Not all of this year's yuri titles were so sweet and heart-warming, though. This one was particularly notorious, even before it got an anime, as well as a rare non-isekai release from J-Novel Club.
GUSHING OVER MAGICAL GIRLS (Maho Shojo ni Akogarete), by Akihiro Ononaka. First published in 2019 and first published in North America in 2025.
PLOT:
Hiiragi Utena loves magical girls, and in particular loves watching Tres Magia fight the forces of evil. That's why when a strange little creature named Venalita offers to transform her, she accepts without a second thought. Utena doesn't become a magical girl but instead a magical villain, one who uses magically kinky methods to punish her foes. At first Utena is reluctant, but with each new battle she learns more about her favorite magical girls...and herself.
STORY:
When the anime adaptation of Gushing Over Magical Girls aired, I remember friends of mine, people whose critical opinions I generally trust, praising this show as a rare, non-pornographic exploration of kink and as a novel, yuri-tinged take on the magical girl genre. Having read the source material, I feel that while those things are true to an extent, Gushing Over Magical Girls is the kind of manga that's trying to have its cake and spank it too.
This manga is one of the last stragglers in the post-Madoka Magica wave of dark, edgy magical girl stories. This series makes it most obvious with Venalita, whose cutesy appearance and manipulative ways are clearly inspired by Kyubey. Most of these sorts of stories distinguished themselves by their level of violence, whereas this one does so with kink and sex. That gives it some degree of novelty but it still stems from the same notion all of these works believe: that the sweetness and innocence of those traditional magical girl stories is too shallow to be believable or sincere, and that by making them edgy you're somehow making them more 'real.' It's an idea I absolutely hate, one born not just from people missing the point of Madoka Magica but also from the latent misogyny within manga fandom that treats any media that caters to girls and women as something lesser and frivolous.
With that off my chest, let's talk about Utena (no, not that one). I can at least see where people are coming from as far as this being the story of her sexual awakening. Curiously, the fact that she's clearly attracted to women never so much as crosses her mind. Her only concern is her being a sadist and having others find that out. In fairness, this is one of those stories where men are complete absent, even as background characters, so this is more of a yuri by default than anything else. There's definitely some gestures towards the idea that every girl has sides of themselves that they hide from the world and that they would be healthier and happier if they expressed them freely instead of repressing them, which is not a bad moral onto itself.
Yet there's a disconnect between this content and the scenes where Utena (as her villain alter-ego, Magia Baiser) attacks. My objections don't come from the content itself, as the kinks on display (spanking, tickleplay, candle wax, and electrical shocks) aren't particularly weird or gross in the grand scheme of things. No, it's the fact that these scenes feel more like a performance for the audience than an exploration of Utena's evolving sense of self. Utena's inner monologue is largely absent from these moments, and without that perspective they become just another round of protracted fanservice. In those moments I am thrown out of the story entirely, put off by my awareness that the mangaka (and by extension the audience) are meant to enjoy these scenes not for what they mean to Utena but entirely for prurient reasons.
ART:
I can't say that I found Ononaka's artstyle enticing either. They've got squishy jellybean heads with nothing beyond a dot to indicate a nose. These are placed on top of scrawny bodies that we somehow see too much of despite them having all the detail of a Barbie doll. I think this is mostly due to the paneling as Ononaka uses a lot of pervy low angles, particularly when the girls are either mid-transformation or getting their costumes damaged to ludicrous degrees. A lot of these battle/sexual assault scenes feel cluttered thanks to poor framing and obtrusive sound effects, which makes them harder to parse than they should be. It's as if Ononaka was rushing through them to get to the kinky stuff.
The costumes themselves are also in questionable taste. Utena's is at least on theme with its dominatrix-inspired look, complete with a bustier, pasties, and a pair of...pants? leggings? that seemingly ride just above the clitoris. If not for the long flared skirt around her waist, her ass would 100% be hanging out. Hers is at least better than that for Kiwi, another girl introduced late in the volume. Her oversized military-style jacket and boots are paired with the scantiest pair of panties possible, worn at a similar height, which make her look smaller and younger than she truly is. It's not going to be a deal-breaker for everyone, but it just adds to the skeevy vibes of the whole book.
RATING:
This manga is published by J-Novel Club. This series is ongoing in Japan with 11 volumes available. 6 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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