Sep 24, 2021
This was a fun ride! A departure from the average magical girl story, though not in the ways that I was expecting based on the title. I was expecting a comedy about adults trying to pull off "childish" magical girl activities that they'd outgrown, and then I got hit by a whammy of a story about a woman who feels like she's *never* been a real magical girl, wrestling with her own sense of uselessness as she becomes familiar with the world's unfairness. Phew! It's been very interesting to see Karin get fleshed out, culminating in this chapter where we see just how deep her self-loathing goes.
For me, the story took a big step forward when Karin's old team was introduced, they're an interesting cast and I really liked seeing their interactions with Karin and with each other. The idea of retired superheroes deciding to try to fight societal injustice now that they don't have an "enemy" anymore is an interesting one! The text did feel a bit... preachy, at times, but it *is* a story about magical girls, so that's not entirely out of place. The battle scenes, once they started happening, were quite exciting. Oh, and it was neat how much representation the group of magical girls has!
There were some aspects that have room for improvement, imo. One of the things that I noticed was that scenes often felt like they were figured out on the fly, and sometimes felt inconsistent with other parts of the story. For example, in the 2nd chapter Karin's boss says that she hasn't gotten any customer complaints in "months", but we just saw her get a complaint in chapter 1, and the idea that there were months between chapters 1 and 2 (but the entire rest of the story takes place over the course of a few days) feels jarring. Likewise, when her old team is confronting her about what good she's actually done, the point is made that none of the "crimes" that she's prevented were *real* crimes, but this seems to forget about her stopping the thieves in the first chapter. Along similar lines, there are some elements that are brought up once and present some interesting worldbuilding, but aren't ever mentioned again; most particularly, chapter 3 mentions using a phrase to transform, but I don't think that Karin does that even once in the story. None of these break the story, but they do detract somewhat from the sense of continuity, and might be cleaned up in an editing pass.
Thanks for writing! This was definitely an interesting take on the genre, and though it's a little rough around the edges, I'm glad to have read it!
