About Magical Boys...

This had originally been a Dreamwidth post for the Snowflake Challenge 2025 that ended up being a lot longer than I originally expected it to be (wordcount-wise, it ended up between 4k and 4.5k). Since this is a topic I am very passionate about and I can easily see myself expanding upon this, I decided it would be cool to turn that post into its own page on this site!

My love for Magical Boys could be very easily summarized as “I just think they’re neat!” I see it as basically just a sibling to my enjoyment of Magical Girls in general, but I end up more attached to the Boys exactly because 1) I already have a tendency to get more attached and more focused on stuff that gets less attention (I think my brain just basically goes “there’s already plenty of fan activity for this more popular stuff we like, but there’s much less for this other thing we like just as much so that’s where we’re gonna focus our energy!”) and 2) admittedly, I do think being so into Magical Boys was a pretty big part of me figuring out that I don’t see myself as a girl anymore.

Heck, it’s kinda hard to explain even why I like Magical Girls or what I think “defines” a Magical Girl series! Each canon does its own thing with the trope enough that I’m pretty sure I’ll end up accidently excluding something that should definitely count! It’s a very “I know it when I see it” thing to me.

I think one thing that makes a lot of Magical Boy-focused series have a sort of different kind of charm to them is that they often end up being series of the “cute boys targeted at a female audience” kind (like Boueibu, Fairy Ranmaru, Tokyo Mew Mew Olé, among others I might be forgetting). And I see that as basically just an evolution of “Magical People targeted at young girls”. When we are talking about media for young kids, it does make sense for the main cast to be of the same gender as the specific target audience to work as role models those kids want to aspire towards. But once we get to anime that’s more targeted towards either teens or adults, it’s more common for the point of the characters to simply be “the audience is gonna think they’re cool/be attracted to them”. So to me it actually makes a lot of sense that someone would, as an example, go from watching Magical Girl shows as a little girl to watching something like Boueibu or reading Tokyo Mew Mew Olé to gush about cute boys. (Be it as a fujoshi, yumejoshi or simply shipping the guys with a canon girl.)

There’s ever so often a Magical Boy series that has an appeal beyond the usual “cute boys in female-targeted stuff”, though! One of my favorite Magical Boy manga is ‘Bokura wa Mahou Shounen’, and that was published in a Seinen magazine! And it’s pretty much everything I wanted from a Magical Boy series more targeted to a male audience – having themes around the idea of “it’s fine to be a feminine boy”. And I really like its general themes of self-confidence as well!

(I say this because I used to often see people yelling that young boys don’t need Magical Boys with the same aesthetic as the usual Magical Girls people often think of (as opposed to other Magical Boy-esque shows like Saint Seiya and tokusatsu henshin heroes). But to me that is something that’s important. And I do think part of my gender discovery was due to me realizing that the reason I cared so much about the topic of “we should tell boys that it’s okay to be into more “traditionally feminine” things” was because… I was included in the category of “feminine boy” at least to some level.)

As for Magical Boy canons I enjoy… I will actually separate this into two sections: Magical Boy-focused canons and Magical Girl canons that have at least one boy whom I think is cool or whom I am just generally very attached to!

(A sort of preemptive note that I might like something you don’t, and that you might not agree with my reasons for liking something, and that’s okay! However, a post where I am gushing about stuff I love is not really the place to talk about the billions of reasons why you hate those things. I can be very sensitive and defensive of stuff I like, and have generally seen a lot of imo unwarranted hate towards Magical Boys just as a concept in the past, so I’d rather make this clear now just in case.)

Magical Boy-focused canons

- I think pretty much everyone who has even breathed in my direction knows that I really love the Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu series, and I’d say that if you have heard of any Magical Boy series at all, it’s probably this one. It’s a parody, but to me it never feels like its comedy is straight-up disrespectful to the Magical Girl shows that came before it. I think it does a really good job at doing its own thing as a show about cute boys that is pretty ship-bait-heavy! I am also a strong defender of the idea that Happy Kiss is just as good as Love and the similarities between them aren’t actually big enough for me to think it’s warranted to call it “just a rehash of the first season”. (For those familiar with Precure, think of this as basically the Boys version of the Futari Wa and Splash Star comparisons.)

