Stepnix

mirror universe version of this where i make it PTutu, Pleiades, and then Flip Flappers 🤔

IMO I think Pretear is closer to standard Mahou-of-its-era than Princess Tutu in general conventions (heroine partakes in combat, takes place in contemporary Japan instead of a foreign setting, none of the metanarrative elements, the fairytale thing is more of a surface aesthetic than a deeply embedded part of the world's internal logic), so even though I think Pretear is generally weaker Princess Tutu in a lot of ways, it's a much better introduction to magical girls as a genre than its more famous little sister.

It's still got some atypical stuff, but that's mostly just the "absorbing magic man-boys to transform" thing. Shugo Chara iirc also had a "heroine has multiple transformations" gimmick going on, and I wonder what people's memories of the genre would look like if those both had more lasting cultural impact. Goodness knows I've seen people extrapolate things that only apply to Sailor Moon, or only apply to Madoka Magica, to the genre at large because those are the two Big Ones in our¹ current cultural memory.

Tutu, in my opinion, is something you either show to someone who either

• Already has an understanding of what conventional post-usagi pre-madoka magical girl anime is like, and wants to see stuff that's a bit unusual, OR
• Someone who doesn't really care about magical girls but does care about fairytales, ballet, opera, and metafiction

1. English-language-space anime fans, I mean. The continued success of the Precure franchise is probably a huge factor in terms of how Japanese nerds think of "generic magical girls," even before we get into all other series that would've been watched by tons of non-nerdy Japanese people as children that were not translated into English.

Doremi S1 can also basically be that and also creates a desire in people to watch more Doremi, which is always a worthy pursuit.