I'm not sure if this counts as a deconstruction, but an early Sailor Moon based story that I ended up deleting for a reason I don't remember (maybe I just didn't like writing it anymore) could be similar to this. It was called Sailor Chibi, and it was about a grumpy loner girl who gets told to be a magical girl heroine with cutesy powers. I also made a revamped version called "Sailor One" that was based off of the Gundam Wing characters as girls (from what I know of them) where the main girl acted like Heero but was a girl. The idea was that the villains (who were more like the typical magical girl team, personality-wise) wanted to make them act more stereotypical. In one version (Sailor Moon Chibi), there was a character who was stuffy and quiet but was stupid because usually the quiet one is smart too.
The villains these girls would face were actually the ones who created their powers, because they wanted to make the perfect magical girl team with the pure, sweet but clutzy and stupid heroine, the aloof one who has to be taught love by the main girl, the shy bookworm, the tomboy and one other (maybe the rich snob character?). It was kind of based off of the Tokyo Mew Mew characters' personalities. The villains weren't really that evil, they were just trying to teach the girls to act stereotypical, and so they sent a guy called the "Mysterious Knight" to woo Sailor One and teach her to be more romantic, except instead of being mysterious he was actually more cutesy and silly. The idea was the girls wanted to be their own kind of magical girls, and not be forced to change their personalities, and the other thing that made the villains "villains" was because they WERE sending out the monsters for the magical girls to fight (you can't have a fighting magical girl team without monsters to fight!).
So out of this, I thought of two ways to deconstruct or at least play with the genre that could be mixed together. One could be that the villains are the ones who gave the heroines their powers and are also the ones secretly sending out the monsters for them to fight because they wanted to see magical girls beat up monsters. The other way, which I mentioned, is to have a different kind of girl be the heroine. Instead of a sweet, friendly character, what if, for example, a cold, cruel person had been chosen to be Wedding Peach, or at least someone who didn't like romance at all and preferred being alone? What if someone like that had to channel love energy of some sort? I know Salvia is like this, but she's not the main heroine, which I think would be interesting. Perhaps the magical girl could find a different way to channel her powers or else she would have to learn to be more loving.
What if the main magical girl character (who had to find and work with a team) was like The Spock or The Stoic, basically, instead of being a Hot-Blooded Love Freak?
edited 19th Nov '09 1:34:11 PM by Rainbow
A Song Of Ice And Fire actually does a pretty good job: No scheme goes off without a hitch (although some still work out due to *extensive* patching by various plotters.
"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy EntHave a character spend years setting up the pieces for an elaborate scheme where it seems that every possible outcome will benefit them, only for it to fall apart almost immediately because they didn't account for the possibility of unknown unknowns.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.Lots of writers have mocked the idea of elaborate plans that rely on overly specific circumstances. At this point, the best strategy is just to have characters plan as intelligently as you can, unless it's part of their character that they're not good at planning. (See, for instance, Prince Zuko.)
Read the page. It disagrees with you.
You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!A thought based on the old Studio Pierrot series Pelsia. Our heroine's powers had a nasty potential side-effect. If they were misused or used trivially for long enough, her "big brothers" would lose their masculinity, turning into girls.
So the Power of Friendship makes our Magical Girl stronger, yes, but if she draws from it too heavily or for the wrong reasons, it adversely affects those same friends in some symbolically appropriate way.
"Note that to be a deconstruction of X the work must both play the trope deadly straight and not ignore the realistic implications or consequences of the trope, for bad or good. As such, it both abides by the trope while offering criticism of it regarding how it would work in Real Life."
(Um......Isnt that a summary of deconstruction?)
Remembering from my teen years, Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World I would imagine to be ALOT more stressful for girls entering puberty.
edited 22nd Apr '10 6:33:33 PM by LadyGaga4ever
Hey, I have an idea!
How about writing a magical girl story, BUT making the setting the real world, i.e. the one we inhabit? That way, you can ask questions like "How would a real-life girl react to being told by a talking cat/ferret/squirrel/rabbit/fox/stuffed toy/whatever that she has been chosen to save the world?" or "How would people in the real world react to all the monster attacks and the appearence of a magical warrior?"
