MG Project: Dark Magical Girls Part 1
Feb. 28th, 2012 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_sun_is_upThis week on the Magical Girl Project, I'm looking at the genre's answer to the hot-blooded shonen rivalry: the Dark Magical Girl.
Dark Magical Girls date back to 1974, with Majokko Meg’s blue-haired rival Non as the first one, but the trope didn’t really become a staple of the genre until the 90s. However I have to stop the history lesson almost immediately because as soon as I started examining this subject in depth, I became stuck on a very important question: What exactly is the definition of a “Dark Magical Girl”?
Is it simply as it sounds, a female antagonist with magical powers? That can’t be right because plenty of Magical Girl shows have characters who fit that description but aren’t Dark Magical Girls. For example, Sailor Moon has Queen Beryl and Nehellenia, both of whom are evil, magical, and female but are definitely not Dark Magical Girls, although maybe that’s because they’re adults — Dark Magical Girl implies someone young. But continuing with Sailor Moon, each villain has under his/her employ a team of underlings, most of whom are young women with magical powers — the Weird Sisters, the Witches 5, the Amazoness Quartet, and the Animamates — but none of them are Dark Magical Girls.
After much pondering, I think I’ve hit upon the key ingredient that distinguishes a Dark Magical Girl: parallelism. For a character to qualify as a DMG, the text must set her up as the mirror image of the heroine — strikingly opposite but at the same time undeniably similar. In aid of this parallelism, the heroine and the DMG will often have contrasting color schemes — white vs. black, red vs. blue, etc — and contrasting personalities — extrovert vs. introvert, optimist vs. nihlist, down-to-earth vs. arrogant, red oni vs. blue oni — but they’ll also use the same or similar magic systems and will have a deep, intense, personal rivalry that occupies a large chunk of screentime and nearly always results in the DMG either getting permanently redeemed or at least defrosting a bit and teaming up with the heroine on some missions.
To elaborate, here are a number of common traits I've noted amongst Dark Magical Girls:
Magic Systems: DMGs almost always use the same system of magic as their heroic counterparts. Usagi and Galaxia are both Sailor Senshi, Yui and Ai are both Correctors, Arika and Nina are both Otomes, Nanoha and Fate both use Intelligent Devices, Amu and Utau both transform using Guardian Characters (and transform using each other’s Charas on several occasions), and in the case of Pretear, the previous holder of the heroine’s job turns out to be none other than the DMG. If the show is in the Cute Witch genre, then the two girls will both hail from the same magical world and possess the same type of in-born magical ability. The one consistent exception to this rule is the Precure franchise, which instead has the two girls using the same magic system after the DMG gets converted. The exception to the exception is Heartcatch Precure which had the aptly named Dark Cure, whose parallelism with Cure Moonlight was even more extreme than is usually the case.
Rivalry: Heroines and DMGs are usually rivals, and when I say “rival,” I mean it in the fighting shonen sense, where the two characters spend a significant percent of their time thinking about and obsessing over each other, resulting a large amount of homoeroticism. This rivalry also ensures that DMGs are long-lived. Unlike the Villains-of-the-Week that were common in Cutey Honey TOS and Sailor Moon, DMGs hang around for a large portion of the series and have multiple inconclusive fights with the heroine. A key defining feature of DMGs is their longevity.
Not the Big Bad: Despite their critical role in the stock Magical Girl plot, DMGs are rarely the main villain of the story. Just as Magical Girl heroines are usually in the employ of some far-off queen or princess in distress, DMGs are often minions of another more powerful villain. Nova from Rayearth, Rue from Princess Tutu, Fate Testarossa, Vanille from Sugar Sugar Rune after her face-heel turn, Utau Hoshina, all the Precure DMGs, and even the Demon Sisters from PSG — all of them are working for somebody else. I’m guessing this is done to make them more sympathetic — they’re not calling the shots, they’re just following orders whether they like it or not, and often doing so under coercion or psychological screwery — and also to ensure that the heroine still has a 100% evil final boss to beat the crap out of in the finale.
Another common variant of this is the Loner DMG: she’s not the main villain, but she’s not working for them either. She has her own reasons for fighting the heroine. Non from Majokko Meg, Lena from Shamanic Princess, Glenda from Petite Princess Yucie, both of Majokko Tsukune’s rivals, and Homura from PMMM are all examples of this type. The Loner DMGs tend to be the least evil of the lot, since they’re usually just competing with the heroine over some commonly desired goal.
However there are a few DMGs who get to be the big fish in the villainous pond. Sailor Galaxia from Sailor Moon, Sara from Mermaid Melody, and Sumire from Getsumen to Heiki Miina are all fully fledged Big Bads who have their own minions and mooks, while Takako from Pretear and Dead Master from the Black Rock Shooter OVA are Big Bads who work solo.
Angst: The stereotypical image of a DMG usually includes an angsty woobiefying backstory, probably thanks to iconic characters like Rue and Fate and Sailor Saturn (who was actually more of a prototype-DMG, but still). Actually there are a fair number of DMGs who are either angst-free or fairly light on angst, so angstyness is not a requirement for being a DMG; however it does fit in well with the image of a DMG as a redeemable anti-villain whom the heroine and the audience can sympathize with. Speaking of which...
Redemption: It'd be much faster to list all the DMGs who don't get converted to the good side by the heroines because there are precious few of them. Even the few who get killed off by their heroic counterparts usually get a Redemption Equals Death type deal. For the majority who get redeemed and survive, the process ranges from full redemption and inclusion into the girl posse, complete with corresponding wardrobe change (à la Eas from Fresh Precure) to a mild defrosting and occasionally teaming up with the heroine on a temporary basis but still remaining rivals, albeit friendly rivals (à la Non from Majokko Meg-chan).
