The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Gushing Over Magical Girls

What's It About? 

Hi, I'm Hiiragi Utena. I'm a normal magical-girl-loving middle school girl—or at least I was, but then some talking mascot showed up out of the blue and cast a spell on me! Now's my chance to join my beloved magical girls as...a villain? Hang on, something's wrong with my outfit! This can't be happening!

Watch this shy magical-girl fan transform into a sadistic dominatrix! When good and evil collide, who will be the one to submit?!

Gushing Over Magical Girls has story and art by Akihiro Ononaka and English translation by Mikey N. J-Novel Club will release its first volume digitally on June 1.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Sure, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has yuri elements, but wouldn't you rather see a full yuri magical girl story? And while we're at it, why not make it a parody as well? That's the theory behind Gushing Over Magical Girls, an English title that is absolutely a double-entendre given that the French edition calls it Looking up to Magical Girls. It's hard to fault J-Novel Club for their choice, though, because that's what our protagonist does in several senses of the word – especially after an evil little mascot named Venalita gives her the ability to transform into an enemy for the local magical girl squad, Tres Magia, to fight. It seems that Venalita saw abundant power dwelling within middle schooler Utena – the power of an awakened BDSM fan, that is. Now as Magia Baiser, Utena ties up Tres Magia, spanks Tres Magia, gropes Tres Magia…you get the idea.

Obviously if you're looking for a realistic, non-kink-shaming depiction of BDSM, you're not going to find it here, and the fact that our girls are all in middle school may make this less than palatable for some readers. Poor Utena is put through the wringer with Venalita, who is hellbent on exploiting the girl's sexual proclivities for all that they're worth, even at one point spinning a lovely sob story about how the creepy mascots have been driven from Mascot Land by the cuter ones. Presumably Venalita's really just interested in sowing as much chaos as possible; tormenting Utena is just a delightful side benefit. And Magia Baiser's costume is a torment to her as well as a bit of a riff on how the bad guys always seem to wear less clothing than the heroes; Leoparde, another villainess, also is pretty severely underdressed. (Magical girls and villains get to name themselves, which is kind of fun, and something that may come back to bite Utena; in French “baiser” as a noun is a kiss, but as a verb, it can mean “to fuck.”) As the book goes on, Utena has a harder and harder time holding herself back, although she pays for that with shame and embarrassment when she de-transforms. It can be funny, but you really need to be in the right mindset for it, because there's a fair amount of nonconsensual stuff as well.

If nothing else, this is the kind of insane parody that really enjoys itself. It's explicit without detail, has a fair amount of color pages, and knows the subject of its satire well enough to make it work. If none of the darker stuff bothers you, it's worth casting an eye over.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

The first thing you need to know about Gushing Over Magical Girls is that this isn't simply a comedically-subverted magical girl parody scenario. Pretty much right from the word go, you might notice that the presentation of things is just a bit…hornier than expected, even compared to other regular riffs on the genre. And as the initial intro battle with our reluctant villain Utena reaches its, uh, climax, the true gimmickry starts to make sense: What if the way most magical girl villainesses dressed like dominatrixes wasn't just for show, and what if their motivation for fighting those heroines was something significantly more simple-minded than any complex world-domination schemes?

Lest you think these undertones may be too subtle, the book really has no problem putting it all out there, as a multi-page spanking spree in the first chapter is only the catalyst for Utena's directly-described sadist streak. She moves up later into things like tickle torture, sensory deprivation, even electrocution…either Akihiro Ononaka did really their homework, or (more likely) is mixing business and pleasure just a bit more than usual in manga artistry. With an understanding of the target appeal of the content here, Gushing Over Magical Girls could easily earn a recommendation for that set, if not for the other detail about the book that needs to be known about it before jumping in: All the characters involved in this action are middle schoolers.

