Uncanny, July/August 2026
Kelly, the story’s narrator, is one of four young women — alongside Annie, Mako, and Lin — who begin fighting crime as self-styled Magical Girls, first as a lark and then as a livelihood. In the early days their operation is homemade: cheap costumes stitched by hand, a corny slogan coined in a McDonald’s, a battered van they pack into after each job. Their fanbase is small and personal — a single mother who films her kids imitating their poses, a forum moderator, and Mami, a twelve-year-old in a plastic tiara who once mailed them a handwritten letter asking, earnestly, what it actually takes to become a Magical Girl.
Fame arrives unevenly and then overwhelms them. A viral video and a hundredth arrest bring in corporate sponsors, magazine spreads, and fashion houses eager to redesign their costumes. Within two years they need a manager just to field the offers. The girls are rebranded with color-coded personas, optimized for merchandising rather than personality, and coached by “body language experts” on how long to hold a triumphant pose for the cameras. Beneath the glamour, though, focus-group data reveals a colder truth: audiences are growing bored of ordinary crime. They want a villain worthy of the spectacle — something cinematic, apocalyptic, magical-girl-sized.
The wish is answered by the sudden appearance of monstrous beings called Magical Girl Eaters, or MGEs, who tear through cities and occasionally devour disposable “sidekick” magical girls sourced from newly formed temp agencies. The team fights them on camera, still performing synchronized poses even as merchandise factories multiply overseas to keep pace with demand for wands and costumes. Unsettling rumors begin to spread that the MGEs can actually speak, and that their first deciphered words were “It hurts.” A leaked, blurry video shows one that looks less like a monster and more like a frightened, starving teenage girl eating fries alone in a parking lot at night.
The story’s turn comes when Annie is killed by an MGE named Beast-I, later confirmed through tissue samples to be seventeen years old. Rather than being allowed to grieve, the surviving three are pushed by their management into turning the funeral into a broadcast event, complete with a specially commissioned, tear-jerking rearrangement of their theme song. When Beast-I is finally captured, her execution is staged as a sold-out, live-streamed spectacle in a rented stadium, fans chanting “Justice!” and waving signs. As the cameras zoom in for a close-up, Kelly notices something achingly familiar in the creature’s black hair and features — and thinks of Mami’s old letter, of a photograph of a girl in braces, of a fan who once just wanted to know if she could be magical too.
The MGE dances a soundless, feral dance with the wand she’s been handed, clutching at invisible hands and imaginary friends, and the audience laughs, mistaking her death throes for a clumsy attempt at the team’s signature pose. The story ends there, on the crowd’s mockery — a devoted fan, discarded and monstrous, dying for the entertainment of the very people she once longed to join.
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in NYC and Tokyo. She is a three-time Nebula Award and 2025 Astounding Award Finalist. Her work has also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new narrative platforms. She now writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. Her stories and poems are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/ Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu.bsky.social.