10 Dark Magical Girl Anime That Twist The Trope

You know what they say, you can’t have something cute and wholesome become a trope without having it eventually be deconstructed into the exact opposite.

That’s what happened to magical girls, anyway.

Originally, magical girls were whimsical, cheerful anime about young girls being able to transform into cute frilly outfits and save the world with various powers, most powerful of all, the power of friendship.

It was a dose of wholesomeness for all if not aimed to get more young girls into anime or to sell merchandise.

However, now we have a new magical girl genre – dark magical girl anime, in which you watch still cute girls, but they go from having a wholesome adventure with their magical girl powers to getting viciously mutilated or some other such horrifying fate. If the suffering on display in popular deconstruction of the magical girl genre is your jam, then give these dark magical girl anime recommendations a go.

Best Dark Magical Girl Anime

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

I like to call Madoka Magica the progenitor of the dark magical girl sub-genre, but not because it was the first one to put a dark spin on things. No, older magical girls series can actually be quite dark if you stuck with them long enough.

It is the progenitor more so because you will note that its immense popularity spawned many subsequent dark magical girl anime in the years following its release. What made it more special than its older peers is perhaps because it dared to stand up and say, “I’m going to mutilate these moe girls on-screen and graphically!” Older dark magical girl anime was more bleak than graphically vicious.

Fans really loved that brutality, and when an anime garners wild popularity (and financial success), it tends to become a trend. I mean, just look at isekai anime.

Madoka Magica follows all the steps, or rather, created all the steps. It starts off with very cute girls given the option to become magical girls by a deceptively cute being. It is all fun and games at first as they meet others with the power, right up until those others die rather brutally.

However, imminent brutal death isn’t the only potential outcome as it is discover that they can become something much darker if they don’t kill their enemy and cleanse their soul gems from using their powers.

From there, Madoka Magica goes from dark to surprisingly philosophical.

Magical Girl Raising Project

What do you get when both battle royale-type games and dark magical girls are in fashion? Well, you get an anime about magical girls forced to kill each other in a battle royale, of course!

That’s really all this short series was. In its plot, it was deemed that there was too many magical girls in the area, so the app that created them tasked them to fight in order to thin the herd.

The series is violence and suffering in fine form, with a more fleshed out plot showing its head near the end. However, that plot is one that continues in the light novels, so it makes the anime seem somewhat pointless until it gets that second season.

Yuki Yuna is a Hero

Similar to Madoka Magica, Yuki Yuna is a Hero follows all the right steps to deconstruct the magical girl anime genre. It starts very in-genre with cute girls that have the power to transform into fighters that can defend their world from an unseen enemy, all of them led by a girl that so fervently wants to be a hero she might start frothing at the moe mouth.

However, what it doesn’t do is sugar-coat battles and the cost that can come with being a hero. It isn’t afraid to maim the cute girls you grow attached to and shows what you have to give up to be a hero.

All that said, to its credit, Yuki Yuna is a Hero doesn’t focus so much on the suffering, but rather really does do action quite well in a show that blends the realities of battle with the gooey optimism that drips from standard magical girl series.

Day Break Illusion

Day Break Illusion turns the brightly colored moe anime aesthetic dial to eleven and dashes in tarot-inspired powers into the mix. It tells the story of a girl that discovers that she inherited the power of the tarot card The Sun from her dead mother, which allows her to become a magical girl. She joins an organization of magical girls who fight monsters that threaten humanity.

The dark rub on Day Break Illusion is that the monsters used to be people, and the main character begins to struggle with the choice between just wiping them from existence or trying to preserve what is left of their humanity. There are magical girl anime that do that route a little better, but not many that do it with so much visual flair.

Magical Girl Site

Magical Girl Site does something that you will either love or roll your eyes at. It takes all the awful things that humans can do to each other and really piles it on. Each character is either being abused to an absurd degree or is the said abuser.

The series follows a website for those abused girls that turns them into a magical girl. After which, they must decide if they get their revenge or use their powers for something else.

The issue with this particular series is how over-the-top it can be. It is why there are so many mixed feelings on it. It is over-the-top with its abuse, but also over-the-top with its anime-levels of forgiveness too. You can be either, but to be both is often too cheesy for most to stomach.

Uta Kata

It really is a shame that few remember Uta Kata since it deals with similar themes to Madoka Magica, though less finesse and with more fan service that no one was into.

Uta Kata follows a girl that is given magical girl powers from a mysterious mirror girl that grants her the power to channel the Djinn. Over the course of the series, you watch the characters go through a number of different abuses and disorders.

However, what the series does well is showcase the price that the characters pay for their power. Over the course of the series, it becomes clear that the powers of a magical girl are more burden than blessing.

Princess Tutu

While its age and its cuteness often cause this series to be overlooked, make no mistake that Princess Tutu can be as dark as the rest of them. It doesn’t necessarily lean on gore, however.

Instead, Princess Tutu really excels in telling darker-toned stories through the lens of a ballet dancer whose dope dance moves relieve the turmoil in the hears of others.

Princess Tutu, in its plot, is an absolutely hard sell to offer anime fans. However, if you don’t need gore and do need a big dose of melancholy, it is an unforgettable anime.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

In this dark magical girl anime, humanity was threatened by an alien race from the spirit world that only the power of magical girls could stand against.

While they won the war, the surviving magical girls were left less intact than the standard anime hero. Suffering from PTSD after the war, the leader of a group of magical girls seeks to retire, but gets pulled back into the battle with enemy survivors.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka is more military drama than magical girl anime, but regardless, they are, in fact, magical girls. It is interesting to see PTSD covered in magical girls, something that was dabbled in Madoka Magica, but covered here in more detail.

Overall, the series loves its body horror, but the plot of it, like Magical Girl Raising Project, goes nowhere without another season.

Blue Reflection Ray

Blue Reflections Ray follows two girls that become one of the select few to posses a ring that allow them to protect fragments of human emotion from other, similar magical girls that want to take those fragments.

Blue Reflections Ray looks like bright cotton candy on the outside, but everyone, including the main characters, have endured some sort of abuse. While it perhaps isn’t the most vicious series here, the tone remains distinctly dark magical girl.

This series catches tons of criticism for being a poor adaption of a popular Japanese game that many outside of Japan haven’t heard of.

The rest of it comes from the more justifiable accusations of yuri baiting, having too little content for a 2-cour show, and having a pretty aimless plot in the first half. As such, you have to stick with this series for about 10 or 12 episodes to get to the good meat, and that can be a big ask.

Wonder Egg Priority

The wave of dark magical girl anime popularity has kind of fallen off, but Wonder Egg Priority still dared to dip the toe in it.

In this series, girls who have lost someone via suicide can purchase an egg to enter into a dream world. There, they are tasked with fighting monsters in order to save other lost souls who have killed themselves. Each girl they save gets them closer to bringing back the friend they lost.

The overall plot of the series gets wildly more complex near the end, rapidly so, and I can’t say it pulls it off flawlessly. However, in getting there, the animation is a visual feast and the sad character stories poke little wounds in your heart.

Do you have more dark magical girl series that you would recommend? Let fans know in the comments section below.