Future_Producer@mail.com

At 15, I learnt the meaning of the word 'Frustration', as I felt helpless as a girl in a decidedly male-dominated system. Whenever I felt like an outcast I used to pull strength from the portrayals of a particular type of protagonist known as "magical girl". I wanted to be a magical girl. I even cut my hair like they do. Rather than feeling down for my divergences and for all the things I couldn't have in life, I used the image of the magical girl on my television to feel like I was powerful too. I cried on the street on my way back home. I cut my hair to look similar to a magical girl’s character. I badly wished to be like a protagonist in animation. I really wanted to become a magical girl who could eventually succeed and become the centre of her world. I was a complete outcast from my life. I wanted to become a class representative. I wanted to play soccer. I wanted to do whatever I want to. However, in my life, everything that I wanted couldn’t be mine. Whenever I felt miserable, I sat in front of the television.

On that 13-inch television, ‘magical girls’ were ordinary girls in Japanese fantasy and manga, who would transform and gain the power of magic.^[1] They would become brave, aggressively powerful, and beautiful. Every night, I prayed. “Please, let me become like her”. If everything had gone as I wished back then, I would have become a magical girl and lived happily ever after. But nothing magical ever happened to me. I wasn't a magical girl. And now that I am an adult, I realise that my saviours from television were not as perfect as I used to think. I used to feel frustrated when I realised I’m too ugly in comparison to those magical girls. I used to feel ashamed for not behaving like their almost angelic selves. I used to feel nothing but admiration towards my gods of girlhood, whereas now, I find it strange how different the girls in those animations are from ‘real’ girls. I’ve grown to feel suspicious of the image of their perfect bodies.

Seemingly, the magical girl genre aims to teach girl-power to the younger generation. As Jeon Hee Jin writes in the journal "Comparative study of magical girl characters of Korean and Japanese TV animations", society even appears to actively cheer on that well-animated ‘guide’ and encourage us to be more like the ideal women shown on our screens.^[2] With all the decorative frills, heart shapes and rainbow colours that made their way beyond animations, the magical girl story is so well integrated (especially) into the young generation that it almost appears inherent. But what if the society utilises the magical presences to instill in us “through a stylised repetition of acts” to support the misogynic system as Judith Butler put it in her 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”^[3]?

I would like to paint you a picture. One that depicts the magical girl genre as if it were a film set for an animation. There is a big podium in the centre of the space, lit up by bright stage lights and surrounded by an array of thrown around production equipment. Among them we find a bunch of intimidatingly large film cameras, focused on the one girl standing on the stage, closely observing her from all angles. She is in the very middle, taken in by these cameras with almost predatory intent. Behind the camera sits a man. He is the director. He has been the director for quite a while, too. Far from the stage, there are spectators with opera glasses, silently appreciating the girl, the magical girl performing the director’s act. She is observed by 3 perspectives, among which the view of the girl as the director and his camera capture her; the view of her through the eyes of the characters within the stage; and the view of her through the eyes of the male spectators; as Susanne D. Walters also writes in her book Material Girls (referring to Laura Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema".) She is completely observed by the male gaze.^[4]

On stage, twelve years old and fresh from elementary school, the girl pretends to fight her monstrous enemies. In order to overcome them and be truly powerful, she transforms into a magical girl. The cameras love her. They adore her. The director nods, a stoic smile around his lips. Once again, he tightens the camera and takes a shot targeting a quite specific selection of her body parts. The spectators silently watch.

And just behind the curtain, eagerly waiting for their turn, are more girls. Trainees hoping to take the stage themselves soon. They grew up watching from behind that curtain, watching and admiring, preparing for the day they are good enough to take over. It’s their dream to become a magical girl. And behind them are more girls, even younger ones. Every now and then, they know, a place will be made available. Not for all of them, not for most of them. For some, though. As long as the cameras are rolling on the magical girl, more magical girls will follow.

I would dare to unpack their too-good-to-be-true story with a more critical eye and allow ourselves to find the errors inside. And further, can we dare to challenge deconstructing the certainly existing dominant gaze structure in the genre to correct these errors?


In this thesis, I attempt to take on the roles of both the young girl who has ‘the magical girl’ as her idol (the trainee, if you will) as well as that of the ‘future director’ who quits the magical girl training system, and rather suggests another type of strong female protagonist’s story that young girls could look up to in popular media instead. “I take the camera and I say, hey, audience, I’m not just showing you this thing, I want you to really feel with me”.^[5] And you take on the role of a future producer who can offer me the chance to realise what place the ‘magical girl’ genre still holds in the future of female idols in popular media.