The whole show is available on Crunchyroll! ‘Love’ has two seasons of 12 episodes each and OVA, and Happy Kiss has a single season also with 12 episodes. (Happy Kiss is categorized on the site as simply a third season of Love, in case you ever try to look for it separately and get confused.) There is a movie coming out in Japan on the 24th as a celebration of the franchise’s 10th anniversary! But there’s unfortunately no news on if there will be any kind of English release. With the 10th anniversary they’ve also announced a tower-defense browser game called Love Macho, but currently we aren’t sure when it’ll be released. (It used to have a rough prediction of ‘2024’ on that pre-registration page, but that was altered near the end of the year.)

(If you’re into seiyuus, this series has some pretty big names! Both Love and Happy Kiss did a thing where the protagonist teams are voiced by seiyuus who were a bit newer to the industry at the time while the villain teams are voiced by some pretty popular seiyuus! The villains in the first season of Love were voiced by Hiroshi Kamiya, Fukuyama Jun and Takuma Terashima, while the villains in Happy Kiss were voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa, Kousuke Toriumi and Yoshitsugu Matsuoka. The seiyuus for the protagonists for the most part didn’t get all that big post-boueibu, but I’d say two exceptions to that for Love are Yuuichirou Umehara and Toshiki Masuda! (Though the others do have some important roles in bigger franchises! But my impression is that they don’t have as many named character roles as these two.) The seiyuus for the Happy Kiss protags have even fewer roles, but Shouta Hayama has been in some stuff like HypMic and Bucchigiri!?, and Rikuya Yasuda seems to have a good handful of roles as well! And their mascot is voiced by Eguchi Takuya!)

- Fairy Ranmaru has a lot of the same staff as Boueibu, but is quite different from it. For one, it’s not a comedy and is a more serious show. And let’s just say… They go beyond simply ‘ship-teasing’ stuff! It does have its odd parts, like having character song sections after every transformation (for the record, there’s only one character transformation per episode), but I don’t really think that detracts from the story’s overall quality! It’s definitely a show I think you should go into with an open mind.

This one is also fully available on Crunchyroll. It has only one season with 12 episodes.

- I will admit, the original Tokyo Mew Mew never really interested me much. But when Tokyo Mew Mew Olé was announced, I was intrigued. I think I started reading it at some point of 2023, but only finished it in November 2024 when I finally got to the chapters where Hiroo gets properly introduced and from there I basically binged everything else in a whole day! (If you’re wondering: yes, I do procrastinate a lot to read stuff). When I first started reading Olé, I did read the first chapter of the original Tokyo Mew Mew, but that is pretty much as far as my knowledge of that story goes aside from VERY vague stuff I’ve seen people talk about. And at no point I felt like having so little knowledge of the original impacted my ability to enjoy this one! So if you just want to read a nice little Magical Boy manga with some Reverse Harem vibes (yes, there’s a female lead whom I actually liked quite a lot!) and don’t feel like reading the original Tokyo Mew Mew, I’d say absolutely go for it! I don’t think there’s a single character in this manga whom I don’t like or don’t think is fun! (In terms of who my favorite is… I’ll be honest I think Latte consumes more than half of my thoughts related to this manga LMAO)

As far as I know, this has no officially licensed English release. It is fully scanlated, though! If you want to know what is the main scanlation site I use, feel free to PM me! This manga has 32 chapters total.

- I think I’ve already mentioned all the main things I like about Bokura wa Mahou Shounen in the part of this post talking about Magical Boys in general. So I will just add that I LOVE the art style and all its characters! (Though, my absolute favorite boy is Akito!) Its worldbuilding is pretty good too!

The manga is completed with 43 chapters in japanese. It has no official English license, but it does have an ongoing scanlation!

