Helen: I still can’t believe you talked me into doing this review.
Muse: I couldn’t let this end without talking about one of the most entertaining and yet oddest magical girl shoujo series that I have ever read.
Helen: I need to introduce you to some stranger things then! While Amu’s situation isn’t normal per say (“No one said that puberty means you wake up to find that you laid eggs in bed!”) having a physical representation of her potential selves appear and help guide her through elementary school isn’t the craziest premise I’ve seen for magical girl transformations. Although I might be giving her shugo chara (guardian characters) a bit too much credit here…..
Muse: It’s a difficult series to break down, since when I think back on it the things I remember tend to be the themes of friendship and not being worried about discovering who you are and feeling free to try out multiple things that interest you as you’re growing up. But then I revisit it and it’s just… What is happening here? Why is a high schooler hitting on an elementary school girl? Are the personifications of the character’s interests their own separate beings or not? How did anyone figure out the rules for all of this? Who made the lock and key? I never got answers to any of these questions!
Helen: To go back to the beginning, before our own hopes and dreams of future answers were dashed: Amu Hinamori is a elementary schooler who dresses cool but uses unintentional snark to hide her own shyness and the fact that she would really rather dress rather girly. These emotions manifest themselves in three fairy-like chibis who represent who she could become someday. For the moment though, they follow her around and occasionally take over her personality. Thankfully someone else at school has an answer to Amu’s egg-laying questions; it turns out that the student council (who have roles like “King” and “Ace”) also have guardian characters! While the student council mostly sits around sipping tea they also protect the students by keeping their unborn eggs from becoming corrupted which, in the worst case scenario, can literally kill their dreams.
Muse: As the series goes on, it’s revealed that an evil organization called Easter (yes really) is behind most of the attacks on people’s unborn dreams. Their goal is to find a magic egg called the Embryo, which is rumored to grant any wish. Two of Easter’s agents are teenaged brother and sister Ikuto and Utau, who directly oppose Amu and her friends with guardian characters of their own. They also have some past with Tadase, the leader of the student council and Amu’s crush, making the rivalry a bit more personal. However, Amu’s frequent encounters with Ikuto make her wonder if he’s really such a bad person, and if the situation she’s found herself in is more complicated than she initially thought.
Helen: What I always liked about the story was how Amu’s characters were born from herself. There wasn’t an outside force that made her into a magical girl, it was her own potential — a rather sweet origin story. I never quite understood why her personality changed only when she did a half character transformation and not when she did the whole transformation, but it did highlight that some of the characters are already rather close to who they want to be. It’s like a subtle way of saying that these dreams are achievable! Although I will admit that some of the guardian characters make less sense than the others, like fellow Student Council member Yaya who turns into a baby as a result of wanting to be pampered. Most of them work better than that; I always liked that there is a cross-dresser in the series who has a male and female character and the story completely supports the idea of wanting to be two, contradictory things at once (since one character is prim and proper and the other is a hip-hop skateboarder).
Muse: I agree! As confusing and head-scratching as Shugo Chara can get in terms of its storytelling decisions, it is something that I do love for the way it portrays kids starting to make their own decisions about who they want to be. The cross-dressing character is taken seriously and is not played for laughs (Yaya’s “baby” attitude takes that role), and a lot of Amu’s half-transformations in the earlier half of the series are pretty similar to the nervousness that a lot of kids feel at that age — all of them are right in the middle of puberty. The best parts of Shugo Chara are the parts that speak to that uncertainty that we all remember; wanting to be treated like an adult but still wanting to have fun as a kid, or wanting to be taken seriously at an artistic pursuit only to have the rest of the world start to tell you why that’s unreasonable. There’s a healthy mix of “dreams” here, from “this is what I want to be when I grow up” to abstract concepts (one character’s guardian character represents what they think “freedom” means). Some people need to mature while others just need to find the internal strength to pursue what speaks to them, which is a powerful message to send to the pre-teen audience this manga was targeting. The rest of it, however…
Helen: Just about every pre-teen/teenager is interested in romance and boy howdy are the characters here curious! There are multiple love-triangles, hints of incest, and plenty of smutty moments. So really the series knows it’s audience surprisingly well!
Muse: Yes, despite the average age of its characters, this series does not shy away from stickier relationship subjects. When reading this series for the first time, I was most surprised by Utau’s brocon feelings, but they are increasingly downplayed as the series goes on. Most of the “are we sure this manga is for younger teens” moments come in with the way Ikuto acts around Amu. Be forewarned, these characters come with quite age gap (Ikuto is a high school student while Amu is in her last year of primary school) and there is a scene early on involving a literal lock and key because Peach-Pit apparently thought that we couldn’t put the innuendo together by ourselves. Nothing truly crosses the line, but it can get a bit surprising given the premise and sometimes outright silliness of the series.
Helen: There is also an anime adaption of the series and while it’s not bad, it’s confusing. While the manga runs in Nakayoshi, which is aimed at the 9-15 audience, the anime goes a bit younger; by the last season of the show it was half live action with some of the idols used in the theme songs or with shorts focusing on the guardian characters and only one half was actually related to the story. The show already had long filler arcs before that but it seems like the mixed format killed the show since it never ended up finishing adapting the story. It was never licensed here (despite reports of people seeing it at industry trade shows being marketed as My Guardian Characters! which Crunchyroll now lists the show under but didn’t initially) and while I won’t warn people away from the series you will have to come back to the manga if you want to finish it.
Muse: The anime is an interesting mixed bag. It was originally slated for a 13-episode run, but when its popularity took off, the run continued to be extended until the final count for the series ended up at over one hundred episodes. However, I think that if you’re interested in it, the first two seasons are pretty decent adaptations. The rest of it is like watching a train crash in slow motion, since studio Sunrise (yes, the mecha studio) had no idea what to do with a popular magical girl show. If you’re interested in anime oddities, the last season is a sight to see; only half of the episode is animated, while the rest of it features strange shorts which seems designed to appeal to very small children, and each episode opens and ends with an idol group dressed up as Amu’s guardian characters. There was even a contest to cast a fourth girl as the last guardian character, but I have no idea how that turned out since I stopped watching the show before that concluded.
Basically, Sunrise tried to make an anime/live-action magical girl variety show, and it ended how you would expect.
Helen: Not that this completely excuses it, but artistic duo Peach-Pit has made a few other, interesting series (such as DearS) and I feel that they’re more known for their art style than storytelling abilities. Much like Clamp this is a series where one artist did most of the drawing and the other handled a few characters (I think they split it between the humans and the guardian characters) and everything has a very modern shoujo look to it. Screentones explode off of the page, everyone seems to be constantly bathed in a soft light, and it generally looks very “girly” — even the more masculine, adult characters look more feminine than expected.
Muse: Despite its missteps and my general confusion over some plot decision even all these years later, Shugo Chara is still a favorite series of mine. The very first figurines that I collected where prize figures from this series, and I own plush versions of Amu’s guardian characters. I still flip back through my favorite chapters from time to time since even though I personally feel that the sudden popularity and it’s confused plot threads dragged a lot of it down, there’s an important point here about being true to yourself no matter what, and that alone makes this worth a read.
And watch the anime for amazing fourth-wall breaking moments.