The way in which I wish to illustrate the issues surrounding the magical girl genre is as follows: I would like to undertake the fairly peculiar action of sending a series of emails to you, the potential ‘magical girl’ animation spectators (and perhaps even advocates or directors) of tomorrow. By sending the mails, I call for an interaction between the makers, the subjects and the viewers of this genre, in order to establish an understanding that works in all ways between them. I say hello to you. Hopefully, you reply, and if you do, I send out another email. Hopefully, you reply again. This attempt to have a conversation builds a bridge between you and me, and as such between the directors, the spectators, the castmates and the magical girl herself. A direct connection, a powerful engagement, one with an eye on the horizon. And I believe this (future) interaction, though on a larger scale, can bring a change to the story of magical girls. Open your mailbox. You will see a new mail is delivered from me.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Dear future production supporters,


Nice to meet you all. I’m very glad to be able to reach out to you, the future producers/funds/grants of this project. I’m Handi Kim who is a future director. There's a high possibility that I have never met you before in real life. Yes. We probably don’t know each other. So it is fair if you were to think “Why me?” But still, I would like to share a very personal story with you. Maybe afterwards, it’ll be clear why.
A piece of my life will be revealed to you, an audience unbeknownst to me, and I would like to ask you to appreciate this story in more universal terms, so that it will be applicable to any of you. By sending this mail, I hope and believe a direct bridge between you and me will be built, particularly if we don’t know one another. I dare you to engage with and dedicate a bit of your time and energy to the coming story. And then, maybe, I hope that our interaction allows us, the recipients (and maybe even appreciators) of the magical girl genre, to take action and steer the magical girl towards a brighter future.
This is the first time that I attempt to suggest my scenario to the public, let me introduce myself properly. As already mentioned above, my name is Handi Kim, the future director. I am from South Korea, currently living in the Netherlands. To be honest, I wouldn’t say anything is particularly special about me, except one thing, and it’s all to do with ‘magical girls’. You may have heard of them. I used to be a trainee to become a magical girl for almost 20 years. You can guess how much I was dedicated to it. Ultimately however, I dropped out, or rather, was kicked out.
For you, this all could sound a bit surreal. It may be quite bewildering as to why I, a person unbeknownst to you, sent this weirdly specific email out to people unbeknownst to me. Some of you may just simply move this mail to the bin. Some of you may giggle and say, “A trainee for being a magical girl? What is this person talking about?”, and some of you might be very interested and already have some questions.

I would like to share some images with those of you who are still with me. Look at these images. What do you see? What catches your eye? What do you think about the portrayal of the girls’ characters? How old do you think they are? In short, what impressions do they leave with you?

Magical girl is the sort of fantasy girl I wished I could have been like for 20 years and the ultimate goal for womanhood I was guided towards as a trainee. When you see these images of magical girls, do you feel maybe that there seems to be something to be concerned about?
By sending this mail, I would like to throw a metaphorical pebble at your windows and unpack the rather ugly truths behind a very beautiful story. A story which is told again and again through popular entertainment and therewith got ingrained in the minds of our youngest generations. I would like to tell a story created and sustained by advocates of a patriarchal society, and which has a very specific goal set in place for the women of the future. A goal which may not have their own best interests at heart, and which holds no consideration for who those women really are, but a goal which is nonetheless idealised and presented as an inherent conviction.  Hopefully, this mail makes you feel interested, and lets you decide to jump into more of the mails coming further. I really would love to share my concerns with you about these goals and the means put in place to have them be reached. Please do tell me what you think. I look forward to hearing from you all.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Hello all,


Thank you for your kind attention. I’m pleased that you guys are interested in my suggested discussion on the implications and significations of the ‘magical girl’ idolisation. It was good to take all of your small questions into account before sharing a more detailed story to follow up my introductory email. In a way, I should have of course expected that you would ask about what exactly a ‘magical girl’ is. I will attempt to give you that answer.


