Magical Girls - Common Themes and Features

Common Themes and Features

Magical girls generally obtain their powers from some sort of enchanted object: such as a pendant, a wand, a compact, or a ribbon. By concentrating on this object, and in some cases by speaking a special phrase or command, a girl undergoes an intricate transformation sequence and changes to her fully powered form. A major theme of magical girl stories involves learning to harness these powers and develop them fully. Teams of magical girls often learn to combine their powers to perform massive, super-charged attacks. Powers or no powers, though, magical girls rarely suffer defeat even in normal form, as they tend to learn how to cope with opponents in their powerless form, or they might have learned some ordinary acrobatics, martial arts, or other offensive or defensive actions to supplement their supernatural talents, although they do need to use their power against whatever villains they have to fight.

Magical girls do not operate alone in their adventures. They occasionally receive the help of mysterious, magical boys. These boys sometimes disdain their female counterparts, but at other times they show romantic interest in one of the girls, or vice versa. Another common theme involves some sort of talking-animal sidekick with magical powers of its own. These pets rarely participate in combat; instead, they offer advice and help train the girls in the use of their abilities.

Magical girls' power potential is generally inestimable, which also makes their abilities vaguely defined. While their powers evidently have a source behind them, the extent and exact nature of those powers usually remains unknown or unclear. However, because the function of magical girls is generally to unleash and harness such mystical powers, and their ability to summon powers depends on their mind state, which, in turn, depends on various emotional factors such as combat awareness, sense of duty, realizing what they must protect and the fact that they are the ones to protect, and so forth. Thus a magical girl may summon extraordinary new magical powers—powers previously unavailable to her—in the last moments of an epic battle. Such powers can serve as a deus ex machina to resolve the major conflict in a climactic fashion. To some extent, this seems to differ from shōnen in that shōnen tends to define a hero's powers specifically and to indicate what those powers can achieve (in most cases said powers increase as time goes by, usually by extensive training), whereas magical girl series tend to leave these factors ambiguous, and instead allow her powers to be more free-flowing and open to change based on the situation. However, since magical girls tend to harness their power using their mind and might even fuel their power with their mindful indomitability, the extra powers can generally be attributed to a power source from their mind or the power sources' response to their mind. Unlike shōnen characters, who tend to have an affection in adventuring and heroism, magical girls are generally peaceful and they tend to prefer the normal way of life, so they tend to develop combat awareness along the way and experience an emotional upheaval during an epic battle, resulting in a dramatic power increase that might be repeatable only when the situation calls for it.

Magical girls spend much of their time trying to keep their powers and their normal identities secret. The reasons for this vary: they may wish to avoid capture by the enemy, they may simply feel embarrassed, and sometimes they have even received severe warnings not to let their friends and family know about their secret powers. However, despite their best attempts to keep their normal and supernatural lives separate, strange events tend to occur to magical girls in normal life with alarming regularity, forcing them to transform and fight.

Magical girl stories tend to be emotion-oriented, upbeat and cheerful. Magical girls often represent that special time in a young, Japanese girl's life where she is free from adult responsibility and submission. The characters fight for idealistic causes such as love, peace, hope, and beauty—rarely for revenge. By forming teams, the heroines learn the values of friendship and co-operation. Even the magical girls' enemies leave them alone most of the time; the girls need to pursue the enemies and to attempt to thwart their plans. The genre can be intriguing due to the contrasts and conflicts the magical girls represent, caught up as they are between the childish and the mature, or between helplessness and power.