- Sarazanmai is another show that I believe is decently well-known. Some would probably say this is sort of a grey area when it comes to calling it a Magical Boy show, but to me it has enough Magical Girl elements for me to think it’s pretty fair to include it in this list! It’s unfortunately one of those things that is like… “It’s so good and well made that I struggle to figure out how to talk about it”, if that makes sense? I guess for the purposes of this post, two things I’d say to help promote it is that it has the same director as Utena (I am yet to watch that myself, but I know it’s a series a lot of people like!), it has at least one m/m pair that goes beyond just ship-teasing and is straight-up canon, and two big seiyuus in it are Mamoru Miyano and Yoshimasa Hosoya!

This show is fully available on Crunchyroll and has 12 episodes!

- Okay, this one is probably gonna feel a bit out of place compared to the other recs, but… Doutei Yankee Magicus is a single-volume smut BL manga that I found out about by chance when looking through MangaUpdates’ ‘Magical Boy’ tag. And my thoughts on it are basically “this hole was made for me”. It has a “the Magical Boy’s power and mission is very much about sex” set-up, there’s a lot of non-con going on, one of the characters (not in the main pair) is a brocon who very much has some issues. And I love all of that honestly aduhadsuiadhsgiadh.

This manga has no English license, but is fully scanlated! It has only 7 chapters, so it’s something that could easily be read in a single day if you have some time to spare!

- It feels a bit sad to promote this one, since I’ve never gotten to fully read it because the scanlation was last updated 5 years ago, but… Mahou Shounen Natsuki x Loveits was a pretty cute manga even from just the first few chapters I read! Natsuki himself is a very adorable protag so it saddens me that I don’t know enough Japanese to read the rest of it. (I have like a billion reasons to keep trying to learn that language at this point but alas it’s another one of those things that I end up procrastinating into eternity.)

As mentioned, the manga is not fully scanlated, the only one it had stopping at chapter 3. But if you turn out to be someone who can understand Japanese, the full manga has 21 chapters!

Magical Girl canons that have Magical Boys I like

(Just a heads-up: I’m not really gonna talk about Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura in this post. Simply because those are two series that are big enough that I imagine not only pretty much everyone knows about them, but also everyone knows about the Magical Boys in them. I do really love Cardcaptor Sakura though!)

- I found out about Pretear completely by chance a few years ago and finally decided to read the manga last year. And I was very pleasantly surprised! I really like the characters and adore the drama around Himeno trying to adapt to her new life after she gets a stepmother and stepsisters! The Magical Girl & Boy aspect is that the protag, Himeno, transforms by fusing with the ‘Leife Knights’ who all have powers related to different elements. This does have a bit of a Reverse Harem vibe as well, but tbh I’d say it leans a biiiiit more into a standard love triangle.

There is also an anime, but I haven’t finished watching it yet. But I will say, it does have a good few changes from the manga, some of which I don’t feel so positively about. (I could go on a whole rant about how I think the way the Knights figure out Himeno is the Pretear in the manga is much better both from a characterization POV and a thematic one, but this post is already at almost 2.5k words at this point so I’ll save it for another time or for replies)

The manga has 18 chapters, no English license as far as I know but it’s fully scanlated. The anime has 13 episodes and is available on Crunchyroll.

- Shugo Chara is a Magical Girl series that is definitely more well-known than Pretear, but still in that realm of “not super huge” that I feel I should bring it up. Plus, the cast of ‘Magical People’ is pretty balanced between boys and girls! I only got into it MUCH after the “hype” around it died down, as I think I first started watching the anime sometime around 2020. I eventually started to get a bit frustrated with the anime’s pacing and started reading the manga instead, and I can pretty confidently say it’s one of my absolute favorite Magical Girl series! I really really love its Coming of Age themes and the characters! (Of course, I really like the boys. But when it comes to the girls I do really like Amu and Utau, and I absolutely LOVE Rima and her plotline with her parents!)