The concept of magical girls originated in Shojo culture(literally “little female” culture) in Japan.^[1] Shojo originally referred to girls around the ages of 12 and 13.^[2] The subculture has been widely imitated across various genres and media, among which manga(comics), drama, animation, film, and songs.^[3] The stories of the magical girls primarily focus on girls’ adolescent struggles, friendship and love, and/or their growth in overcoming failure. They are meant to speak to teenage girls and help them realise they themselves could also be the centre of their worlds, and even be important in the world at large.^[4] In the 60s and 70s, when Japanese animation was first shown in mainstream media, it mainly targeted boys. Most of the content in the media, as such, was focused on the ‘country of boys’, as Saito Minako writes in her book Koitenron.^[5]
It was quite obvious, therefore, that the arrival of Shojo culture, with its focus, for the first time, on girls and their perception of the world, was a huge success in the media market. It directly became a hit among girls who wished to build a place in the world that was, finally, about them. A little space for girls only, in that big country of men.  The very first magical girl anime appeared in 1996 with a show called Sally the Witch(魔法使いサリー). It follows Sally, princess of the magic world Astoria, and shows her episodic journey as she makes friends, uses magic, and tries to understand Earth.^[6]From that animation on, the concept of the magical girl was explored further and further until it became its own established genre. “In the worlds of manga and anime, shojo(girls) are everywhere” states Tufts University professor Susan Napier in “Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke”^[7]. The image of magic and power on screen then inevitably turned into an actual, real-life goal to be reached for the young girls who grew up watching shows like Sally the Witch. What these new special girl protagonists represented was an enrichment of female ambition and place in society. Girls could now not only dream of being little princesses waiting to be saved by some knight, but also to become powerful in and of themselves, by turning into a real-life magical girl. 


My daily life was filled with patriarchy and, as anything in society, was governed by heteronormativity (the idea that being heterosexual is the default mode of sexual orientation, asserted through the ever ruling gender binary).^[8] I was brought up to believe in common stupidities and gendered stereotypes, among which that “boys like trucks, girls like dolls; boys like blue, girls like pink; boys like sports, girls like makeup; boys are angry, girls are sad; boys are active heroes, girls are passive victims; boys are protagonists of stories, and girls are objects to be saved.”^[9] Like the start of every story, my motivation to become a magical girl was triggered by the (unspoken) rules of the society that I belonged to. 

I was born a girl, and my name is a girl’s name. Only girls have it. I was taught how to behave like a girl. I was dressed as a girl. The things I was expected to enjoy were girls’ things. I was made to do things in a girly manner. Growing up, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that I was, in fact, a girl. l wondered why I was treated so differently from my younger brother, my next-door male friend and my classmates. I wondered why my grandmother called me ‘one’ of 9 girls while my brother, who was the only boy, was just called by his name. I wondered why I had to quit Taekwondo and play the piano. They told me it was because it was better for a girl to play a piano, not to open her legs wide for kicking. I wondered why I needed to be scolded that I walked like a man and eventually I learnt how to walk in a pretty way. I wondered why I was refused to be a class representative, and needed to support the boy who was chosen instead. And, now you can imagine how much I was impressed by the girls who save the world with magic power. The saviours who came to tear the expectations in my girly life apart, my magical girls.^[10] After seeing the overwhelming presence of the magical girls who dared to become the protagonists of their own story, I started dreaming of becoming such a protagonist of mine, right where I belonged.

Thank you for reading another one of my emails. I hope it helps you to be more interested in my project. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.  Looking forward to receiving your comments.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Hello, all.


Some of you have expressed wonder about how the magical girl genre was initiated and how this affected girls to enter the training system in the first place. I want to share the answer to that question this time.


Media productions before the introduction of the magical girl genre were not particularly bothered with focusing on making money from female spectators. Dominantly, it was simply assumed that the main viewers were men.

Because of that, the majority of protagonists in mainstream media were male. “Even with a female hero, action movies are still male gaze. They are usually - if not always - either written, directed or produced by cis men, so we’re still talking about male projection and fantasy.”^[1] As such, popular entertainment used to be an exclusive party: the male production, the male consumer. But more profits could be made. The cis-male dominated entertainment industry soon figured out that they could profit from younger spectators in particular. Suzanna D. Walters refers to Elizabeth G. Traube’s text Dreaming Identities, who writes: “Youngsters use media to gain insight into roles they will fill in later life. Youngsters model behavior they see in the media.”^[2] Within the entertainment business, people realised they could educate (and manipulate) the youth into adopting certain viewpoints using the medium of animation. As such, they started producing animations with female protagonists that had a very special storyline in which an ordinary (nothing-special) girl turns into a magical presence who can use a mysterious power to save the world.^[3] That format, the now well-established ‘magical girl’ trope, was a goldmine for the entertainment industry from then on. The number of female viewers increased immensely as a result of the emergence of this new genre.


