Shortly after starting their first year at Silvermount University, five young women discover they’ve each been chosen to protect our world and a newly discovered sister dimension. Volume 1 begins at the start of their first year of college as they learn about this new responsibility and try to find out exactly what’s going on.
Join Norah, Adele, Kendall, Paige, and Jordan as they navigate the complexities of college and discover that they have more strength than they’ve ever imagined. Read online here.
Review
This story has everything you can expect from a Magical Girl one: some very different and kind of adorable coming-of-age characters; a land filled with mysteries, a sister dimension and rich long-hidden history, where they all casually attend college; a mysterious and seemingly bigger-than-life threat that they’re gonna face together, and some really cool clothing designs for the transformation moments.
Once this story gets traction (I would say between the second and the third chapter, when we meet most of the main characters), it’s also a fast-developing one, and of these kinds of stories that keep you interested and wanting to see the next page constantly. It certainly helps that the characters are so vastly different in their personalities, their clothes, their interests, which makes you certainly interested in the relationships they have with each other and how they interact, with themes like friendship, social anxiety, self-demands, clumsy flirting, and other teenager themes handled brilliantly.
It’s also a cast of characters mostly composed of black and brown LGBT+ characters, and that is handled richly, they really have an approach vastly different to most of their issues, anxieties, the story they find themselves driven into. This is one of those stories, like Sailor Moon or W.I.T.C.H., where you can kind of fall in love with one of the characters depending on how you are and feel towards these kinds of stories, and that talks a lot about how they’re different and defined. Generally, LGBT+ issues and diversity is a natural and incredibly well-handled fit for this series, with the exception of trans representation, which so far as Volume 1 is only hinted at (like MacKenzie, who’s a gender non-conforming girl with hints to her being trans, mostly by fandom, but no in-text confirmation) or a little weird (like the main villain is a non binary alchemist, and you bet that’s a cool DnD role but I kinda wish they weren’t a villain at all).
I personally love the structure and kind of mirror-style of the narrative of this webcomic, and chapters 4.5 (with the mirror-narrative showing us the sister world) and 5 are the points where for me it reaches its maximum point. In chapter 4.5, we have a really great sapphic full-front moment, and in chapter 5 our characters attend a concert, and everything turns to its maximum expression, with them getting into the costumes while the band plays a song, with some amazing visual design and out-of-this-world coloring. This volume 1 ends in tension and cliffhangers and the trip has passed too fast and too enjoyable till there.
Final Thoughts
If you like Cardcaptor Sakura, Sailor Moon or Sh?jo Kakumei Utena, this webcomic is one hundred percent for you. If you don't, but you still want a story with strong worldbuilding, cute character interactions and a diverse, explicitly LGBT+ and lovable cast, I'd say go give it a try!
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