American audiences fell in love with Sailor Moon’s adventures, too. It wouldn’t be until the ‘90s, with the release of the cult classic Sailor Moon, that the newly revitalized genre would adopt the evil-vanquishing and world-saving themes common in popular boy-focused franchises like Power Rangers.
Many of the early examples of mahou shoujo focused on coming-of-age tales and solving mundane problems with newfound powers, almost exclusively starring one of two tropes: a young, adorable witch or a young, adorable pop idol. While their plots might be considered simple compared to modern examples, they pioneered a newfound focus on catering Japanese media to young girls.
A Japanese dub of the 1960s sitcom inspired the creation of both the first magical girl manga, Himitsu no Akko-chan, and an anime, Mahotsukai Sally, later that decade. Nearly every magical girl anime can trace its lineage back to a single show: Bewitched. It’s like puberty, if puberty had a theme song and sparkles. Most commonly, though, mahou shoujo (literally “magical girl” in Japanese) series feature multidimensional women suddenly bestowed with extraordinary abilities, often leading to newfound responsibilities and challenges they must overcome to grow into young ladies. What makes a magical girl anime? Many entries have similar themes, like bumbling sidekicks, glittering transformation sequences and protagonists who defeat their adversaries with the greatest power of all: talking things out. Yet, for all its gruesome glory, the first, 12-episode season of SAOA: GGO, which wrapped earlier this summer on Crunchyroll, managed to become one of the most compelling, modern takes on the “magical girl” genre. Without a single sailor scout uniform in sight, the spinoff series’ female characters get bloodied and dismembered in nearly every episode.
Grenade launchers, submachine guns, and laser swords are not the typical arsenal of magical girls, but, then again, Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online doesn’t bother much with convention.
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