“Always just. Always magical.”
When the four of us first started working as Magical Girls, we penned the slogan in a McDonalds, giggling about how corny it sounded. Annie joked about how we’d still be calling ourselves magical girls when we were eighty, buckling on arthritic knees.
“We’ll have to rebrand to ‘Magical Grandmas’.”
We had a few core fans. The ones who showed up to our battles with cardboard signs and tote bags with our faces printed on them, ordered for cheap online. We recognized some of their faces: Kiki, the single mom who made TikTok videos of her kids doing the magical girl poses. Dominic, the tech start-up manager who moderated an online forum for our unofficial fan club. Mami, the twelve-year-old girl in braces who’d forced her dad to drive her over. She wore a plastic tiara and waved her homemade wand from the crowd, hoping we’d see her.
“You can be a magical girl too!” We always waved back, offering to take photos before packing into a musty van for our next job.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the offers slowly trickled in. Local news stations invited us in for interviews. Principals and teachers asked us to give safety talks at elementary schools. We made the occasional appearances at local malls and comic book shops where fans would ask what our favorite foods were and who we grew up admiring. What kind of guys do magical girls like? one fan asked with a smirk, recording us with his phone. Once, during a meet-and-greet at the American Dream Mall, a fan tried to kiss me.
“We’ll beat him up with our wands if he shows up next time,” Mako said on the van ride home, trying to comfort me.
“Add ‘slaying creeps’ to our job list,” Lin added with a few practice swings.
Annie blared Radiohead’s “Creep” on the scratchy car radio, the four of us belting out the chorus off-key, and I joked that we should give up fighting evil and just start a band instead. “Kill ’em softly with our singing.”
I don’t even know when things really started to change. Maybe it was after we made our hundredth arrest. Maybe after that Magical Girls’ Morning Routine video I made as a joke went viral. Companies started calling us on our cellphones. Our inboxes flooded with requests for meetings with marketing departments and overly touchy executives who didn’t want to know if we were over eighteen. Editors wanted to put us on glossy magazine covers. High-fashion designers praised our homemade costumes and offered to make us trendier new ones with real leather and lace. At the end of our second year, we had to hire a manager to handle all the offers.
“In the name of Prime Day, we will punish you!”
We were overwhelmed with the sponsorships and product deals. None of us had ever seen that amount of money. Cars, gold tiaras, and jewel-encrusted magical wands, a new Billboard Top 20 theme song, facials, and spa days to combat the daily stress of fighting evil.
“No one wants to see a frumpy magical girl with weapons from three seasons ago,” our manager justified, showing us the focus group charts and surveys.
But there was something else in the anonymized quotes and social media posts: People were losing interest in the usual arrests. Another robbery? Another abducted child? Another young woman buried in a field? Of course, these were all evils that needed cleaning up by someone, but weren’t we magical girls? The people, the fans, longed for heroes that stopped cities from falling, planets from imploding, timelines from severing. They longed for a magical girl-worthy villain.
The Magical Girl Eaters (MGEs) appeared out of the sky one day. They demolished apartment buildings, tore up streets, and occasionally consumed a no-name “magical girl sidekick A” that our manager had recruited from one of the new magical girl temp agencies. No one knew for sure what they wanted—they spoke a language none of the linguists could decipher—but we soared in each time to save the day.
“Evil doesn’t stand a chance!” we said into the well-timed cameras, teeth clenched, holding hands, eyes full of that heart-wrenching, summer blockbuster-worthy determination. We waved our shining magical wands in perfect sync, short skirts fluttering, our matching choker necklaces gleaming in the light. Hold that look for at least five seconds. The body language experts had coached us on the importance of flashing an easy-to-mimic signature pose for brand recognition. For the kids.
Soon every little girl wanted a magical wand of her own. They were selling at a two hundred percent markup on eBay. A young father had been robbed at gunpoint during a magical girl wand Craigslist exchange. Cheap knockoffs exploded during birthday parties. Magical Girl LLC had to contract more factories to keep up with the demand. Production channels were set up in Pakistan and China, blueprints drawn up for new Magical Girl Training Centers in Thailand and the Philippines. Every shop would be stocked with the latest wands before the Christmas season.
There were rumors that the MGEs’ first successfully deciphered words were: “It hurts.”
Someone uploaded a blurry video of a long-haired girl eating fries in a McDonald’s parking lot in the middle of the night, a stained hoodie over her head.
Excuse me, miss?
The girl whipped around, startled, wincing at the phone light. There was a flash of teeth. Too many. The gleam of a wand-shaped charm around her neck, an original Mako design that had been sold out for at least a year. She snarled for the person to turn off the light, knocking the camera to the ground, the video cracking to a stop.
Magical Girl LLC had the video pulled from all social media within two hours, but copies soon popped up on other sites.
A fan shared one of the links to our official Instagram. We watched the video from our dressing room the way we used to watch fancams of our battles, a mix of curiosity and nausea.
“Do you remember that time we got that handwritten note from Mami?” I said once the video stopped, all of us trying not to remember the ashen face from the video.
“‘What does it take to be a Magical Girl? Mama says only girls who get over ninety-five percent on their math tests can become Magical Girls. Is that true?’” Annie recited from memory, and the rest of us laughed. “God, she must be in high school now.”
A recommended reel began, which featured a compilation of all the death sequences from our latest MGE battles, timed to No Doubt’s “Just a Girl.” Twitching fingers, moppish hair, screaming mouths, showers of ashes, the colored spotlights our staff sometimes brought.
