Scampir

my partner and i have been doing a sort of weird anime watching activity where we watch the first episode of animes, picked at random from the list of those available on streaming services we have access to. as a result, i've started to form a really wide but shallow impression of the state of anime available to English language audiences in the US right now. i've seen fairly few strictly magical girl genre anime- of the shows with femme main protagonists, the majority were either A. gacha game tie-ins with the characters being sort of mecha girls or strangely powered but not exactly magical girls, or B. idol animes, sometimes with a gacha tie-in or virtual idol franchise tie-in. insofar as anime is connected with magical girl stuff, i wonder if a lot of that cultural space that was once occupied by magical girl stuff has been taken up by these other genres.

One of the things which colluded to halt work on Vigil (my personal Magical Girl Opus) was that... well, it became increasingly obvious that outside of myself and my partner, there just weren't that many people in my sphere of contact who were interested in "magical girl" (or henshin hero) beyond "yeah, I remember sailor moon as a kid!" and aesthetics. I spent more time in pitches and limited playtest trying to communicate why players shouldn't just try to create Spider-Man and the Justice League or try to force Batman into the game, explaining the core touchstones
(admittedly: some of this is my fault, the idea behind the setting is "we know what happens when the magical girls win in the end, that's how the story goes, what about when things don't go that way? What if at the last moment, in the end, when you'd lost and your team was gone, you were offered a second chance by someone who said they needed your help for something bigger?" and was working through trauma and survivors' guilt and more through a magical girl lens...)

but just... your premise of "most magical girl fans don't actually engage with the wider genre past selected touchstones (some of which are unrelated but for aesthetics, a la "steven universe has transformation sequences")" holds a lot of water for me.

Might be something about how crossover appeal works get extra momentum and visibility due to what they're doing that's putting things in new combinations, without drawing audiences to their "origin" genre where people would get an idea of what that source material is really like. hmmmmm