Look, I only get a few paragraphs to talk about things in this preview guide, and that's hardly the kind of space to navigate the moral implications of the enjoyment of art depicting the sexualized torture of middle schoolers. What I can do, however, is qualify any recommendation I might sound like I'm implying for a series like this that would otherwise have a healthy audience hungry for its particular brand of fetishy fun. Let he who is without sin shame the first kink and all that, and for what it's worth, there's plenty about Gushing Over Magical Girls that I know would otherwise work for a lot of people. The writing is as concerned with exploring the mindset of Utena's sadist awakening as it is in depicting the various fetishes, even directly laying out about halfway through that yes, this is a sexual thing for her, and she's starting to realize that. The various corruptive mind-games played with the magical girls, the table-turning rivalries that manifest later on...they actually make for some interesting storytelling exploration alongside the kinky stuff. There are even some pretty good gags (no not those kinds of gags…yet) playing off other expected conventions of the magical girl genre, like a clearly-labeled 'POWER OF FRIENDSHIP' explosion. At one point, Utena's villainous mascot pal even congratulates her with "You sure were on top of things today". Come on, that's a great line!

But I also know that for a lot of people who otherwise don't mind a healthy exercising of fetish content within a fictionalized space like this, centering this kind of material on characters this young is going to be too high (or should that be too low?) a barrier to overcome. It's not even something the story allows us to potentially ignore (the characters are introduced right at the beginning as middle schoolers, and their ages reinforced a few times throughout), nor is there a point where they knowingly call attention to or subvert as a bit about how inappropriate this all is. That's easily the most frustrating part, because as an otherwise cleverly constructed showcase of already niche wank material, it means Gushing Over Magical Girls is only limiting its prospective appeal further. Credit where it's due for knowing why it's here, I suppose, but if you decide to take the plunge, I think you should know what you're getting into. Since even with all the other escalating kinks on display, it's likely the numbers game that's going to result in many potential readers noping the hell out.

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Jean-Karlo Lemus

Rating:

Hiragi Utena is a huge fan of the Tres Magia, the magical girls that regularly protect her town from the evil organization Enormita. When the small flying creature Venalita gives her magic power, she thinks it's her chance to become a magical girl—except it's not. Venalita blackmails Hiragi to join Enormita in the fight against the Tres Magia. What's more, her tools aren't just limited to creating monsters. Hiragi also uses humiliation, BDSM, and all kinds of dark tricks. Hiragi doesn't want to keep doing this, but she's finding herself enjoying being a domme.

There's a way to handle this kind of raunchy dark-comedy, and Gushing Over Magical Girls wastes no time in letting you know the kind of story it is when Hiragi's costume is revealed to be a cupless corset with pasties. There's plenty of humor to be found in an innocent wallflower getting kinda-sorta-not- really forced into being a domme and liking it more than they expected. And hey, a story about sexy magical girls blindfolding each other in pitched combat is a great idea that I'm baffled to see isn't more popular. But what unfortunately pushes Gushing into squick-territory is that all of these girls are middle schoolers. It's nevertheless funny to see Hiragi working herself into a frenzy against her best intentions, and Venalita's underhanded manipulation is entertaining, but seeing middle schoolers electrocuting each other and stripping each other naked is a bit much. There's a concept for a really funny, sexy dark comedy in here, but uh... not like this.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

So this is far removed from the wholesome cute story I thought I was getting into based off of this title. This book is already funny enough playing with some of the troops we've come to expect from a lot of msgicsl girl shows but to go in the direction of turning a highschooler into a villain as a means of her slowly realizing she's a natural born sadist it's a few steps further. Half of this book had me laughing while the other half had me confused regarding just how uncomfortable I was supposed to feel during a lot of the situations. While it's funny having a girl sort of be blackmailed into becoming a villain and seeing her naturally dark personality come out through all of these experiences, I'm not sure how I feel about the book using BDSM as an indicator of corruption and evil. Despite the very cute and simple character designs, the book definitely leans more into the raunchier side of things by putting almost every character in uncomfortably, compromising positions. It clearly knows what kind of market it's aiming towards and tries to expand upon the variety that is set up with some surprisingly good build up for things to come. Definitely something I can't recommend for everybody but if you want to turn your brain off and enjoy some edguy and raunchy magical girls then I guess this satisfies that quota.