Magical Girls of Unusual Colours
We’ve previously covered timelines of different magical girls by colour - you can find all those particles HERE - but today we’ll be discussing some that never made the cut!
Officially, Sakura has no official colour, though could easily fit under the Red or Pink umbrellas aesthetically, though not always thematically. This leaves her without any true colour fit at all!
With an interesting mix of predominant black gloves and detailing on a white suit, paired with a yellow skirt and pink undegarments, topped off with green-blue hair, Magical Emi not only fits into no category thematically but also aethstically.
Although she isn’t the first nor last of the Studio Pierrot magical girls to have an out there colour scheme, she definitely possesses the most unique colour palette.
Although arguably red, black, or pink, Utena and Anthy are far from traditional magical girls in terms of their story arcs and aesthetic. So it’s unsurprising that they are neither clearly colour coded, nor fulfill any of their potential colours.
Much like the Precure that came after her, Ririka is most easily cataloged as white or pink, yet her wands are purple and red, as are most of her merchandise items. Her tropes also don’t fit particularly well in any one category.
Almost Everyone - Sailor Moon
Although some Sailor Moon characters like Mercury and Mars fall clearly under one type, others like Sailor Moon herself, Venus, and Uranus sport a multitude of colours and don’t fit the stereotypes around any of them. While others like Saturn have been coloured inconsistently, sometimes depicted as navy and other times purple. And we’re not going to talk about Dark Mars or Sailor Luna or any of the many musical variations!
With all that said, Sailor Moon was perhaps one of the anime that latter series took some of their coded inspiration from - though it wasn’t until the 2000s when Tokyo Mew Mew and Ojamajo Doremi that truly codified and popularized the concept within the magical girl genre.
Everyone - Wish Upon the Pleiades
While each girl does posses a colour details, their overall uniforms lend the group a much more colourless aesthetic, which is emphasized by their casual colours being different to their magical ones.
While their hair colours remain, their casual outfits and the items accessorizing their uniforms are different, such as Nanako’s black cape and hat, or Itsuki’s red accessories. One character even gains and entirely different coloured magical form later on.
However, they do fit relatively well within their initial magical colour’s tropes, with the exception Itsuki, whose form appears either navy, grey, or black accented depending on the media.
Cure Echo - Pretty Cure All Stars
A movie-only cure, Echo is officially a white Cure. Depending on where she is depicted, her background has been pink, green, and blue, but her magical girl items and official colour are so far always white coded.
Others in the franchise have fluctuated, such as Cure White technically being, in name, white, later being officially coded as blue, before having her colour redacted entirely in an anniversary art book. Others like Shiny Luminous, Cure Egret, and Cure Rythm have always had other, non-white official colours despite being considered such by parts of the fandom. This leaves Echo as the only consistently officially white cure to date.
Cure Black - Futari Wa Precure
Like Cure White, Cure Black has often been re-classed - including officially - as pink, before having that redacted entirely. Nonetheless, as the only officially black-coded magical girl that isn’t somewhat evil or dark (at the time of this post anyway, we’d love to see that change) she definitely deserves a mention for her unique colour coding.
Cure Cosmo, Cure Parfait, and Cure Summer
Once again, Precure has been notoriously inconsistent, with Parfait being the only one of these three officially being considered as “rainbow” by the official website. Yet, both Cosmo and Summer have been officially depicted with rainbow merchandise and items, and Parfait has been officially classed as Green in other texts and merchandise. Summer’s colour, though officially pink, is further complicated by having relatively little pink in her design.
Western Cartoons & Comics
The team of W.I.T.C.H. has outfits that are most notable for their complete lack of colour coding, going totally against the established tropes of the genre. In spite of this, their powers are actually colour coded, as are their transformation sequences, yet even so, none of them fit thematically well into their colour groupings.
Like Sailor Moon, some characters like Flora fit relatively well under one colour code throughout the series. But all members of this group have changed aesthetics over the years, and not always for good reasons.
We’ve previously covered Winx Club’s long history of whitewashing and racism, and unfortunately much of their colour palette changes have gone hand-in-hand with the removal of ethnic features, personality traits, and even backstories.
What other magical girls of unusual colours do you know?