The manga has 55 chapters and is fully scanlated. I have no idea if it ever had an English license. The anime has 3 seasons, the first two having 51 eps each and the third having 25, and is all available on Crunchyroll. (As mentioned previously, I am not the biggest fan of the pacing. I specially dislike it in the second season. But I do still think it’s a fun time and like some of the anime-only stuff such as Lulu. So I’d say it’s still worth a shot if you’re interested!)

- From this point on it’s basically the Precure mini-section… So to start that of: KiraKira Precure A La Mode has been one of my favorite Precure seasons ever since I first watched it in 2020! I am a sucker for its gimmick being sweets and I adore each and everyone of the characters, and I love how each one of them get pretty much equal time to shine throughout the series! Out of the girls my favorite is definitely Akira, but I have a really soft spot for Himari too! And I really like how it handles its villains as well!

The ‘Magical Boy’ part of this show is what I would consider pretty major spoiler territory. So for those who might want to go into it more blindly, I’ll keep stuff about that topic under a ‘details’ tag.

Pikario is a boy who is at first introduced as a villain with the name ‘Julio’ and whose human/civilian disguise is called ‘Kuroki Rio’. As the show progresses, you eventually find out he is actually the twin brother of the show’s 6th Cure, Ciel, and that the two of them were originally both training as patissiers to become Precures. (Unless I am misremembering something about previous seasons that I either didn’t watch or only watched AGES ago, this was the first time the franchise even alluded to the idea of male Cures!) However, Ciel turned out to be much more of a prodigy at sweets-making than him, leading him to grow envious and frustrated. The seasons’ Big Bad took advantage of that to recruit him. The Cures eventually have their big confrontation with Rio in the middle of the show, and he is left basically under a magical coma for a good chunk of the series. HOWEVER, during the last few episodes, he wakes up and FOR A SHORT MOMENT you see that he does turn into a Cure himself! Although he doesn’t get a transformation sequence, nor does he get an official Cure name during the series (but given how the girls are named in the show, he pretty obviously would be named Cure Waffle).

I just absolutely LOVE Pikario with all my heart! I love his plotline! His designs are super cute! Even though he didn’t necessarily go to “main Cure status”, I was still super excited to see him getting to be a Cure in the last few episodes, even if just for a few minutes!

This is one of the Precure seasons that is available on Crunchyroll! It has 49 episodes.

- (This next rec is for a show that is ongoing (Wonderful Precure), where the thing that officially makes it qualify for this Magical Boy post has happened in the most recent episode. So I will be keeping the Magical Boy-specific stuff under a ‘details’ tag as well.

Look… I started watching this show literally one month ago when I spent 2 weeks of December having the absolutely WORST cold of my life… And I ended up binging all the episodes that were available at the time. I was having the time of my life with it, and I DON’T think it was just that terrible cold making me easier to please! (Specially since there were other shows, even other Precure seasons, that I was watching at the time that I didn’t feel like watching over this one.)

Right away I was really charmed by how it presented the relationship between humans and animals, and how a lot of the episodes have plotlines that can apply to just human relationships as well! I didn’t expect Iroha and Komugi to be characters I was going to care much about, but I ended up finding both of them really charming in their own way! (I’ll be honest, Komugi even made me start to understand the charm of tiny dogs or just dogs in general more! I say this as someone who is definitely a cat person and whose interest in dogs is mainly in the fantasy of having a BEEG dog who would crush me if it slept on top of me.)

Mayu and Yuki are absolutely WONDERFUL (heh) too! I love how Mayu is shy and honestly kinda anxious about social interactions! I love her relationship with Yuki and the backstory of how they met! I love how Yuki’s personality is SO accurately cat-like! (And something about Yuki that is probably only gonna make sense to those who watch Kamen Rider, but… You know how a lot of secondary Riders are “guy who is very grumpy and pissy (either in general or specifically at the main Rider), but then basically gets “domesticated” and starts being a bit nicer”? Yeah, I think Yuki is the closest I have seen Precure get to that! She’s very violent and mean towards the monsters at first and very dismissive when Iroha and Komugi try to talk to her, but has her “domestication” moment when Mayu becomes a Cure.)

