Some thoughts on Magical Girls in Masks and the Legacy
Yesterday I was thinking about Magical Girls and how they fit quite well into Masks. Multiple Playbooks can fit (even the Doomed when you go with a Madoka route…) and then thought about the Magical Girl show I saw the most of.
Wedding Peach.
(ye old Magical Girl show but a lot about love and relationship dramas. Importantly the characters transformed into wedding dresses before putting on their magical girl fighting costumes)
I thought of how a newly chosen of that “type” of power might find it offensive. It can be seen as giving a bad rolemodel to women when they are told “you have to get married super fast and that will be the best and then you will be ultra happy”. That doesn’t mix well with emancipation and strong, independent women.
So of course I thought this would be a Legacy character that is the newest bearer of that power with former angels of love still in the city.
That isn’t really how that works in Magical Girls though. There usually is not an old mentor type figure, maximum there is a magical guide animal that tells them everything and then they are on there own. Sometimes there is an old queen type character but they are not around, more of a mystical figure. (that is just from what I know from limited experience with the genre)
So does the Legacy really fit here? The Legacy works great when you are Kid Flash with a second Flash around and also old Jay Garrick but does it work for the chosen one of a mystical power? For the reborn hero?
In a sense a character like that is way closer to the Bearer by Sean Dunstan.
Who do you play when you want to encompass the role that has been given to you but have internal problems with the values that are associated with it? It feels like the Legacy but does that work or are there weird things that can happen there?
First: thanks for pointing out that I have another system for Magical Girls drama. You could actually do a Super Robot Wars style crossover, if you wanted to have that Madoka-esque Doomed in the same party as an over-the-top force of Nova destruction like Nanoha. Hmm…
Anyway, OT: haven’t seen any Wedding Peach, but in the general case… maybe that’s more like the Protege? Not that The Legacy can’t have problems with their… well, legacy, but they’re actively punished for going against the associated ideals by those -X Forwards from their end of session questions. The Protege, meanwhile, has balancing their mentor’s ideals against their own as a big part of their shtick. They even get rewarded for going their own way with Venting Frustration.
Being a rebellious youth who wants to find their own identity instead of going with what the past generations have passed down could naturally be done with a lot of playbooks, though.
My friend used to be a translator and he worked a lot on Wedding Peach. Not knowing the language myself my understanding is kind of garbled, but it might be worth noting that cultural assumptions around representations of weddings, brides, and bridal wear are very different in Japan than they are in the West. Also, I would agree that The Bearer is closest to what you want, at least for the signature character.
Mmm… I have yet to really read through Masks properly, so this
may beis a tangent. But in my experience, cultural assumptions about weddings, brides, and bridal wear are similar here to what they are in Western countries.More on topic though, I’d love to see a Sailor Moon or PreCure inspired set of Mask playbooks.
I think it’s the Janus. A lot of anime focuses on the bifurcated life in exchange for the power to protect.
I think Adam Goldberg’s idea is spot-on. The Legacy could work as well, with a slightly rejiggered conception of that magical girl–and heck, there’s a bunch of takes on the magical girl schtick.
The Janus is really interesting here when the things your mask stands for is something you don’t really feel comfortable with all the time, or gets assigned things you don’t want.