The Case for Magical Boys

The idea of anime “magical boys”—male counterparts to the “magical girls” seen in Sailor Moon, Magic Knight Rayearth, or Revolutionary Girl Utena—isn’t really new. Since the first Japanese animated girl got her hands on a mystical item that granted her enhanced strength, special attacks, and the ability to change clothes in public without getting arrested, there have been supernatural guys assisting magical girls on their journeys. Syaoran Li from Cardcaptor Sakura, the male cast of Shugo Chara!, and even Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon (whose psychic powers become more important to the story later in the series) are all examples of magical boys.

And yet, “magical boys” never took off as their own anime genre. The likely reason is that Japan believes it already has a male equivalent of magical girl anime: live-action tokusatsu shows such as Kamen Rider and Super Sentai (the latter of which western audiences may know best as the inspiration for Power Rangers). But that equivalence is primarily based on both franchises featuring transforming characters opposed to more meaningful similarities. While magical girls embody a wide variety of types and personalities, there’s precious little variety in the tokusatsu portrayal of male characters, especially in their latest incarnations.

In action tokusatsu, you can be brainy, you can be macho, you can be the clown, or you can look for another show. Plus, no matter what you are, at the end of the day, you’re expected to kick monster ass (sometimes giant, sometimes regular-sized) with a variety of cool weapons or robots. And that’s great. Those shows should exist because they’re so much fun. But these shows don’t really capture the nuance of the magical girl genre and hardly count as its male equivalent. A magical boy anime (or other kind of media) would gender-flip what magical girl shows do for their target audience: show boys that there are many ways to be themselves and that bravery, strength, and other traditionally masculine traits exist on a spectrum.

The funny thing is, there is a show like that out there, but it’s not anime. Steven Universe, an American animated series that aired from 2013 to 2019, followed Steven, a chubby, hyper, imaginative, caring, and imperfect protagonist living with humanoid alien gemstones and learning how to harness his own half-gem power in order to fight evil. Created by Rebecca Sugar, a nonbinary artist, the series is also full of LGBTQ themes, from queer love to people’s brains shorting out when faced with androgyny. All of those elements make Steven Universe the magical boy equivalent of the most influential magical girl anime of all time: Sailor Moon. 

Sailor Moon is the quintessential magical girl story that gave us a protagonist who, like Steven, was a new kind of role model. Usagi Tsukino, the titular Sailor Moon, often slept in, was a terrible student, could be kind of an airhead, and exhibited other traits that were considered un-girl-like. In Episode 1, her friend Naru calls Usagi out for skipping breakfast and eating lunch early because girls don’t do that! Girls also don’t have growling stomachs because that would imply that girls poop, when that’s clearly nonsense. Usagi still liked things like love stories and jewelry, and, when it came time to fight, she grumbled and got flustered but ultimately got the job done.

Sailor Moon showed audiences that heroism and femininity come in many different forms. Its diverse cast of battle magical girls—from outwardly traditionally feminine characters like Sailor Venus to the androgynous Sailor Uranus who was in a lesbian relationship with Sailor Neptune—only strengthened that message. From the get-go, magical girl shows had more substance than they were given credit for, and Steven Universe was possibly the first show not just to understand those lessons, but to also apply them to a male main character. 

Despite having a home field advantage, Japan still hasn’t achieved what Steven Universe did.

The 2011 anime Is this a Zombie? is often called a magical boy show because it has a male hero who is balancing his life as a high schooler and vanquisher of evil and who uses transformation sequences, powerful magical items, and special attacks. Only, the protagonist is a zombie resurrected after being murdered by a serial killer; his post-transformation costume is a pink dress and bonnet that get the hero called a “pervert” for wearing them; his signature magical item is a chainsaw; and his special attack is the chainsaw (often applied to the head of a foe.)

In terms of tone, Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! Is another possible candidate for a magical boy show. First airing in 2015 and celebrating the release of its first anime movie in January 2025, the anime tells the story of five high schoolers who get Sailor Moon-ed by a pink wombat alien into “Battle Lovers.” Whenever they sense lovelessness, they transform with a kiss on their “loveracelets” and the catchphrase “Love Making!” (Their favorite mathematician? Ada Lovelace.) The male heroes of the Earth Defense Club admittedly don’t wear girls’ clothes, but only because an ensemble that says “Fantasy Butler by way of the Bolshoi Ballet” results in something vaguely gender ambiguous.

However, when you get past the surface stuff, you realize that both these ostensible magical boy shows are just parodies of magical girl anime. In Is this a Zombie?, the chainsaw as a magical item, the (unwillingly) crossdressing protagonist, and all the blood and gore are meant to skewer magical girl series for being ostensibly all about dresses and rainbows, with action so lackluster that it would make an episode of Care Bears look like John Wick. Is this a Zombie? provides an intentional juxtaposition of over-the-top machismo with cutesy femininity played for laughs, like a pink AK-47 that shoots heart-shaped bullets. Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! goes a slightly different route but ultimately arrives at the same destination.