To be continued...
Dark Magical Girls date back to 1974, with Majokko Meg’s blue-haired rival Non as the first one, but the trope didn’t really become a staple of the genre until the 90s. However I have to stop the history lesson almost immediately because as soon as I started examining this subject in depth, I became stuck on a very important question: What exactly is the definition of a “Dark Magical Girl”?
Is it simply as it sounds, a female antagonist with magical powers? That can’t be right because plenty of Magical Girl shows have characters who fit that description but aren’t Dark Magical Girls. For example, Sailor Moon has Queen Beryl and Nehellenia, both of whom are evil, magical, and female but are definitely not Dark Magical Girls, although maybe that’s because they’re adults — Dark Magical Girl implies someone young. But continuing with Sailor Moon, each villain has under his/her employ a team of underlings, most of whom are young women with magical powers — the Weird Sisters, the Witches 5, the Amazoness Quartet, and the Animamates — but none of them are Dark Magical Girls.
After much pondering, I think I’ve hit upon the key ingredient that distinguishes a Dark Magical Girl: parallelism. For a character to qualify as a DMG, the text must set her up as the mirror image of the heroine — strikingly opposite but at the same time undeniably similar. In aid of this parallelism, the heroine and the DMG will often have contrasting color schemes — white vs. black, red vs. blue, etc — and contrasting personalities — extrovert vs. introvert, optimist vs. nihlist, down-to-earth vs. arrogant, red oni vs. blue oni — but they’ll also use the same or similar magic systems and will have a deep, intense, personal rivalry that occupies a large chunk of screentime and nearly always results in the DMG either getting permanently redeemed or at least defrosting a bit and teaming up with the heroine on some missions.
To elaborate, here are a number of common traits I've noted amongst Dark Magical Girls:
Magic Systems: DMGs almost always use the same system of magic as their heroic counterparts. Usagi and Galaxia are both Sailor Senshi, Yui and Ai are both Correctors, Arika and Nina are both Otomes, Nanoha and Fate both use Intelligent Devices, Amu and Utau both transform using Guardian Characters (and transform using each other’s Charas on several occasions), and in the case of Pretear, the previous holder of the heroine’s job turns out to be none other than the DMG. If the show is in the Cute Witch genre, then the two girls will both hail from the same magical world and possess the same type of in-born magical ability. The one consistent exception to this rule is the Precure franchise, which instead has the two girls using the same magic system after the DMG gets converted. The exception to the exception is Heartcatch Precure which had the aptly named Dark Cure, whose parallelism with Cure Moonlight was even more extreme than is usually the case.
Rivalry: Heroines and DMGs are usually rivals, and when I say “rival,” I mean it in the fighting shonen sense, where the two characters spend a significant percent of their time thinking about and obsessing over each other, resulting a large amount of homoeroticism. This rivalry also ensures that DMGs are long-lived. Unlike the Villains-of-the-Week that were common in Cutey Honey TOS and Sailor Moon, DMGs hang around for a large portion of the series and have multiple inconclusive fights with the heroine. A key defining feature of DMGs is their longevity.
Not the Big Bad: Despite their critical role in the stock Magical Girl plot, DMGs are rarely the main villain of the story. Just as Magical Girl heroines are usually in the employ of some far-off queen or princess in distress, DMGs are often minions of another more powerful villain. Nova from Rayearth, Rue from Princess Tutu, Fate Testarossa, Vanille from Sugar Sugar Rune after her face-heel turn, Utau Hoshina, all the Precure DMGs, and even the Demon Sisters from PSG — all of them are working for somebody else. I’m guessing this is done to make them more sympathetic — they’re not calling the shots, they’re just following orders whether they like it or not, and often doing so under coercion or psychological screwery — and also to ensure that the heroine still has a 100% evil final boss to beat the crap out of in the finale.
Another common variant of this is the Loner DMG: she’s not the main villain, but she’s not working for them either. She has her own reasons for fighting the heroine. Non from Majokko Meg, Lena from Shamanic Princess, Glenda from Petite Princess Yucie, both of Majokko Tsukune’s rivals, and Homura from PMMM are all examples of this type. The Loner DMGs tend to be the least evil of the lot, since they’re usually just competing with the heroine over some commonly desired goal.
However there are a few DMGs who get to be the big fish in the villainous pond. Sailor Galaxia from Sailor Moon, Sara from Mermaid Melody, and Sumire from Getsumen to Heiki Miina are all fully fledged Big Bads who have their own minions and mooks, while Takako from Pretear and Dead Master from the Black Rock Shooter OVA are Big Bads who work solo.
Angst: The stereotypical image of a DMG usually includes an angsty woobiefying backstory, probably thanks to iconic characters like Rue and Fate and Sailor Saturn (who was actually more of a prototype-DMG, but still). Actually there are a fair number of DMGs who are either angst-free or fairly light on angst, so angstyness is not a requirement for being a DMG; however it does fit in well with the image of a DMG as a redeemable anti-villain whom the heroine and the audience can sympathize with. Speaking of which...
Redemption: It'd be much faster to list all the DMGs who don't get converted to the good side by the heroines because there are precious few of them. Even the few who get killed off by their heroic counterparts usually get a Redemption Equals Death type deal. For the majority who get redeemed and survive, the process ranges from full redemption and inclusion into the girl posse, complete with corresponding wardrobe change (à la Eas from Fresh Precure) to a mild defrosting and occasionally teaming up with the heroine on a temporary basis but still remaining rivals, albeit friendly rivals (à la Non from Majokko Meg-chan).
To be continued...
