Writing about our experiences through the lens of fiction.
Last week I had a six-hour call with a dear friend; a week later, that conversation helped me unlock how to write a story I’d been having a really hard time figuring out. That friendly call by itself was kind of like a healing experience for me. I miss this friend quite dearly – we tend to have great and intense conversations, and she’s someone who fills me with inspiration and makes me feel like my head is suddenly filled with ideas and projects, besides giving me a sense of belonging.
Talking to her, I realized I’ve been missing that feeling/sense quite a lot – belonging and everything that it entails for me. For me, this sense of belonging brings with it some things that I had a lot of in the past, but that after the pandemic, and due to my depression and because I moved from Brazil to Canada, I feel like I kind of lost all of that.
It took me almost my whole life to feel like I was in the right place at the right time, that I was surrounded by people who actually wanted me to be there with them, people that I shared a real connection with. Making this kind of friendship is hard, especially when you spent most of your life feeling like you don’t belong.
The story I’ve been having a hard time writing is one that I’ve been working on for almost 5 years. It’s a comic book project that already had a first digital issue posted on Tapas, as well as a promotional physical issue published last year. I am/was a Magical Girl follows the trajectory of a former Magical Girl, now in her late 30’s, that’’s faced with yet another magical threat 15 years after her last fight – one that cost another magical girl’s life. She needs to “un-retire” and go back to work.
For this story, although I always had a clear vision of which themes I wanted to explore with it, the plot itself was never fully clear. Some of this difficulty comes from the fact that among all the things that I’ve written so far in my life, this one is probably my most personal story, so far – mainly because I decided to mirror some aspects of my personal history with depression into the protagonist’s character arc. So although I’m not exactly like the protagonist and she has her own characteristics and traits that don’t look like me, still, there’s clearly something of me in her. Also, I was deeply depressed when I started working on this story and have been slowly getting better, so writing it has been a challenge for me, from day one.
I am/was a Magical Girl is very much influenced by a lot of the manga and anime I’ve read and watched while I was growing up, as well as by stuff in the genre that I read and watched as an adult. “Sailor Moon” and “Cardcaptor Sakura” played such an important role in my teen experience during the early 2000’s. Anime and Manga culture are really big in Brazil – and in Latin America as a whole, from my experience. For people from my generation, there are so many elements from these Japanese stories that became intrinsically tied to our experiences as we grew up. Back home, ever since I was kid, I’d say that Manga has always been bigger than superhero comics from the US.
Many of those Manga titles that I’ve loved ever since those days were created by women who had girls as their intended audience. So some of those stories might sometimes, now in 2024, feel dated in some aspects. Still, those stories represented one of the few positive examples of sisterhood that my generation had when we were growing up. When we think about comic books and movies from the 90’s and the 2000’s, it’s easy to remember stories about groups of boys fighting evil and being messy, but it’s not so easy to recall stories where girls are doing the same – that’s one of the reasons I love “Sailor Moon.” Besides, “Sailor Moon” also had the plus of clearly having queer characters among the protagonists, which for a closeted queer girl living in a small town, like I was, made it even more appealing.
As an adult I look at these characters from my childhood and teenage years with different eyes than I had, back then. I think about the traumas those characters might have developed after years of fighting those incredibly dangerous (but cute) monsters, the friendships that were forged and maybe lost for a bunch of different reasons, and the life that they would have built if we’d had the opportunity to witness these forever teenagers reach their 30’s, 40’s and maybe even their 60’s and so on. When I think about them like that, I see some similarities about them and my own trajectory, the problems I experienced and my own struggle as I tried to help create a safer, more welcoming space for women and queer people back in the days when I was working as a feminist pop culture critic. The challenges I faced every day as a woman in a men-dominated creative industry seem to mirror those characters’ challenges, too.
No, I never fought hand-to-hand combat with a monster, and I most certainly don’t walk around in a sailor suit. Not in my 30’s and not back in my 20’s. But I can see some intersections between my own trajectory and theirs, and also in terms of how I want to keep going in a world that is still far from ideal and is constantly trying to beat me down to a pulp, but it has also come a long way from what it used to be in the past. We just need to keep going – and that’s the hard part.
The strength I need to keep writing must come from within me, but it can also come from my memories of the shared stories I have with my friends and from the certainty that no matter which obstacles I might have in the future, I’ll still have the power to fight them because I have the power my friends shared with me, the energy they gave me makes me able to face any battle. And even when I’m simply fighting to overcome a plot point that’s difficult to write in a story about magical girls.
fights I face in the future, I’ll still have the power they’ve shared with me to surpass them. Even if it’s just a plot point in a story about magical girls.
I love my friends.
See you next time. 😉
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