A lot of magical girl fans have been fans since they were children. (For those of us in the west, Sailor Moon was probably the biggest gateway drug.) For many people, loving them as an adult is a form of nostalgia and embracing the things you enjoyed as a kid.

That’s not actually quite the case for me.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I definitely watched Sailor Moon as a kid. But I would be lying if I said that I was a big fan of it or anything. You see, I had a weird problem with being a girl. Being a girl meant I didn’t get cool clothes and cool toys like the boys did. I spent a great deal of my childhood wishing I was a boy because I was more into boy things than girl things. I felt like I didn’t relate to other girls, and, as far as I was concerned, Sailor Moon was yet another “girl thing” that I didn’t get.

Yes, that’s right. I was that kid who shunned pink and dresses and glitter. Shocking considering the subject matter of this blog, I know.

So I watched a lot of Dragon Ball Z (and other anime, but Dragon Ball Z is the important one for this story.) Dragon Ball Z didn’t have frilly dresses in it, so obviously, it was Cooler than Sailor Moon, which was what my sisters preferred to watch. See, badass girls, in my experience, were the ones who looked and acted like boys. So you could just, you know, cut out the middleman and watch stuff with boys in it.

I didn’t get into mahou shoujo until I was an adult. I didn’t get over my weird gender issues until then, either, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

The first real magical girl show I watched– really watched– was Fresh Pretty Cure. I really didn’t know a lot about it going in. I knew, vaguely, that it was a magical girl show. I knew, vaguely, that Pretty Cure (or Precure? At the time, I didn’t know if there was a difference or not) was a show about cute girls. To be quite honest, it didn’t really seem like my type of thing, but it came highly recommended by a few people whose opinion I trusted (my girlfriend, in particular), and so I sat down to watch it.

I can’t quite remember when I was hooked. I think I may have been sold on it even before the Cure Passion reveal. I do know that I wasn’t even finished with the show before I was looking up the soundtrack on Spotify so I could listen to it on bad days. I also know that after I finished watching it and started watching other shows that were not Precure, I was oddly… depressed. Even shows that were good, or took clear inspiration from the genre– or both!– seemed to be missing… something.

Well, there was only one thing for it. I threw myself back into mahou shoujo. I watched Sailor Moon, and Madoka Magica, and then I started watching Pretty Cure from the very beginning, and somewhere in there I had an epiphany.

This whole time I had been bombarded with media where femininity was seen as something that was weak, or performed only to gain the attention of men. Strong Girls or “Badass” Girls usually had to give up some, if not all, of their feminine traits to become Strong or Badass. They had muscles and huge armor and stereotypically masculine traits. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things, mind you.

But magical girls are different. Magical girls are badass because of their femininity. Magical girls weaponize the very things that society says are weak; the things I didn’t like as a child because society said they weren’t “cool” enough. Magical girls said no, actually,hearts and sparkles and pink and fluffy dresses might be the only things on earth that can defeat the bad guys, and they made it cool. Girls, it would seem, don’t have to be like boys to be badass after all. Girls can kick someone in the face and go off to dance practice or a tea ceremony or whatever. (And yes, there is face kicking. The director for Futari wa Pretty Cure was also the director for Dragon Ball Z. Told you we’d get back to that.)

Magical girls, then, are truly something special to me. They showed me that not only is it okay to be a girl, but that it’s something powerful in and of itself. I can’t help but think that if I’d had them (or allowed myself to have them) at a younger age, that I would have figured things out sooner. But hey, better late than never.

And so: this blog. At the risk of sounding dramatic, magical girls arrived in my life right when I needed them: I was confused about certain aspects of my identity, and a prior fandom that I was a major part of had just decided to shun me for reasons that I still don’t quite understand. But here is something good and joyous and relentlessly optimistic (well. Okay we’ll talk about Madoka at some point; I have #opinions) . And we all know I like yelling about things I love, so. Let the yelling commence.