Or maybe you could make the magical girl an older woman who happens to be in the armed forces or police force. That could work - combining magic with gunman skills.
Or maybe you could combine all 3 types! Something along the lines of "Cute Witch leaves magic world to become a Magic Idol Singer, but a fellow witch follows her and, jealous of her musical (as well as magical) talent, uses her own magic to cause chaos, forcing the first witch to become a Magical Girl Warrior and save the day."
And may I recommend setting the action anywhere that ISN'T Tokyo? That way, it won't be as much of a cliche.
Jigoku Shoujo plays with the Magical Girl genre quite a bit. It's not really deconstructed, but does have an excellent example of a Dark Magical Girl.
I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, though. Sorry if this wasn't any help.
R.I.P. Satoshi Kon. 1963-2010Deconstructing is okay, but only if you reconstruct them after. There plenty of the former, but sometimes I fear the latter is not appreciated enough.
That might be just me though.
Maybe by having the main girl not wear a dress in her transformed state. They always wear a dress.
edited 13th Aug '10 5:44:34 PM by HandsomeRob
One Strip! One Strip!Well, this thread gave me some ideas, and after mulling over them last night, I think I've actually got a viable story-concept which I may well put into practice some day.
To summarise, think Sailor Moon meets Bokurano meets The Truman Show.
Think about it - we have a genre involving hot teenage girls in skimpy outfits given supernatural powers by mysterious cosmic forces and instructed to do battle against horrific monsters. Why does this happen? To me, it's obvious. It's a bloodsport, a gladiatorial show for said mysterious cosmic forces to get off on.
Every so often, several teams of five magical girls (plus one Mysterious Protector, who is given a tad more information about the nature of the game) are picked from entirely random individuals around the world, and forced to battle through a Sorting Algorithm of Evil, whilst the audience takes bets on who's going to survive, who's going to hook up with who, and so on.
The team we're following consists of these folks:
- The Hero, a fortysomething office drone who pickes up a shiny, valuable looking necklace off the pavement one day, intending to hand it over to the police station the next morning... only to wake up as a busty, beautiful (and bisexual) girl who looks uncomfortably like a younger, idealised version of his dead wife. Naturally, he doesn't even have time to adjust to the shock before a homicidal monster starts tearing through his apartment block, and he's the only one who can stop it.
- The Lancer, an ever-so-slightly Axe-Crazy Cold Sniper. Actually our protagonist's sweet-natured Shrinking Violet of a next-door neighbour, who's working out some serious repressed issues in her magical girl form.
- The Big Guy, a loud, violent Blood Knight of a Boisterous Bruiser who makes no bones about actually being a hypermasculine He-Man Woman Hater who is very unhappy about the form he occasionally transforms into.
- The Smart Guy, a Deadpan Snarker with an intuitive grasp of the situation they find themselves in. To make matters even more complicated, the protagonist slowly starts falling for her. Actually an obsessive, somewhat overweight geek still living in his parents' basement with his vast collection of magical girl DVDs.
- The Medic, a cheery ray of sunshine who loves to live life to the fullest. Actually a bedridden ninety-year-old woman who's just delighted to be young and mobile again.
- The noble, dashing, and slightly clueless Mysterious Protector. Actually a six-year-old boy.
Together, they attempt to stay alive against the ravening hordes threatening their city, whilst helping a disgruntled network employee take down the show from the inside.
The former is complicated by the fact that whilst they need to kill all the monsters to end the invasion, quite a few of said beasties are thinking, rational creatures, several of whom aren't entirely sold on the whole 'terrorise humans and get slaughtered' deal. The latter is complicated by the fact that when they end the show, The Magic Goes Away, and not all of them are quite so keen on losing their new forms.
Thoughts?
edited 14th Aug '10 7:51:23 AM by Iaculus
What's precedent ever done for us?...I would watch the hell out of that! Why is this thread so full of good ideas?
Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

Well, I assumed we were all mostly familiar with it, if we were discussing it (if that was presumptuous of me, then I apologize to any lurkers who weren't).
@GG: Only in fanon. Lots of fanfics are built around pointing out the flaws of heroines; some of them are actually good, too.
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