‘oh, hey’, says my email, the Girl by Moonlight Kickstarter has delivered the final PDF!
Oh, wait, are they using language here that is… it feels like it’s less about individuals fighting and more about systemic struggle?
Wait, wait—
What if La Chez — what if the Houses of Aid✤ used magical girl guerrillas?
(✤: In my and @vyr’s TTRPG setting Pilgrim Sky, people live on a handful of floating islands, arranged in a spiral shape. Most are small enough for a city or three, but some of them can be as large as continents. On the largest one, Silea, live multiple nations.
On the edge of Silea that faces toward the start of the spiral, there is a gravity anomaly: where most isolas have a harsh gravity gradient at their edges that needs to be navigated carefully if approached, that area has basically no sudden change, meaning you can just put your starship right up to it, dock and walk out. This made it popular with pirates and smuggler crews, who could quickly land, unload their loot and hide. In time it became known for this property as the Coast of Stars and began to develop its own local culture (as essentially Space Corsica), until two things happened:
The ultrafashy warlord state that controls most of the spiral brought war to Silea, instantly turning the Coast from pirate cove to a beachhead into the rest of the continent;
The Bloc, the ultracapitalist superpower that ultimately beat the fash out of the Silean plate, “normalized” the entire Coastal region after the war, turning it into its own state in cahoots with local neoliberal nationalists and installing military bases — and facilitating megacorp takeovers — throughout.
The city of La Chez is a community in northern Coastal territory that functions as the main port of entry. It is also solidly in the hands of a heavily Left-leaning collective of mutual-aid groups known in Coastal language — which my notes describe as “an unholy mashup of French, Corsican, Sardinian and Esperanto” — as le Chez da l’Aiuto, or the Houses of Aid. While their main focus is outward aid — a local proverb says, “A’un littu pe tous à La Chez”, or: at La Chez, there’s a bed for everyone — they also not so secretly fund and abet a Leftist guerrilla movement that aims to expel the Bloc military occupation and provide a radical transformation of the Coast into a state other than a one-party puppet government.
These are the people who would in fact go, in a mech setting, ‘what if we had operatives carry out guerrilla strikes in larger-than-life colors for propaganda’, and given how the setting is, I would not be surprised if they looked like magical girls…)