#authorposting

a taste of your immortal soul

me (i didn’t hear them because i was engrossed in writing my t4t novel where two closeted trans people discover the beauty and true colors of their souls through their awkward and messy but heartwarmingly endearing love and and also the really graphic really hot sex they have):

some character interactions below

additional drawings/lore/past designs below

Like the core conceit of RP is that

> older magical girl works (Cutey Honey, Ririka SOS, etc.) tend to restrict access to the magical girl system to one singular protagonist > the sentai-influence boom starting with Sailor Moon focuses on groups due to the sentai influence, but usually limits it to the group focused on due to fate, external selection, or other esoterica > works like Lyrical Nanoha where the magical girl system is highly accessible were extant but uncommon around this time > around the time of the post-Madoka boom, though, we start to see a conflation between the degree of magical girl exceptionalism and the overall tone of the setting > the idea being that, in settings where the magical girl system is restricted in access, the power fantasy of becoming meguca isn't just being important, but separation from normalcy > Madoka itself is an example of this; one of the few cases of it actually doing a really good job with its visuals is that it uses SHAFT-surrealism to mark the boundary between the world of humans and the world of magical girls (Mitakihara being mostly normal if eccentric, witch labyrinths and alleyway setpieces being full of the infamous chair pileups) > this thematically-load-bearing boundary is a big reason why, despite magical girls being extremely common in the setting, and despite Mitakihara being a major economic center, the anime is constrained by force of Mami to have a hard cap of 5 people in it > in fact, AniReco follows through on this theme, and that's a huge reason why it does so well visually! the reason it depicts Kamihama so weirdly is that MagiReco (the game AniReco is lying about being an adaptation of) is a work whose protagonists exist fully outside the realm of humans to the point of one of its major characters literally being incapable of interacting with them > Iroha lives alone and isolated, with no friends and a conspicuous hospital-trio-shaped void in her life, and when she settles in Mikazuki Villa she exists fully separate from the world of humans, thus the surrealism follows her no matter where she is > in Arc 2 (out of the scope of AniReco's so-called adaptation) there's a point made of having very limited human touchstones for the plot in the historians Kagome and Tasuke, and because humans are inherently outsiders the plot and setting need significant effort to include them (the Uwasa of the Wind Evangelist giving Kagome the ability to spy on telepathy, for instance) > in any case, some works postdating Madoka (Raising Project et al.) ask "what if magical girls being commonplace means you can't actually escape from your real-world social problems" > this creates a logical two-axis alignment chart between "frequency of meguca" and "separation of the meguca and human spheres" > yet, due to genre priors, most "high-frequency magical girl" works tend to use the urban fantasy model and have megucadom be a subculture embedded in the broader scope of human society > this reveals a pretty notable gap in magical girl anthropology despite the odd gesture towards it (Alina's Pan-Human Magical Girl Conversion Project from AniReco comes to mind) > thus, what if logical endpoint where literally all of humanity has become meguca, and there is no separation whatsoever between the human and meguca spheres because "the human sphere" literally doesn't exist anymore?

What RP functionally is genre-ways is a high-magic chuuni setting; it's more like a hypervisor running a magical-girl virtual machine than anything. I am writing it as "a magical girl VN," to be clear, but genre is dialogue and by virtue of my gimmick I've pretty thoroughly isolated myself from my priors. The closest thing I can really compare it to is Midchilda (the setting of StrikerS), or maybe the distant future Earth of To The Stars? But it's not really the same, is it. I do owe a lot to TTS, by virtue of writing about magical girl spirituality and thus occupying the same space as the Cult of Hope, but that's about as substantial a connection as the one every yuri published post-1997 has to RGU lmao.