“Hey, don’t you guys kinda miss—”
Someone knocked on the door of our dressing room. We quickly closed the browser as the reel moved onto a video of students dancing to the poppy song from our latest Coke commercial.
“The reporter from The New Yorker is here for your interview,” our manager announced from behind the door. “We’re going to give them a tour of the Magical Headquarters afterwards. Make sure you put on the new costumes. Big smiles. They requested a sneak peek of the new Walmart-exclusive wands since they go on sale in a month.”
We gave an enthusiastic and perfectly in-sync “Leave it to us!”
As we touched up our makeup in silence, the vanity mirrors highlighting our flawless skin, we spoke in voices so low we could have been speaking to our own reflections.
“Did you know Kiki stopped uploading videos?”
“I don’t blame her. Some of the newer fans can get territorial. It seems exhausting to keep up with all the latest filters and hashtags too.”
“Did you hear about Dominic? Apparently, the official fan club sent him a cease-and-desist, demanding he turn over the website and forum.”
We didn’t look at each other as we spoke, only focusing on the soft brushes stroking our cheeks. We pursed our lips at our reflections in the mirrors, our new, shorter uniforms hanging on the wall behind us like new skin. A hero has to change to fit the times. Didn’t all the magazines say so?
Still, I longed for the old sweltering van, the cheap costumes we’d stitched with our own hands, the fraying cardboard signs and familiar faces, the late-night chats in McDonald’s where we quietly, excitedly brainstormed our individual Magical Girl names:
“Mako the Steel Heel.”
“Lin the Iron Fist.”
“Annie the Platinum Voice.”
“Kelly the Golden Blade.”
They were corny as hell, just like our slogan, but that was the point. Corny was a kind of invitation, a love letter: Hey, I’m actually really bad at this, but I want to show you this awkward, unpolished part of me too because I want you to see the real me. Because maybe you’ll love the real me.
And we loved our fans.
“Colors or letters are easier to remember,” our manager argued when we brought him the list. “And they’ll make you guys seem more like a single entity, a team.”
It will also make it easier to sell goods.
To hire staff that will rotate in and out faster than a car wash.
To be replaced.
The manager didn’t say these things, but we knew. We’d been in the business of Magical Girls for long enough to know that anything can be bought—even the ethereal glow of the moon can be recreated with a two-thousand-watt stage light.
Still, all four of us had nodded in agreement, hadn’t we? We’d all tucked that list of names away like silly childhood drawings of impossible machines and star systems. We’d let them tow away our old van for the new Magical Girls: A History of Friendship, Love, and Fashion exhibit at MoMA. That’s the difference between a magical girl and a normal one, isn’t it? Only the magical ones can become anyone, anything the fans want.
The first MGE to kill a Magical Girl was named Beast-I. Long bare legs, licorice black hair, and muscle-roped shoulders covered in a ragged fleece cloak. She looked almost human, except for a lipless mouth that exposed two rows of metal teeth down to the gums like a perpetually grinning skull. Scorched tissue samples recovered from the massacre site dated the beast at seventeen years old.
There was nothing left of Annie but her platinum choker and a small tin of candies Mami had given her our first year for good luck. The three of us visited her grandmother in Brooklyn, the single Chinese lady from Hong Kong who’d raised her after her mom died and her dad ran off with a new woman, who used to make spaghetti with XO sauce whenever we came to visit. She’d always ask about parents, if they were working too much, if we were being good kids. You gotta take care of them, you never know when the people you love will go. The Chinese word for “to die” is the same as “to leave.”
Our manager insisted we bring a video crew to help record the moment, strangers cramming into the crying old woman’s apartment. “It’s the least we could do to honor her memory.”
But we already knew the truth. The branding team saw the death as an opportunity. Hadn’t the focus groups shown waning interest, some complaining that our smiles looked too rigid, too manufactured? Dead Magical Girls were better than Sad Magical Girls. The funeral was broadcast live, thirteen interpreters on hand to translate the speeches and musical numbers — Magical Girl LLC hired a retired Broadway composer to put a somber twist to our usual theme song. More tears. More nostalgia. Still magical, the creative brief had said.
When Beast-I was finally captured in the alley behind a shuttered old comic book shop, they decided to live-cast the execution too. Mako, Lin, and I arrived at the rented stadium in our new all-black mourning uniforms and matching chokers (lauded as magical-chic by the fashion blogs). Tickets were sold out. Fans waved signs that read “Evil Never Wins” and “Justice for Annie” and even “Justice for Granny.” The MGE was even given a magical wand to be fair, to make the audience sweat a little.
Justice! Justice! Justice! the spectators chanted in unison as we stepped into the spotlight. A trio looks better than a quartet, our manager had already told us.
When the camera zoomed in for a close-up, that’s when I thought I recognized something in the monster’s black hair and grotesque features. A handwritten note. A photo. A little girl as young as twelve in braces.
What does it take to become a Magical Girl?
The MGE waved the magical wand, her body twisting in a soundless dance, her teeth clenched, feral, determined, like she’d practiced years for this moment. Her blistered fingers clutched empty air, invisible hands, imaginary friends. Was she trying to flash some pose? Some of the audience laughed.
Look at that monster, the people mocked, did she ever think she could be a magical girl too?
(Editors’ Note: Angela Liu is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2026 Angela Liu