In “The Paradoxical " Magical Girl " Female Empowerment in Magical Girl Anime”, Nicole Chan states that “Anime is a substantial form of mass media that can legitimately provide some insight into the expectations on women in Japanese society especially because of the increasing number of female readers and writers/artists.”^[4] Production companies made huge profits because of girls’ investment in the magical girl, and at the same time educated girls by moulding them, perhaps subconsciously, according to society's seemingly unchangeable rules. Anime’s so apparently empowered girl heroes underhandedly teach girls to pursue romance, fashion and consumption until they are married and meant to stay at home and be a good wife and mother.^[5]

With the emergence of this passively independent and empowering female protagonist, many girls took the magical girls as their role models. This led to girls en masse deciding to enter the magical girl training system themselves, like I have.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Hello all,


Some of you have expressed curiosity about what the training system tries to teach the trainees. Let me answer that question. I would like to bring up my own story about when I got accepted to be a trainee first.


Everyday was a battlefield honestly. To become a magical girl, there were so many tests in which I needed to prove myself and convince the trainers and producers of my worth. At least it was not a kicking-out system (Well, Good luck to me!). Rather, it went on-and-on-and-on. When I managed to pass a test, I would qualify, and thus be sent on towards the next round. When I did not, I just kept on doing the test again and again and again and again and again and again until I succeeded. The trainees were put on a pyramid-shaped platform, and needed to play this endless game until they were selected. Until they were good enough. I clearly remember what we learned in the training system on the very first day: simply to know where a magical girl should stand in society. I thought the answer would be clear. Isn’t inspiring the younger generation the ultimate reason why magical girls exist at all? Surely, the magical girls were meant to protect young girls’ ambitions to become more and better. Inspired by those magical presences, young girls are assured that they, too, can be the centre of the world. But, Kumiko Saito, referring to Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase, points out that what a magical girl truly aims to protect is a young girl’s mental state to take leave of reality and to become something other than what they are.^[1] Seemingly, it sounds perfect for trainees to have ambition. But what I didn’t catch at that time was the hidden layer behind the magical story, and what it meant to me as a real person. Have we ever thought about why only a group of young females got chances to become magical girls? We never saw an old magical woman as a protagonist. Is it simply because the younger generation would be the society of tomorrow? No. What truly was enforced through magical girls was, as Kumiko Saito writes, “the destined path to female adulthood to the young generation”^[2]: women as mothers, women as sacrificers, women as wives, women as secretaries, women doing household chores, women cooking dinner, women waiting for and on someone else.^[3] In order to have girls get used to walking that path, the patriarchal system utilises protagonism, even in the shape of magical girls, as “propaganda that protects and perpetuates privilege as is”.^[4] To give an example, there is a legendary magical girl whose name is Doremi, the main character in the animation Ojamajo Doremi(おジャ魔女どれみ). There was no team of super-women saving the world from evil, no monster-of-the-week formula, and no overarching theme of fighting for justice.^[5] Instead, Doremi’s main job was to take care of a baby who came from another world. She decided to become a ‘mother’ to her. At just 10 years old.

She learned how to take care of the baby, and at last became a master of babysitting. This was the most essential character growth for the elementary school girl in this popular children’s animation. She wasn’t truly larger-than-life at all, but was designed specifically to idealise motherhood to young girls.


Simply put, the idealised magical girl protagonist became a new way of packaging existing social norms. Young girls, as a result of what they were shown on their television screens, entirely came to remodel themselves to fit into its undermining mould. As Saito mentioned before, after all, “the seemingly empowered girl heroes in anime covertly teach girls to pursue fashion, romance, and consumption until marriage and, once married, to stay at home as a good wife and mother.” ^[6] Girls following this newly presented yet long established norm put themselves in a position of autonomous vulnerability, and deliberately feel encouraged to perform their assigned gender role, as women completely controlled by patriarchal society, not unlike before.


At the end of the first day, my girl friends and I practiced the first spell that we learned. We imagined that we became mothers who used magic. We would wear cute dresses and hold broom sticks, and shouted “Pirika pirilala poporina peperufu!”, upon which the broomstick started sweeping the floor. We practiced again and again and again, until the room became shiny pink.

Now I wonder what the real lesson was. Did this encourage me to learn magic in order to be powerful? No. It taught me to behave according to the stupid assigned role dictated by patriarchal society. By continuously doing this, young girls’ true ambition to be the centre of their world is diluted to becoming merely the centre of domesticity.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Hello all,


You may be curious about who among (and according to which criteria) the trainees would be selected as magical girls. Of course, any girl can enter the training system. That doesn’t mean anybody can become a magical girl. Absolutely, there was the preferred agency of the magical girl. I would like to now share my own story of another lesson that the training system has been trying to teach me and my fellow trainees.

