User:Lmlambe3/Magical girl

Controversy
As stated by Annalee Newitz in 1995, magical girl media can be a subgenre of romantic comedy. She lists Video Girl Ai, Urusei Yatsura, Tenchi Muyo, and Oh! My Goddess! as examples of magical girls in the romantic comedy genre. Newitz notes that magical girl romantic comedies are akin to American television shows such as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie as they portray women who are exceptionally powerful as well as traditionally feminine. Newitz again proposes that magical girl romantic comedies are the culmination between worlds of fantasy and reality. For example, in Oh! My Goddess! Belldandy is a goddess who is accidentally summoned by college student Keiichi. Similarly, Newitz alleges that in the romantic comedy magical girl subgenre, the idea that women “should conceal their power” is a common trope. This is because magical girls in the aforementioned shows almost exclusively use their powers in the home or in their private relationship, but not for power at work or influence outside the domestic realm. 

Akiko Shimada’s study Representations of Girls in Japanese Magical Girl TV Animation Programmes from 1966 to 2003 and Japanese Female Audiences' Understanding of Them references Yokokawa (1991) and Murase (2000) who state that in Japanese language, the word “shojo” is always used in third person. Young girls do not refer to themselves as “shojo”. This reflects on how narratives about shojo are crafted from a third-party, often male lens. 

History
Professor Bill Ellis noted that in traditional Japanese folklore, powerful women were depicted to be monstrous, similar to the level of Oni. 

During this era, Kimagure Orange Road (1985) introduced audiences to the idea of a "magical boy" character. 

Background
Scholar Kumiko Saito concluded in her 2014 study “Magic, "Shōjo", and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society” that the magical girl genre’s values of gender and power have grown “symbiotically” with how Japanese society views gender roles, despite some of the portrayal of these roles in magical girl media being oppositional to traditional Japanese values.