u/SanaJisu

Thinking about Magical Girl Dandelion, and the thing that really stands out about this series (aside from Shade grabbing the Tumblr sexyman crowd from the first key visual) is it's a shoujo take on the dark subgenre.

While you could probably categorize stuff like Nurse Witch Komugi or maybe Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne that way, dark-type magical girl series have been the domain of seinen since the 2010s boom Madoka kicked off. Which in turn spurred the magical girl fandom, at least in the Anglosphere but sometimes JP fans too, to turn on seinen shows and clamour for more shoujo (while ignoring the shoujo that comes out because it's not the 90s and 2000s shows they want, but I digress).

But MGD goes full in on not just being a darker series because it runs in Sho-Comi instead of Nakayoshi or Ribon, but fitting into the dark subgenre -- specifically the tropes popularized in the 2010s seinen shows. Magical girls called "magical girls" and not by another name. Magical girls working under a structure run by mysterious beings without their best interests in mind. The main character dreams of becoming one, rather than either just wanting to be normal or nebulously wanting a future where she can make a difference. Where the enemies come from humans, it's not a "save the victim of the week" plot but treated as a major plot twist and a big secret, with those who know it jaded and willing to kill. And the monsters are shown killing civilians, including the MC's parents, rather than simply threatening harm.

Again, this makes sense -- this is Sho-Comi, the magazine best known for Fushigi Yuugi and for being targeted by legislation in the 2000s because stuff like Red River had too much sex. You can show blood here. But the way it goes out of its way to hit a subgenre that's now associated with a different demographic and check all its boxes, while still being clearly targeted at girls and seeming to head towards a happy ending, I haven't seen outside of Sleepless Domain, and that's a webcomic not beholden to editors or industry trends.

I don't know, I feel like it's interesting just for this, and as a fandom, we probably needed it. What do you think?