Thread by @tacticalfiend

if shonen wasn't stigmatized no one would mentally categorize kill la kill in the same place as sailor moon

https://twitter.com/curemachwindy/status/1647431041139761153

"magical girl" is a marketing term that doesn't say much about the genre a show is in except to people who say "trope" a lot and/or have annoying politics

"well this Toys for Bob game got reskinned into a "magical girls" game in the 90s & it crosses over stuff like Sally the Witch with Cutie Honey" yeah it's a corporate product loosely tying together Toei properties & says nothing about their actual content beyond the surface level

the idea that anyone making KLK thought "where does this fit into the canon of the magical girl genre??" is silly & the TVopesy definition of "magical girl" is so wide. "Honey is not "magical" but transforms so she IS a "magical girl", thus so is Ryuko who's inspired by Honey"

are female kamen riders, ultra(wo)men or super sentais "magical girls" then? is devilman lady a "magical girl"?

Tomino said "real robot vs super robot" is "just a marketing term" but at least it tells you something about tone & execution. wtf connects CCS & Kill la Kill that way

it would be fine if it just meant stuff like Precure & Doremi cuz there is tone & execution connecting those but Honey and KLK are different beasts and so is Utena. "I love Magical Girls! Sailor Moon, Utena, Kill la Kill, EVERYTHING!" is youtuber brain

let's not beat around the bush "magical girl" to video essayists has become a general "female empowerment thru specifically feminine traits" thing (different from Revy's gunslinging thus "masculine") it's a political term which is why KLK falls into that now; but so would Fujiko

KLK isn't "power thru femininity" it's "power through nudity" & dudes have it too. Ryuko & Satsuki were male in production stages and it's clearly inspired by Kakugo no Susume. the only reason it's seen as inherently "feminine empowerment" is cuz feminism was big when it came out

people used to justify "low brow" stuff by saying "it's about feminism" and now it shifted to "it's about gender identity" cuz feminists became #istandwithjkrowling types. "media literacy" just means reading whatever the current e-leftist hot topic is into everything

basically any series where the heroes transform that has female characters would be "mahou shoujo" (doubly pretentious to say that instead of just magical girl)