Creator Spotlight: Kiana Khansmith (@kianamaiart)
Q: What is Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl?
Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl is a project that I started in August of 2024. Luckily the title kinda explains the premise! It’s a story that follows 15 year old Aika, a magical girl, who doesn’t want to be a magical girl. It started off as a one-off drawing of Aika but, over the course of 6 months, evolved into an 11 minute pilot animatic that was posted to YouTube.
Q: You’ve built a distinct creative world with IDWTBAMG from scratch on Tumblr. What made Tumblr the right place to develop that?
It was a great place to post and cultivate an audience for a specific thing (AKA a fandom). It made it really easy for me to archive and tag my work relating to the project, made it easy for other users to follow, and from there, it just kinda grew legs and ran away from me. I also really love the ask feature! It’s pretty unique to Tumblr and it’s a fun way to engage with my followers and for them to engage with me. It’s nice that I’m able to answer a question for everyone to see versus replying to a comment that would otherwise get buried.
Q: How has Tumblr’s creator community at-large supported or influenced your work over the years leading up to this current project?
It’s definitely helped shape how I share my work and shown me how important it is to have an artist community. There’s a really fun aspect of collaboration that comes from posting on a site like this. Prior to this, I was doing Pokémon comics on my sideblog (@yamujiburo) about Jessie and Ash’s mom dating. It started off as just a silly ship that I and a few other people thought was cute, but after I started doing the comics, it REALLY spread and it was so surreal to see people get on board. It’s lovely seeing people come together and share their ideas. I’ve so rarely had artist block since I really started posting on Tumblr. There’s endless inspiration and this feeling of creating something with a community.
Q: Is there a specific moment or fan interaction that made you realize your work had really resonated?
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment but generally getting asks or seeing tags from other queer, Black women saying how much Aika and Zira mean to them, means a lot to me! There’s so many fun anime tropes out there that Black characters (especially Black girls) seemingly don’t get to be. Although we are capable of relating to characters that don’t look like us, it’s nice to have the option! And on a sillier note, the first comic I made had Aika talking about wanting to do normal things, like trying every cheese. It was a throwaway line intended to just fill out the list but my followers took that and ran. And now it’s a canon character quirk that Aika’s obsessed with cheese haha. It’s fun to see the characters develop in real-time through community!
Q: How do you see your creative work evolving in the next year?
Through this project, I’ve been thrown into a sort of showrunner role. While it’s something I was really scared to take on, I’ve learned SO much by having to dip into different parts of animation production that I haven’t had experience in prior. I’ve professionally worked as a storyboard artist, character designer and episodic director, so a lot of my experience is mostly in writing and preproduction. This past year, I’ve had to learn more about production, voice directing, color design, layout, animation, music, sound designing, etc. So, this coming year, I hope to continue this trend and become a better leader and more well-rounded artist.
Thanks Kiana! Here’s an exclusive look behind the scenes of Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl!
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