One day, to welcome new magical girl trainees, two legendary magical girls alumni visited the training system. I and other trainees stood looking at them with intense admiration. We whispered to each other, “Oh my god. They are my role models.”

One of the girls had huge eyes almost covering half of her face, and had a small and sharp nose and beautifully round, full and glossy lips. Her cheeks had a flushed cherry pink colour, and her hair was bright blonde. She definitely looked very young, quite short, and had elegantly long arms and legs. She was obviously cute. The other girl seemed much more mature. Although she wore a school uniform, her facial expression made her seem highly seductive. She also had immensely large eyes, but her lips were sharp and red. She wore a swim-suit-like dress so it was very obvious to show her large breasts and thin waist. Her mini skirt flattered her long and thin legs, and she wore a pair of high heels on. She was gorgeous.


To my surprise, they were both 14 years old.
Two seniors told us that the magical girls’ identity was liminal between child and adult.^[1] The young-looking alumnus told us that her first generation of magical girls’ purpose simply was to be cute. She said her generation made girls believe that “the magical girl’s true goal becomes the eternal deferral of growth, and their task, to be just cute and young” (as Kumiko Saito also states in her “Magic, Shoji and Metamorphosis”).^[2] The idealised image of this first generation was to never grow old or die, an ideal found everywhere in the world. The more mature-looking alumnus told us that the girls in her second generation were dedicated to saving their worlds, to fight against enemies and to keep the peace in their world. However, unlike boy protagonists who are inherently powerful, girl protagonists needed to be dependent on an external influence of ‘mystical’ energy to become strong. For example, magical girls would gain superpowers in their metamorphosis becoming sexualised woman figures. (As Kumiko Saito mentions in her writing, the brand of sexy battle heroes, which is the favoured image of the second generation, would be a sheer paradox of claiming power in powerlessness.^[3])


When I was taught by those admirable girls, the first impression I got was neither excitement, nor astonishment. I felt melancholic. And then I felt perplexed. Eventually, what magical girls gave young girls in real life was only one idea of becoming a cute and/or sexy protagonist, often aided by, and dependent on, indescribable power. But, then, are they really encouraged to dream of becoming an empowering presence, or is it something else that makers of the magical girl genre are after?


When I looked at those two idols again, they didn’t look different anymore. They were the same.
Exactly the same.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Dear all,


This time, I would like to share what sort of jobs the magical girls who got selected among all the trainees actually perform. And I would like to depict the power relation between the magical girl production and magical girl herself through one story that I experienced.

One day, I visited the film set where all the productions of the magical girl happen, as a small field trip with other trainees. The day was dedicated to a ‘transformation’ scene, obviously one of the most representative shots of the magical girl genre. People were very busy. So many cameramen were setting up the equipment, and a director was sitting on his chair and was discussing with others. We were to stand behind the stage. All the spotlights on the stage were turned on. In their midst stood a magical girl. Cameramen focused their cameras on her, centering her in the frame. It was difficult to see the producers’ faces. I could only recognise they were intensely capturing her. Far from the stage, spectators sitting on comfortable chairs viewed her through a large screen in front of them, directly connected to the cameras. They shared their view of the girl with the cameramen creating it. It was hard making out their faces as well. Even though the male gaze-led spectatorship prevailed on set, the magical girl was still retaining an aura of shining braveness. “I’m here to save the world!”. The 14 years protagonist shouted in her very sharp but young voice. The cameras couldn’t avoid taking and capturing the young female’s extraordinary assertiveness. It radiated from her, and shone at least as bright as those spotlights did. The spectators and cameramen watched her passively, not thinking much of it. However, the girl’s active energy was forced to be cut by the next scene of ‘transformation’. For 30 seconds, “the camera caressingly sweeps over her behind twice, while her clothing dissolves, piece by piece, until she floats naked in the dark, hugging her magic device to her chest in a cringeworthy close-up. As her body magically matures to adult form and becomes enveloped in a ‘barrier jacket’ her breasts are featured in two more close-ups.”^[1]

