I’m looking for magical girl manga where the girls discover and learn magic by themselves instead of it being granted through some contract

Witch Hat Atelier has girls learning magic by being taught it. It’s not really the magical girl genre – and their mentor is a guy and there are plenty of male witches in the background – but the overall focus is on a small group of young girls learning magic.

Not sure if that’s really what you’re looking for, but its at least adjacent! (Also, the art is lovely.)

e: Oh, and there’s an upcoming anime of it, here’s the trailer

I had something vaguely (very vaguely) similar happen a bit after I started taking progesterone. At around that time, I started getting a random stiffness/weirdness/almost-pain at the front of my right leg, maybe a third of the way down. It did feel a little bit like a muscle cramp, but localized to a very specific (and consistent) area. I only ever noticed it when walking.

Touching and massaging that area didn’t hurt or feel any different, and there wasn’t anything visibly different either, other than it being the location of a fairly noticible vein. Since it wasn’t a particularly strong sensation, I never went to the doctor. In the end, it just kind of stopped happening at some point.

This probably isn’t that helpful to you, but wanted to describe my experience since it at least had a couple things in common!

There’s definitely just some variance in terms of how much it bleeds and whether it hurts. I haven’t really noticed any pattern in terms of injection site; I think there are a lot of factors. Holding the vial and maybe rolling it between your hands can help warm up the liquid, which makes it a little bit easier to both draw and inject.

The needle size will affect these things too – the thinner the injection needle the less blood I’ve seen, but then it takes a little longer to inject. Do you know what gauge you’re using to inject with?

I found the whole process very stressful for the first several weeks, but eventually it just became routine!

Ok, so the MC gets iskei’d into their own Mary Sue story, but as the villainess… now I really want to know if the author based it on something they wrote in middle school!

When you’re ready to make big changes, definitely look into threading as an alternative to waxing, a lot of folk find it less painful in the long term. (But it still really stings at first! :) )

Having thick/full eyebrows can be an advantage, since you have more to work with. I have the problem that my upper eyebrows are a bit too sparse, which makes them much more difficult to shape.

I’m pro this rule. I eventually quit reading a lot of the trans subreddits because of the constant doomposting.

The source is referenced in the graph (PRRI survey from 2023, as described e.g. here)

The previous years are a different org’s polls (Gallups)

I thought Frieren was still better at suppressing her mana.

Although, Frieren did state in an earlier episode that Fern was faster at getting off spells, which would definitely be an advantage here.

Not everybody wants to subscribe to a community dedicated to a single seasonal show.

I know I actively avoid those communities for works based on a manga, because they often have spoilers show up by way of fanart/etc/. It’s just not a suitable place for general discussion of a currently airing anime.

Sure, that’s kind of tangential to the point I’m making. Something can reflect transphobic ideas without explicitly being about trans folk.

I’m curious how these modern takes on One Piece will deal with the Okama and related characters (assuming they get that far!)

I haven’t read the manga, but the anime at least comes off super-transphobic in how they’re played for laughs at times. I think that’d necessarily be cut from the live action version, but less hopeful about this for another anime adaptation.

This is a weird grey area for me. I see it as a silly episode where bender does some reprehensible shit, sort of learns his lesson but than continues being a shitty person.

That episode really bothered me – decades before I realized I was trans it was my least favorite episode of the entire run. It just came off as too mean spirited, and relied too heavily on the man-in-a-dress “joke”.

I’ve always read that it’s because many light novels started online, and the way they were listed meant you needed the title to really grab folk’s attention.

(I actually really like this particular anime; the animation is often iffy but art and story really appeal to me!)

<3 Shami momo

As a trans woman, I thought it was interesting that in one of the most recent chapters (this is not a spoiler) Shamiko has to deal with some minor awkwardness about her name having changed. The series is consistently queer-adjacent in ways that go way beyond the central relationship!

One kind of interesting twist on that is Fincher’s The Game. It remains unclear until the very end of the movie whether the main character is in a convoluted game where people are pretending to conspire against him, or an actual conspiracy using the game as cover.

They also tended to say the changes made it ‘hard to follow’ or ‘ruined the pacing’ or other things, but as an anime-only that just flat wasn’t true. I actually really loved the kind of elliptical feel of the story in S1.

I honestly kind of felt that source readers were border-line brigading posts about the anime on reddit. It certainly didn’t make me any more inclined to check it out!

You should probably have made some of the questions optional – “distribute a 100 points” is just not something I’m going to bother thinking about.

The animation is iffy, but I actually really like the art itself in this show.

Also, the vibe overall.

Bofuri is surprisingly good! Not in any way serious in tone, since it all takes place in an MMORPG, but some good action scenes, especially in the first season.

Pretty sure it’s completely kid friendly (no fan service or other anime weirdness.)

One issue I’ve seen is that the bot’s empty posts tend to flood out other more interesting stuff from my main feed.

I’ve thought about removing the community from my feed for that reason, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.