Keywords Used
| Magical Girl | Gender roles |
| Mahou Shoujo | Feminism |
| Genre | Deconstruction |
| “Sailor Moon” | “Madoka Magica” |
| Analysis | History |
| Anime | Societal Expectations |
| Identity | Commentary |
Primary Catalog & Database Systems Searched
- Langara Library Discovery Search (Primo/OPAC): Used for locating physical monographs and ebooks.
- EBSCOhost (Academic Search Complete / Film & Television Literature Index): Used for finding peer-reviewed journal articles on Japanese pop culture.
- JSTOR: Used for foundational gender studies and Asian studies papers.
- Youtube: Used to find easily digestible discussions as well as podcasts that discuss the series’ themselves.
Search Strings & Results
Jump to category:
First (Preliminary) Search
My first search string was on Magical Girls and gender roles, where I put in queries using these keywords:
| “Magical Girl” | feminism |
| “Mahou Shoujo” | “gender roles” |
The search string ended up being: (“Magical Girl” OR “Mahou Shoujo”) AND (“gender roles” OR “feminism”) as a keyword search on JSTOR.
Result: Yielded 42 peer-reviewed articles in JSTOR; filtered by discipline (Film Studies, Asian Studies).
Second Query
Wanting to shift onto more specific topics such as subverting or changing the tropes of the genre in order to truly understand it, I used the series example that is known as the most popular version of trope subversion when it comes to Magical Girls.
The search string then became: “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” AND (deconstruction OR horror OR tragedy) where I focused on EBSCO (through the Langara Library’s Online Database).
Result: I retrieved 15 relevant articles that were all analyzing dark genre shifts.
Adjustments
Using these parameters, I searched through multiple websites and the Google browser itself to find more resources that were the most relative. This includes scavenging Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Goodreads.
End results & FInal Inquiries
Because this search string/learning guide came to about because of an academic journal I had previously read, it was easier to find jumping points from. Based off the themes prevelant in the article “Magic, Shojo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society” (Saito, Kumiko. University of Hawaii Press, 2014) I took what I identified as keywords and ideas of the piece to help develop my guide.
This led to searches including topics such as feminism, gender roles, genre shifts, fantasy, and societal expectations.
Of course, I also wanted to include history and introspective onto the genre itself, to which I searched things into Youtube such as “Analysis of Magical Girl Genre” or “History of Magical Girl Anime”.