Cutting the linear narrative, a “timeless void” was created. In this void, the assertive, active girl didn’t exist anymore. As Mulvey described, she became isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised.^[2] It was the spectators’ favourite part. In contrast to the girl who was there before, the position of cameramen and spectators in the void changed completely. They were now an active presence and got the chance to control time and narrative. By displaying a magical girl as an eroticised and/or fetishised object specifically for a male gaze, men would be defined as masterful puppeteers as well as passive and consuming viewers, as Jasmin Boehm also argued, referring to Anne Allision’s statement in her book Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mother, Comics, and Censorship in Japan.^[3] This void willingly cut away the young girl’s self-reliance, and gave an excuse to let girls be defeated by male gaze, and let male spectators and filmmakers unlimitedly project their desire onto the female form. This ‘transformation’ scene is the so-called ‘Service Scene’, defined as those “shots and scenes in manga and anime that are presented to please the viewer’s (often sexual) interest”.^[4] After that most uncomfortable transformation scene passed, the cute magical fighter, armoured in a swimsuit-like dress stood on the stage. She held a pretty, magic stick and shouted “I’m ready to fight!”. For all intents and purposes, she was not a helplessly pleasurable, erotic product any longer. She regained her assertive energy, hadn’t she? But what happened in the void tainted that energy. That indulgence lingered.

Behind the stage, us girls were dreaming and waiting for our turn to take to that stage with the powerful wish of endlessly transforming into beautiful, desirable objects.
When the filming was done, people were applauding the magical girl. She was still in the spotlights, cheered on by everybody on set. Her illuminated body almost gave the appearance of shining light of its own, but I saw the lamps. The crew had focused those on her, and that’s all it was now. The assertiveness, her agency, which had burned so brightly before had now burnt out in the light of those spotlights. I stopped clapping. At that moment I had figured out what it truly was I sensed on that day I felt perplexed. It was all a disappointment. This was not the magical girl I longed to become.


All the lights turned off. I couldn’t see the girl anymore. The spotlight only lingered in the eyes that had watched her.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Dear all,


I would like to ask if you’ve ever seen any girl around you who does nothing but smile shyly and look up to admire you. Or a girl who struggles with anger, jealousness, sadness and frustration, but never shows it in front of you out of respect. Or a girl who is so overly optimistic that she truly only ever thinks about the bright side of the world: a girl who does not acknowledge the existence of pain, sorrow or ugliness, and whose world doesn’t either. Have you ever seen a girl who cries for her enemy? Or a girl whose nurturing of and friendship with a little broken-legged bird consumes her whole being? Or a girl who does nothing but visit to check if you feel better and cooks for you and cleans the room for you when you are ill? A girl who only ever cries out for peace? Have you?


Unfortunately, I haven’t got any chances to meet girls like that in real life. Girls in media, as Emily Jane Wakeling also discussed in her “Girls are Dancin’”, seem to be quite far detached from what we generally recognise as reality. Magical girls are willingly, purposefully, unashamedly, being objectified to catch the spectator’s eyes.^[1] And, as Kumiko Saito stated in her “Magic, Shoji and Metamorphosis”, they are produced and consumed within an imagined autonomous world of representations. That makes flat cuties in visual text produce a system of desire independent of the desire for women in three-dimensional reality. It is never responsive to the real world.^[2] In order to be a magical girl, I need to get rid of my diverse expression. I am not allowed to feel disgusted by orders. I am not allowed to feel jealous of others’ achievements. I am not allowed to feel bored by my partner’s stupid jokes. I am not allowed to show my pain, it’s not professional! I am not allowed to express my discomfort. I need to cut my anger. I need to smile and speak kindly and elegantly. I need to say “I don’t know” in a very cute voice. I’m not allowed to show my intelligence. As such, a girl’s authentic body undergoes fragmentation.^[3] Her body is scattered into pieces to be “perfected” until she totally loses her own agency.
And one day in the training camp, I asked myself: “am I going to willingly let my body be scattered and consumed by spectators? Am I going to be a perfect product?”^[4] I answered myself.

I am not. That is not what I so desperately wanted to become for 20 years AT ALL.


Thank you for reading my mail once again. Before sending it out, I would like to show a message that Miyajaki Hayao, a Japanese animation director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli,^[5] received from a girl.

“I am a big fan of yours. [...] But there is one thing I was wondering about. Your girl characters aren’t real at all and seem strange to me and my friends of the same age. I can’t believe that those kinds of girls really exist.”^[6]


All the best,
Handi Kim

Hi all,

Now, some of you might wonder about girls who refuse to be fragmented, and who protect their autonomous agency. And so I will tell you what happened when I decided to quit my traineeship.