And god, Satoru… I absolutely love him too! He’s just so cute and I love his gentle vibes, and I like how he gets to be such a big supporting force to the girls despite being a civilian! (And I think MeyMey being so over-the-top about them being “besties” is hilarious fienfiebf) I also really like the little moments where Daifuku’s personality shines through, even though he can’t talk!

(Spoilers under the ‘details’ tag)

AND YES I WAS *EXTREMELY HAPPY* WHEN SATORU AND DAIFUKU GOT TO TRANSFORM IN EPISODE 49!!! I had been so sad to hear they had gotten Magical Boy forms in the movie, but with no Cure names or confirmation on if those would appear in the show. We still don’t have Cure names, and their “transformation sequence” is very short, but at least they are in the actual show and got a transformation that wasn’t just a “body gets a light flash for a few milliseconds” one! (I was very surprised by how deep Daifuku’s voice was! I do remember the show had already established he had a bit of a “tougher than he looks” personality, but my brain still kept giving him a shota-coded voice coancosnci)

Gods I could go into a whole rant about how much I like the villains too. Specially after the developments involving Subaru and Gaon in ep 49! But this is… So long already… (Both the post overall and just this WanPre section…)

The show is available on Crunchyroll! It has 50 episodes!

- Delicious Party Precure... Okay, look, listen: yes I love the food theming. Yes I really like Ran and MemMem specifically. Yes I do like Takumi even if he is no Pikario and no Satoru. However I cannot lie to myself that a HUGE reason why I like this season is because I have a crush on Rosemary. I have an excessively huge soft spot for this feminine male mentor figure whom I want to pat my head and tell me I did a good job. Procrastination means I haven’t finished this season yet however even if I end up thinking they fucked up something in the ending it’s not gonna change the fact that it gave me Rosemary.

It’s on Crunchyroll. It has 45 episodes. This post has reached 4k words my brain is fried.

A short (I PROMISE) section about tokusatsu henshin heroes

I SWEAR this one is going to be just a quick thing. But the reason I want to bring up tokusatsu here is: back when I was in middle school and first getting into Precure, and thinking “huh I wish there were more Boys in these”, Kamen Rider (and the few Sentais I watched some of) was like THE thing that was scratching my Magical Boy itch back then before I first got into Boueibu. So I say that *to me* toku henshin heroes, or at least these two specific franchises, DO have enough similarities to pre-existing Magical Girl & Boy franchises to count as Magical Boys & Girls themselves.

Getting into tokusatsu is a bit more complicated than getting into something like anime and manga, as there are very few official releases outside of Japan and even for fansubs you have to know where to look… I mostly know where to find a fansub specifically in Portuguese, so I’ll probably not be much help for pointing you to an English fansub…

As for recs of specific seasons (these will be very quick fire so I encourage you to look for stuff like the summaries or other deeper info yourself), I am mainly a Kamen Rider fan. My two absolute favorite seasons are Zi-O and OOO, but I also really like Drive, Den-O and Fourze. And I have been really liking Gavv so far! As for Super Sentai, the amount of seasons I have watched is MUCH smaller. But I enjoyed Gokaiger a lot, and Donbrothers is just A Wonderful Experience™.

…I swear I did not originally intend for this post to become like 4.5k words long… If you made it this far, congratulations you honestly deserve the most expensive Magical Girl or Boy or tokusatsu merch of your dreams.

What did we learn today? Don’t let Serenity get started about Magical Boys he will not shut the fuck up. At this point I think this was less “talking about a trope/theme I like” and more a “Magical Boy Manifesto”... Mission Failed Successfully???

(I literally stayed up writing this way past the time I should have gone to bed because even though it was getting late I KNEW this was gonna be plaguing my head and stopping me from sleeping unless I finished it… I’ll go pass out now, see you tomorrow maybe.)

((My brain, as I was pretty much ready to finally hit 'post': "Ah wait I was gonna bring up how you could consider Show by Rock as a Magical Girls & Boys series or at least adjacent to it!"

Me: "NO NO NO NO STOP THAT'S ENOUGH"))