umahousume

umamusume: pretty derby is a nerd game for huge nerds. this is known. Among its nerdery is a remarkable sensitivity to magical girl history. There's two horsegirls who have magical girl motifs as a major part of their character: Kawakami Princess and Sweep Tosho (Special Week gets a mahou henshin sequence as part of her unique skill but there's no real follow-up for it).

Kawakami Princess is a fan of Princess Fighter, a magical girl franchise that's very much riffing on Precure. There's monster fights, lots of punching, multiple seasons, they recreate the pose from Futari wa Precure, it's not exactly subtle. She's got a fun dynamic with Biko Pegasus, the tokusatsu enthusiast whose favorite show became real. But the term "magical girl" is conspicuously absent from her various monologues; she prefers the term "princess," which links directly back to PriFai and, of course, her own name.

Sweep Tosho calls herself "Magical Girl Sweepy" (mahou shoujo), but also claims to be a witch (mahou) like her grandmother. Her aesthetic is farther from modern magical girls compared to Kawakami, but it does cohere pretty well with the first magical girls, the "little witch" era. For a while I assumed that the designers had started from "Sweep->broom->witch" and used that as the seed for her presentation in Umamusume, but as I dug a little deeper, I found out that there were other "witches" in the real horse's pedigree: Samantha Tosho and Tabatha Tosho, apparently named after characters from American sitcom Bewitched... which was also a major inspiration for those same "little witch" magical girls!

"Bewitched is an honorary magical girl series" would be an appropriate joke to make here but I think it's also just true?? the whole title of Bewitched Agnes depends on this being a recognized consensus??? and now I guess the web of associations that led to Magical Girl Sweepy demonstrates that too.

her song is pretty great btw