One day in July 2018, I saw a gorgeous red protest on the street, fighting against the objectification of women’s bodies. The protesters were wearing bright red clothing. Hand in hand, they were shouting. “My daily life is not your porn”. Since 2015, a conservative wave has hit the South Korean society. About this political phenomenon, Heejung Sohn writes that the patriarchal societal rules oppress both genders more heavily than before. Referring to Gayle Rubin’s book Deviations ^[1], she writes that sex is a vector of oppression, and points out that this norm even gave permission to citizens to sensor and attack others who dare to deviate from the assigned system.^[2] With the uncovering of sexual oppression as a massive issue in South Korean society, many sexual crimes came to light, and were finally openly discussed. One of most prominent was the Molka (Hidden cam, 몰카) crime, in which women were secretly recorded in public spaces like bathrooms and hotels. The videos that were taken of these women appeared in heaps online. Through crimes like these, people finally acknowledged how carelessly the female body is objectified not only in the media, but also in reality. Tens of thousands of women finally went out to address this problem in the 2018 red protests. They were not silent. They didn’t obediently smile and brush off the upholsteries against them in the male dominant society. They took to the streets to protest against these practices and demanded action.^[3] All the social norms which were imposed so heavily upon us were addressed and even broken where they stood. Their shouting became a song. They started singing together in nostalgic melodies. The red parade was moving forward. Wherever they decided to head became the path which they could and would follow. In their tracks I could see red sentences on the stone. The streets echoed “My daily life is not owned by yours.” The protesters were wearing beautiful armour. They held magic sticks up high and moved forward to “save the world!”. The real Magical girls! A little girl came to me from the crowd. She looked up at me shyly, smiled brightly and handed me a red picket. I grabbed it and held her little magical hand and we started walking. And we sang together. On that day, the media explained this march as “crossing the border of mockery.”^[4] As Duna also highlights in Girls: K-pop screen square (소녀들: K-pop 스크린 광장 ), it can bring up serious controversy in patriarchal society when the minority speaks out against the norm. It is regarded as unacceptable and untolerable. Especially when it comes to the objectified speaking out against the existing system, the majority inflicts the most severe and cruel measures onto them. The protesters were portrayed as ‘monstrous’, even.^[5] Ugly, uncontrollable, dirty, creepy and unwanted! And the, in my opinion truly magical, girls who fought against their misrepresentation, objectification and who dared to seek their true selves, were totally vilified and seen as unsuitable to be ‘magical girls’ by mainstream media.

Somebody told me before I left the training camp that if I endure a little more, I might be able to become the person I longed to be my entire life. Maybe, yes. Maybe if I endure a 30-second service scene, maybe if I wear lingerie-like clothing and act in front of a camera that bluntly captures my ‘female’ parts for the sake of convincing adult male viewers to watch me, maybe then I may finally become the magical girl I dreamed of becoming and who motivates a future generation of young, impressionable girls. But what I so badly wished to become was not a perfectly reproduced statue of traditional, patriarchal values. I wished I could be subjective. I wished I could pioneer my life. I wished I could be autonomous. I wished I could be myself! And that red parade clearly showed me who the magical girls truly are. In the BITCH Manifesto, Joreen writes that women [bitches] are subjects, not objects.” She points that women seek their identity strictly through themselves and what they do. And women prefer to plan their own lives rather than live from day to day, action to action, or person to person.^[6]


And, yes. Magical girls, inspirations in so many ways for women-to-be, should be subjects, not objects.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Dear all,


Thank you for your kind attention.
I was delighted to have you all hearing me out, sitting through my emails and supporting my words. So finally, this time, I would like to explain why I sent them to you at all, and to suggest you read my very own first piece of magic.

My dream of becoming a magical girl was destroyed when I was in the magical girl training system. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t what I think it should be. Through these emails I have attempted to show you what I truly longed for all those 20 years: to become a magical girl who still would be me! I didn’t long to become a girl who allows you to objectify her in order to have agency at all. I didn’t long to become a girl who doesn’t govern her own story. Who is passive. Who doesn’t express confidently who she is. I wanted to become a woman who holds the reins of her own life. Someone who gets to decide who and what they are for themselves. Who isn’t sculpted by others, but who does it herself. That is true magic. I found the true magical girls neither in the training system, nor on the stage on the film set. I witnessed the authentic meaning of magic in the protest! There, I saw girls who paved the way for themselves. Who expressed who they are in their unignorable ensemble. Who invited others to join their beautiful march into the future. Their rearrangement of existing social norms let people see the ‘magic’ I wish to see within the magical girl genre as well.


