Side Business Magical Girl - Oneshot

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This is a straight-up masterpiece. 10/10. Masterful deconstruction of the mahou shoujo genre.
 
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Magical workers of the world unite! THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!!

Although seriously it seems like rather then gig economy it'd have made way more sense there for the fairy kingdom to just flat out hire her full time, and/or negotiate with the regular government. The MG series Asuka and kind of Nanoha are the only ones that come to mind which got this right. If there really was some sort of dark evil invasion that threatened the world, of course any real government would want to support efforts to fight it. Assuming conventional weapons are either fully ineffective or just can't handle everything, they'd in turn be very interested in supporting any of the limited numbers of magical super soldiers they could manage and offer them significant support and benefits to stay on side. I guess in some cases it's understandable that certain people would want to try to hang onto their regular lives if it was possible, particularly as kids. And the temptation of magic power could make governments and militaries really nasty too.

Also I wonder if the ability to go truly undetected is in retrospect going to look like a temporary historical artifact of the 80s/90s/00s. Something fun and cute, but increasingly hard to accept in a modern setting. Even with recognition inhibition magic, these days the kinds of tracking and surveillance assets nation-states have available are increasingly extensive. Just ducking into an alley is probably already useless once government is actually looking.

Edit: unless of course government itself helps, and that might be a big benefit they offer, a magical girl version of witness protection programs or what they do for covert assets. Of course, certain powers, like any strongish version of time/space stuff, could make it still possible. But those tend to be very rare not ubiquitous.
 
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I was disappointed they didn't cover/deal with the issue of breaks.
 
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If there is any dignity in the Manga industry, this will get published ASAP.
 
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Apr 26, 2018
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I would love to see this getting serialized but the story looks like it's supposed to be a short one.
 
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Jul 25, 2019
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I loved this! Never thought about it that way. Loved the fresh take.
 
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this was interesting, particularly for slapping me in the face with the very obvious observation that magical girls stuff has bad labor practices. it's not something i would think of without applying the kind of money-logic isogai displays here. the manga itself is brief and not very deep, but i think it provides enough commentary regarding the issue to start a conversation with.

just sharing. this manga is adjacent to what i call 'retro-progressivism' which describes fiction that examines an outdated system and develops it into something more familiar.

also, i could be misreading it but i don't particularly enjoy that one panel implying that people like isogai are unfair for making money the way they do. respect to people who respect work. want to talk about exploiting the system, there are other people to eye at.
 
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Magical Girl "Clean"! She will shine the light of fair worker compensation and labor rights onto the evil practice of wage theft and unjust labor practice! She will clean your low working conditions to an acceptable standard!
 
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Apr 29, 2019
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This is so real, i feel embarassed to be a night guard with barely no responsabilities.

I go to work, game, read manga and eat to my heart content all night long.
 
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Dec 31, 2019
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Hoping for a serialization, given the "To Be Continued..." teaser message at the end of this one-shot.

Imagine her fighting the monster of the week (MotW) and explaining the necessity of setting up life insurance for the monster's next-of-kin,
given the terrible turnover rate and reduced life expectancy in their line of work.
 

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