feelings, definitely. Although I think that most of it is due to Yuna being as dense as neutron stars (she doesn't think anything is weird about Togo's behavior during the skits practice in the first VN, and in the second she doesn't know why Togo seems so flustered when Fu makes them play the pocky game). And she actually gets surprisingly flirty at times in the Vita game.

Right now they're at the level of Two-Girl "Romantic" Friendship at the very least, in any case.

Write them in a way that adds intrigue. Have a backstory, but save it for the finale, and let little hints of the backstory and the finale creep in through the filler. Viewers are suckers for twists and mysteries.

I would like to thank universalperson for introducing me to Dai Mahou Touge.

Sailor Moon and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are the only shows in this genre I've seriously watched, so I'm not sure if I can understand what I want.

More Nanoha, where they are a thing with their own place in society that's well-known and important, their own organizations that are designed for their training and employment, and more of them being allowed to grow up and retain their powers or being introduced as adults.

I would like to see some strong characterization such as something out of Utena or Evangelion. They don't have to psychologically damaged or anything but they do need flaws that don't go away very easily. Also, I would like it to explore archetypes very much like what Persona 4 did.

madoka more or less has you covered on that front. more often than not their flaws are so glaring that they end up paying the price for them again and again (sayaka, homura, etc).

Fair Enough.

Maybe it is just me but I think magical girls could explore superhero tropes as well as deconstruct them to some extent.