one of the things i think is perhaps not as widely known as it could be about sailor moon is that as much as it's described as a magical girl show it kind of doesn't think of itself as one, or at least it doesn't talk about itself like one. like it's a show invested in exploring girlhood, womanhood, and femininity, but it's never really commented on that they do all happen to be girls, and like usagi doesn't ever describe herself as a "magical girl," she describes herself as a superhero. (rei actually does this too a couple times.)
and the show gestures at the idea that in spite of the near-universally female sailors we see in the show, the role of sailor earth is in fact filled by tuxedo mask. of course i believe this means that mamoru should get put in a seifuku and they should be respectful about it instead of mean but more broadly i think it's notable that such a definitive work for the genre didn't think of itself as being genre-establishing at all. it's interesting to look at magical girl stories as a subcategory of superhero stories focused on girls i think! it definitely changed the way i think about their core appeal
This is something I think about a lot as someone that likes to talk and write about the magical girl genre, and ideally would like to write a trpg game or supplement about them that would have a "what's a magical girl?" section to help people understand what I get out of the genre.1
It always feels really weird to me when shows or other stories hewing closely to the Sailor Moon team format give some in-universe reason why they have to be girls, partly because of the gender essentialism but also because plenty of other shows just don't feel the need and can be magical girl shows, focused on female characters, with boys on the team/sharing the same kinds of powers, without it being a Huge Deal or requiring explanation (first example that comes to mind, because I watched a few episodes recently, is Shugo Chara). And most of all I just think saying "well we have to have an explanation for why Girls Specifically are chosen to be magical" implies they if there wasn't a special reason, girls wouldn't have been the heroes/main characters. There can be interesting angles to a girls-only restriction (cough, I've read a lot of gender-filled fiction on the internet about this idea, cough) but generally if the the point is to have a cool story about action and romance, I'd rather have one where anyone can be a hero and the hero happens to be a girl, than one where the narrative shrugs and says, "well, you see, they all just had to be girls, for these reasons".
And in terms of being superhero shows, it's notable that a lot of magical girl shows before Sailor Moon had nothing to do with fighting evil2, and were more like fantastical slice-of-life shows along the lines of Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Bewitched (explicitly the inspiration for the first animated magical girl, Sally the Witch). And there's elements of those shows in Sailor Moon (eg magical girls using magic to turn into/disguise themselves as adults, like Sailor Moon does with her transformation pen) but it was also hugely inspired by Super Sentai, a superhero show, Takeuchi herself said she wanted to make a Sentai team of all girls, and to turn the seifuku "into a super hero that everyone could relate to." It was a synthesis of genres, that ended up redefining one of them to look far more like the other.
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My plan when I do get around that is just to explain why the magical girl genre is significant and fun and then say there's no reason it has to be restricted to girls and actually refer to the "magical girl-style" characters as something neutral like Magical Guardians for the rest of the book.
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If you go way back to works that people cite as proto-examples of magical girls, like Princess Knight and Cutie Honey, it looks a lot more familiar, but those were either before the existence of a defined magical girl genre or explicitly designed to be a shounen action story3. It's only after the shift of "magical girls" to be strongly associated with "transforming super-powered warriors that happen to be girls" that they were reevaluated as such.
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Okay, Cutie Honey is actually an interesting example because it was originally designed to be a shoujo series and the show was going to air in the traditional magical girl timeslot but then a different magical girl show got that slot and it was bumped to a timeslot for action shows and retooled into a shounen series, anyway the history of media and genre evolution is fascinating and the lines between them are vague and permeable.
