A Thread For My Characters

[Bluelantern]

My impression is that blood is kinda valid - dark red, flowing liquidy costume design- and the others aren't. But I'm not expert.

Cute monster girl sounds valid, if a bit... off. The others don't quite fit with what had been show in thread, but I prefer a direct answer to this kind of thing.

[DanielH]

[...]sexy¹-themed magical?[...]

¹I am asking this purely for setting-mapping purposes, and it is an idea that I am strongly against.

If there was an age limit on magical girls, I missed it; I’m not sure why an adult wouldn’t be able to get a sexy theme or why having one would be particularly objectionable in that case. Given a more traditional magical girl age it would probably be a problem, but given how activation works I would be surprised if they were all traditional age. Even if they were, some definitions of “traditional age” might not even have this problem problem (depending on individual, circumstances, etc.); Aurora was over the local age of consent when she became a magical girl.

Are we even talking about the same thread? I’m thinking of the magical girls in counterfeit. They have some themes (like the psychic, metallic, or jewel seen in thread), but I see no reason those themes would be at all restricted. Any theme seems possible if it’s loosely related to something that can generate the right kinds of emotions.

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Okay...

Henshin (Cerebella and Magnetar) Magical Girls aren't fueled by emotions. They are fueled by the Magical Girl Power Source, which is the same entity that empowers them and which was shown in-thread when it was empowering Gem.

There is a cutoff age for becoming a magical girl, but it's a soft limit, not a hard one. It has to do with a number of factors including developmental level and some aspects of psychology.

The Magical Girl Power Source was originally a subsystem in a larger magical network that "imprinted" on magical girl anime in the late twentieth century. While themes like "blood" aren't impossible, they're particularly unlikely; themes like "sexy" are A) profoundly unlikely due to not fitting the them of how the Source "sees" Magical Girls and B) too generic ("sexy" covers a helluva lot; in a system that didn't have factor A but had a similar idea of what constituted a theme you might get someone with a theme of a particular kind of sexiness but not just sexiness in general.) Cute monster girl is...um? Maybe? I'm not sure if I even understand what you mean by that but based on several guesses the answer ranges from "maybe" to "no" to "no for a completely different reason."

Also, as has been mentioned in-thread, while most of this kind of magic user are girls and practitioners in general are frequently just referred to as magical girls, Magical Boys do also exist.

[DanielH]

It sounded like activation was partially caused by emotions even if the subsequent magic was not. Did I just misread that?

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Activation is caused by desire, which is--not unemotional, but has to do with how much you want it and why, not any other emotional stuff. Someone who cries over pictures of puppies and swoons over ice cream but doesn't want things strongly is at a disadvantage to someone who mostly doesn't feel very strongly but has deep desires.

[Alicorn]

We were talking about whether Gem would need to actually concentrate on her purpose in order to get magicked and I reminded Maggie that she was a Bell. Who was mid-long-term-worldsaving project. And Maggie agreed that she probably didn't need to get herself any further worked up.

[Ezra]

Sometimes people color-code things for gender, such as baby clothes. In the culture many of us share, there's a common convention of pink for "girl" and associated concepts, and light blue for "boy" and associated concepts, with extensions of less reliable support like yellow for aggressively neutral.

Does Pletha's culture have any similarly widely recognized visual code for their genders? (Or do they depend exclusively on olfactory, or ?)

[MaggieoftheOwls]

"mi" are associated with bright colors, "an" with monochomes, and "ret" with dark nonblack colors.

[Ezra]

With no consistent difference in color association between, say, haran and desan? Or are some dark colors consistently more harret and others more desret, etc.?

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Burgundy is more desret and green is more harret, but I don't think there's a truly massive color differential.