I still believe the positive energy with which magical girls can affect society. I strongly believe that the younger generations (among which adults) can flourish as inspired by the magical girl. To realise the potential of the genuine magical girl, I would dare to take action from now on: Rearrange. I am no longer a magical girl. I am no longer a trainee to become part of that beautifully presented but still ultimately unchanged, obedient species. I say goodbye to the camera that has been set in front of me for 25 years. I no longer take part in this game wherein I once believed. I come down from the stage. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to get used to the dark. It is too strong and too bright to stand on stage. I think about my life... and my story… and about the magical girl I am or was supposed to be... Now, I clearly see what’s around. I see the triangular set of positions: Magical girl, director, and viewer.^[1]
I say hello to the camera that has been aimed at this stage for ages. I take up my place behind it. I become a future director. A girl who will become part of the future of the magical girl genre comes in and stands in front of my camera. A future magical girl’s camera. She takes place in the solid rectangular frame. There is some distance between me and her. Is she nervous? Or is she happy to be on stage? I cannot see. It’s too far. I want to say hello to her. It’s too far. The future viewers sit far away from me to spectate the girl through the screen. It’s too far to see their faces. Do we really need this distance from each other? How can we share our feelings when we cannot interact? I want us to look at each other and connect. Like how Jill Soloway brings up “the subjective camera” in her TIFF talk, through which she suggests destroying the triangle of divided, sectional gazes in favour of a circular room in which “we see and feel one another all at once.”^[2]


Let’s try. I stand up. I start to dissemble the equipment. It takes quite a bit of time to take the structure down. But it has always required a bit of patience to challenge a system which has existed for such a long time. I take the tripod off, take the camera, and walk towards the stage. I come close to the young girl. I stand next to her. The camera is beside us. I see the girl. She also sees me. I ask the viewers to come close to us. “Come. You all as well!”, the viewers are no longer a third, distant party. We gather. I now see you. You also see me. You see her. She sees you. We see them. They see us. When I hear voices of greetings to each other, the triangular system of the set starts to change. The pointy set starts losing its edges and mingles and transforms into a flexible shape.


Now we all see the true magical girls.


All the best,
Handi Kim

Dear all,


Thank you for reading all my extensive mails. Thank you for allowing me to introduce you to the world of magical girls, for discussing them with me, and for thinking about the future. I hope my pebbles have reached your metaphorical window. Maybe those windows are now open. I hope these little writings give you an incentive to unveil what lies beyond the spectacular story projected behind you and that you will see what is real.


When I was 15 years old, I felt frustrated for the first time. I remember adults telling me “No, you are a girl!”, although I can’t quite remember what I wasn’t supposed to be doing. In this biased society with all its readily established rules and values, I could only take on the position of a girl who follows those rules well. If I had a script to my life, my part would be written as such: A good girl (to be). I never wondered what made me sincerely want to become a magical girl in the first place. What made me want to follow the path which the former generations of magical girls and their -as it turns out- normative creators had laid out for me. I modified myself to an instituted hologram: being a flat, cute, sexually innocent, and nostalgic representation of the ideal woman. I completely renounced the parts of me which constituted the essence of me and instead fragmented myself into pieces. When I -without realising it- was completely lost, I saw that red flame in the streets. There were the magical girls who danced and shouted, demanding their freedom. The red flame grew bigger and bigger, and it became an ever-expanding fire. When that little girl held my hand, I found all of my fragments. Those who ultimately saved me from the hierarchical drain turned out to be the magical girls after all, just not the ones I imagined.


I was a trainee to become a magical girl. I was standing behind the stage curtains and waited for my turn. What was I longing for my entire life? Autonomy! To be a girl who owns her own story! To grow up a woman who can control her own path and who motivates young girls to do the same. After figuring out my true goal, I decided to rearrange the whole environment. I took off my transformative armour. I came down from the stage. And I turned off the camera, reserved for me, which had been rolling for almost 20 years. Instead of sitting in a director’s chair, I took the gears and reset the stage. I put the director’s chair away. I put all the spectators’ chairs away. On this stage there is now room for people with all kinds of different gazes. I turned on the camera. And gave the cue sign.


I’m looking forward to seeing you standing next to me. Say hello to me in real life. I’ll say hello to you. Maybe we can hold hands. Then, true magic may happen here.




All the best,
Handi Kim.