Chapter 01 ★ I'll become a magical boy!
I'd always been surrounded by magical girls. My parents turned Sailor Moon on our cable television one day and saw how hooked I was even as a kid who could barely make any sensible sentences. It was almost their sworn duty to get me as many Sailor Moon related things as possible, the VHS tapes, the dolls, the trading card game, my mom would buy toys and dress up books straight from Japan off Ebay and even make her own handmade dress up dolls out of yarn, plastic canvas, and some velcro for me as a kid. They saw how much I loved the show and took it a notch above just a year or two after, my mom finding anime blogs and geocities and picking out things she thought I would like as a kid too. Next was Ah My Goddess's OVA and then some fun, classic bootleg DVDs hand burnt straight from the fansubbers like Tokyo Mew Mew and A Little Snow Fairy Sugar. I watched those so much they were scratched up so bad they could hardly play.
As I went through life, magical girls were always something inspiring to me and something I always had such a fond attachment to. It could have been nostalgia or it could have been the idea I could transform into someone completely new, full of love and fully loved. For a handful of years, I was recruited to help a local event called "Magical Girl Day", which originally started out as just an Sailor Moon Day fan event. There, I helped with organizing many of it's little events, performing music there, curating the magical girl museum full of toys, figures, and miscellaneous items from the 1960s to current magical girls, helping with guests, and even curating the activity room and manga library, which was one of my favorite things. This event, while a ton of hard work, gave me so much joy to interact with magical girl fans not even just from my city, but all around the United States as so many different people came! Unfortunately, the pandemic in 2020 shut it down and it never returned.
I always had a dream to one day connect with people again the same way I did at that event. I got to talk about the most popular and the most niche series all while making new friends and sharing our stories through magical girl series and it was nothing short of inspiring. When I was a kid, I had made my own magical girl webseries, so over the pandemic I grew determined to get back into art, something I had neglected over the course of my life. I spent everyday for almost two years drawing and then, finally, felt confident enough to throw all my luck at starting up a shop dedicated to all things magical girl and things that made me nostalgic for a simpler time in my life.
Magical girls helped me discover my identity as a transman and gave me the hope I needed to succeed, they gave me so many friends, and they continue to inspire me in everything I do. A friend of mine once described my art as looking like "The final page of a shoujo manga", the one with a cute girl and a "stop! you're reading it backwards!" warning, and after I heard that, I felt as if I had achieved everything I had been working for. Now, I have been given the opportunity to have my very own MAHO-DO with everyone's support and wouldn't be here without everyone! In a way, it feels like I've been able to connect with so many magical girl fans once again, just like I did before and feel the happiness it brought me through this.
Thank you for giving me the chance to feel like a magical boy!
MELLO