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! is a bit like a negging love letter to magical girl shows, pointing out their supposed clichés like the flamboyant clothing, the announcement of non-physical energy-based attacks, and their low stakes. To both shows, magical girl anime is little more than a cutesy, pastel aesthetic. In reality, the cutesy aesthetic of the best magical girl shows obscures complexity that Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! has totally missed, along with the kind of darkness that Is this a Zombie? wishes it had.

For example, coming of age themes were a big part of Sailor Moon, as Usagi was a girl caught between two worlds: She’s not exactly a child at 14 (in the first season), but she’s far from an adult but still has adult responsibilities. This played excellently with the show’s female viewers, as society does have a tendency to infantilize women. Sailor Moon also tapped into those feelings with a magic Disguise Pen that allowed Usagi to transform into adults (like a doctor or a teacher) for missions. It was a sort of wish fulfillment mixed with cutting social critique that the show’s audience picked up right away.

However, when it comes to both strong queer themes and tackling complexity, few if any anime can surpass the 1997 sword-fighting magical girl series Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena examines patriarchy as an oppressive system sometimes supported by its own victims and impossible to take down from the inside. It’s no wonder that Steven Universe shows a Sailor Moon manga in Steven’s room in season 1’s “House Guest” episode and that Sugar confirmed that her series takes cues from Utena. Magical girl series use what came before and borrow from different sources, so naturally their male counterparts do so as well.

Magic Knight Rayearth (1994 – 1995), based on the CLAMP manga, combined isekai (people being transported to another world), magical girls, and giant robots called Rune Gods, which were essentially fantasy Gundam suits. The first Pretty Cure series (2004 – 2005) similarly expanded the genre, this time by adding martial arts to it. Its characters transformed into magical girls with the aid of special items and cute mascots, but they no longer shot energy beams or threw tiaras at their villains. They instead kicked them in the face, followed by a perfectly executed uppercut, all in lacey battle-maid attire. Through this, they also showed us that magical girl anime can be anything, and thus so can the magical boy shows.

They can, for example, ask hard-hitting questions like: Is society shortening boys’ childhoods and treating them as adults before they are ready? Though he didn’t separate the issue by gender, Neil Postman argued the point in his 1982 book, The Disappearance of Childhood. And according to a 2018 study from the University at Buffalo School of Management, men are more likely to be perceived as leaders based solely on their gender, even at a very young age, which might push them into roles they aren’t ready for.

Perhaps exploring these issues via magical boy shows could be the first step toward addressing those issues for Gen Z and Gen Alpha as a countermeasure to the more destructive elements of the digital age like toxic gaming culture, the manosphere, and right-wing pipeline YouTube algorithms.

Steven Universe did just that. Steven eventually gets his powers, which interestingly first take the form of a protective shield. It’s an item so often associated with women/femininity that “guy has shield” was the basis of an entire show, the 2019 anime The Rising of the Shield Hero. But it’s not all fun and games. For all of his gem heritage and enthusiasm, Steven is still a kid, and some of his more harrowing adventures leave him mentally rattled and anxious, traumatizing Steven in ways that stay with him into adulthood as explored in the follow-up Steven Universe Future miniseries.

Fortunately, Steven Universe also has a few tips on how to approach mental health issues, as season 4’s “Mindful Education” episode does. Between that, the exploration of the softer side of masculinity, queer themes, and paying respect to the giants on whose shoulders it stands (plus all the gem-assisted “magic” and battling evil), Steven Universe is not only the only true magical boy, but also destined to become a giant of its genre.

Steven Universe is already inspiring the next generation of magical heroes, with ND Stevenson citing it as one of the shows that paved the way for his very queer reboot of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. But that’s to be expected of a magical boy show that’s emerged from the magical girl genre. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Sailor Moon looked at old school magical girl shows, then looked at Kamen Rider and Super Sentai and thought the two would play well together. From then on, the development of the magical girl genre was like watching the construction of an upside-down human pyramid. Pretty Cure looked at Sailor Moon and thought “Nice. Could use more face-kicks.” Magic Knight Rayearth apparently liked the idea of transformations but thought they should take place in another world and involve giant robots.

These instincts are not exclusive to Japan. Rebecca Sugar developed Steven Universe while working as a writer and storyboard artist on Adventure Time, an animated series that shares some DNA with the magical girl genre. And Adventure Time itself was developed by Pendleton Ward after his experiences as a writer and storyboard artist for The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, where, as he told Animation World Network in 2010, he “just started picking up the styles of the guys working around me.” Wherever there is an animated show, someone out there is simultaneously loving it—and thinking it could use a couple of tweaks.

We are currently living in a dark time when shows with themes of feminism, queerness, and even healthy masculinity like Infinity Train or The Owl House get canceled and, in the case of the former, absolutely purged from the internet. So it might take a while, but one day someone will look at Steven Universe and think “Yeah, that’s a good start,” and that’s how we’ll get a magical boy version of Utena, whether in the west or in Japan. When that happens, the audience wins. We win big time. And that’s the case for the existence of magical boy anime as a genre rather than a mere joke.

This piece was edited by Chrissy Stroop and copyedited by Evette Dionne.