AN INTRODUCTION

Greetings all, Renegade here, and I welcome you all to the first entry to my newest blog, where I intend to talk more about a fanfic that has been several months in the making now: Majikarubasuto, my attempt at the magical girl genre (and more specifically the darker takes on such). The primary inspiration for this fic is twofold - one being Friendship is Magical Girls by the late MythrilMoth (the fanfic is dedicated to his memory as a result; may he rest in peace) and the independent tabletop RPG Magical Burst, from which a lot of the main elements of the setting are lifted - the title itself is a Japanese transliteration of "Magical Burst", in fact. I'm planning for this story to be my attempt at a magnum opus, totaling 93 chapters in all. Call me overambitious if you must, but I have the entirety of the story roughly plotted out, so I'm well-prepared in taking on a tall order like this. With that out of the way, let's get down to business, shall we?

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PREMISE

Based on the RPG Magical Burst, this fic takes a premise that has been done quite a few times (MLP reimagined as a mahou shoujo series), and infuses the Madoka-style deconstruction of the former into it. Further mix in mythological and biblical motifs, and you have this fic in a nutshell.

Tara Sparks has always felt like an outcast; her only passions being her studies and anime. However, this all changes when she encounters a small, wingless dragon named Spike. Spike explains he is a tsukaima, a creature with the ability to grant magical powers, from the shining astral city of Armonia, ruled over by the benevolent and wise Celestia. Spike has sought out Tara for a specific purpose: there are creatures known as “youma”, creatures who feed on the innocent in eldritch planes of reality known as “Nightmares”, lurking in the shadows of Canterlot City. Tara must make a pact with Spike in order to battle the youma, and in exchange she will be granted a single wish if she collects 13 “Oblivion Seeds”. Teaming with five other girls with whom Spike has made similar deals with, Tara accepts her role as the magical girl Twilight Sparkle and is determined to become a hero.

The saying “too good to be true”, however, is readily apparent as Tara finds out. Being a magical girl means encountering and experiencing horrors no mortal was meant to know, and carries a certainty of death. Adding to that, Spike isn’t exactly truthful about his motivations for recruiting the “Elements of Harmony” as the team is dubbed; in fact, things may be far more sinister than they realize. And why is Tara having strange dreams of an apocalypse, and a being calling itself “Discord”?

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Does this all sound familiar? It should; like Magical Burst, this fic is primarily inspired by Puella Magi Madoka Magica, along with other magical girl anime such as Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Kill la Kill, Pretty Cure, and Sailor Moon. However, it also incorporates elements of works ranging from Kamen Rider Ryuki to Neon Genesis Evangelion, with just enough original elements to keep things fresh; after all, no idea is truly original, but it takes creativity to make it your own.

Structure-wise, this fic is organized into 7 “arcs”, which are divided into 13 “episodes” each, and bookended by a prologue and epilogue (totaling 93 chapters in all). The “episodes” themselves are structured on a MOTW (Monster of the Week) basis, divided into a four point formula:

Introduction: The Elements are introduced doing something, and the episode’s conflict is set up.

Investigation: The main “meat” of the episode, if you will. The girls investigate the episode’s main threat further, most often discovering a youma behind it. Along the way, the overarching plot is furthered, usually through character exploration and discovery of “secrets” relating to the conflict between magical girls and youma. And these secrets are far from pretty.

Climax: The main threat is confronted, and more often than not, battle ensues. This part of the “episode” is often the most brutal, emotionally and physically.

Aftermath: The denouement of the “episode” often wraps up the conflict, but at the same time leaves new scars and leaves the girls asking more questions than they started with.

Not all episodes will follow this exact pattern, and more often than not, things are switched up in order to create variety; in some cases, the MOTW battles are at the start of an episode, and in some there are no MOTWs at all, and in those cases, the plot (both overarching and of the specific arc) takes center stage.

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SETTING

Canterlot City is, for all intents and purposes, a fairly normal (if vaguely defined as a setting) bustling metropolis. People go about their daily lives, facing the problems that everyone in the world does. Under the surface, though, lies a world of eldritch horrors and danger, one where secrecy, manipulation, and betrayal are as commonplace as anything else. This is the world that Spike drags the Mane Six into. The world of magical girls.

Beneath the shiny and glitzy surface, however, the Elements soon find out that life as a magical girl is dangerous and horrifying. The  youma are Lovecraftian monstrosities, born from the corrupted desires of people who have made deals with Discord - some are truly selfish, driven by hatred and avarice; others have simply reached such a threshold of desperation that they will simply do anything to get whatever it is they desire. As such, the youma act as foils to magical girls, the two sides caught up in a vicious, never-ending cycle of battle.

It isn't just the youma that the girls have to face, though - other threats are all too human, and some magical girls aren't as nice as others. Some are so driven by their goals that they've let their own magic corrupt them into something neither magical girl nor youma.

The psuedoyouma.

In spite of these obstacles, however, the Elements only have good intentions, and together, they believe that friendship and love conquers all.

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As one last stop, let's look at the youma themselves.

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YOUMA

The youma are the enemies of Armonia, and by extension magical girls. They are eldritch monstrosities that seem to defy any sort of logic or reasoning, and their appearance can range from simple, if highly unsettling humans to utterly bizarre and abstract forms ranging from multi-eyed living dodecahedrons to things resembling the Elder Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. The first and greatest of the youma is Discord, a being of malice and hatred who is said to inhabit the very center of the universe. The motivations, like appearance, vary wildly. The only constant among the youma, however, seems to be an utterly incomprehensible yet harmful form of morality not dissimilar to most tsukaima. Youma are divided into four types: standard, imps, psuedoyouma, and shadows.

Standard: The most common kind of youma, even the weakest of them are able to kill, or at the very least severely injure, magical girls with ease. They tend to come in two varieties - “natural” forms born from the Darkness, or normal humans that have been corrupted via magic taking hold of their inhibitions and negative emotions, stripping away any morality they may have had and transforming them into youma. Ultimately, this loss of humanity (or lack thereof in the former case, and even then some of the corrupted youma barely had any humanity to start with) is what separates them from the psuedoyouma; the latter are fully aware of what they do, while youma generally don’t.

Imps: The most common mooks that magical girls face, imps are actually immature youma, albeit ones that can be taken out with relative ease. While youma can spawn individual imps, most tend to be of a hive mindset; they are still inherently dangerous, and given enough time, they can and will become full youma.

Psuedoyouma: If the youma can be considered the “Angels” of this story, then the Psuedoyouma can, to some extent, be considered similar to the Witches. Like the Witches, they are corrupted magical girls, but that’s about where the similarities end. The psuedoyouma, like regular youma, have the power to create Nightmares as well as lesser minions known as “shadows”. But these are pale imitations of those things, since psuedoyouma only emerge under incredibly specific (but not uncommon) circumstances. Psuedoyouma’s appearances derive from extreme magical mutations rather than being their “natural” forms, and as such, they exude a sense of humanity (albeit a twisted one). Most psuedoyouma are fueled by perverted forms of human emotions rather than the abstract morality of regular youma, but there are (somewhat) exceptions.

Shadows: Minions of psuedoyouma, similar to imps. Unlike imps, however, shadows are just puppets of the psuedoyouma, acting out their masters’ wills and cannot become “full” youma. As such, they are far weaker than imps, their danger coming from numbers rather than strength.

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And with that, I bid you farewell. Tune in next time as we begin our look at the main characters - all 24 of them.