Smile!
In Magia Record's re-run of the Nagisa's Wish event, Yuu has at long last been given a canon design, and she's adorable.
In the past, I drew a design for her myself (here, and here) based on the old silhouette they used and I talked a bit then about the similarities I saw between her and Nagisa's appearances. Have a look at those for context if you'd like, because I'm going to revisit that again here with her new look. Below the cut ↓
To start with, some of the things I pointed out on Yuu's silhouette as being shared with Nagisa's magical girl outfit did not survive to her final appearance, such as the fuzz around the edge of her neck frill, the shorts she wears, and the bows along her tails and across her frill.
Though the tails themselves which I compared to the pompoms hanging from Nagisa's hat did survive, that alone isn't enough to draw a connection.
So it seems unlikely that when Nagisa made her wish, her appearance was influenced by Yuu being the first and only magical girl she'd met up to that point.
We can scrap that idea.
However, the parts of Yuu that I noted as resembling Nagisa's witch form, Charlotte... those do still hold up. When you look closely at Yuu, she has rings in her eyes which aren't present when she isn't transformed, and we now know that she uses her horn as her weapon.
Charlotte has a pure white face and a split open mouth, like Nagisa's mother described her killer. This is the strongest piece of evidence which the rest of it is built upon.
Charlotte attacks with her face as well.
And admittedly, perhaps reaching a little here, Charlotte as a worm has a cone-shaped pointy nose that might resemble Yuu's horn.
They also just both have clown energy.
Huh. Looking at these pictures I'm now wondering if I could draw a comparison between Charlotte's head wings and the bundles of cloth hanging from either side of Yuu's head.
...
Yuu was instrumental in Nagisa's transformation over the course of the story, from someone accepting of the abuse she experienced every day into a person seeking to cut ties with her family and create her own freedom, and then Yuu played the part of the person who mistakenly took Nagisa's agency away from her at the end which is what tipped Nagisa over the edge, so I like the idea a lot that Nagisa's grief made manifest from that event took a form that recognises the significance of the Sleepwalking Ghost.
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Yuu is most obviously themed around a unicorn, but I think you could compare her to a kelpie, too.
The kelpie usually takes the form of a grey, black, or white horse standing near a body of water, and acts sweet and even-tempered to lull people into riding or petting it. But once they do, they find themselves stuck to its fur or ensnared by its mane. With its victim unable to escape, the kelpie takes to the water, diving into the abyss to drown and devour them.
The kelpie's behavior fits with how pre-contract Yuu saw herself as a twisted, deceitful person who was only pretending to be kind, and how she used to have (somewhat unwanted) thoughts about dragging Kei down into the depths with her, away from everything else. And much like how kelpies bind themselves to their riders to drown them, Yuu and Kei tied themselves together with a ribbon before throwing themselves into the sea-- with Yuu, the "kelpie", being the only one to come out of the water alive.
It could be a coincidence, but I thought it was neat anyway! 🐴 Giving Yuu an equine-themed outfit and doppel was an excellent choice from a thematic perspective.
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As soon as Yuu was released the first thing i did was to listen to her voice lines, not only because of who is voicing her (the Sailor Moon!!) but because i was very curious as to what sort of dimension her voice would add to her character.
And it's particularly interesting the way that her voice sells how... empty she is, like not only in that losing her memories destroyed her sense of self and her morality (like i had initially expected), but in that she doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of anything beyond the ideas of "Yuu", Shii, the list, Magical Girls and Witches. Like, it's like she doesn't even know what being a human even is.
That much is obvious just in the way she speaks, like she keeps switching back and forth between multiple voices and running over her own words, like she speaks out of muscle memory and can't control the sounds that her mouth makes. But also, some of the stuff she says is... concerning, here's a few lines:
(I got these from her F*ndom quotes page i didn't know where else to find them)
"We're together today too... is that the same as yesterday? Does that mean tomorrow's gonna be the same!? And two days ago too? I guess after tomorrow too... wait so even today too!?"
From her first login, notice how by the end of the sentence she forgot about whay she said at the start completely. Also it's hard to convey through written text but, not only her sense of object and spacial permanence is nonexistent, she seems to genuinely have a hard time undertanding the concept of time:
"Did you just say good morning? Oh that must mean it's morning nowiseewaitdid i... did i sleep? I'm bummed... no i'm not, aha! Morning!"
Her morning login.
"Did you just tell me good night...? 'Good night' is what you say when you're done for the day!? So if we keep repeating 'good night' forever, can we stop tomorrow from coming...?"
Her night login
A couple of her lines showing her extremely short memory, and how it affects her fundamental understanding of things:
"Man, i'm so hungry... WAIT! I think i was just full...! Which was it! Doesn't it really suck how you can never tell what's inside of your tummy?"
Noon login.
"Sorry! I...! What was i thinking about? Do you know? Can you tell me? What a bummer, what a bummer... Wait, what was i bummed about?"
Her standard login (honestly same).
"I gotta get goinghmm...? Where was i going again?"
Story end 3
"If your arms or your legs get really old, then why not just rip 'em off? It's gonna grow new ones so it's okay, here, lemme help you!"
Tap 4.
"Nagisa-chan loves cheese, meanwhile i have 'someone'... 'someone' is me! So don't forget about cheese and 'someone' even when tomorrow comes, alright?"
Magical release 1
"Y'see, ghosts only come from the past, they don't be coming from the future! So why... can i only go to tomorrow?"
Magical release 2
Also this one is just, man...
"No matter how many times time turns back, i'll keep doing the same thing! 'Cause i don't wanna pretend that all the times i messed up and all the times i was sad weren't real!"
Tap 8
It's also extremely unnerving how genuinely childlike and innocent her "main", higher pitched voice is, like i can't explain why but it really sells that she does what she does all because she genuinely doesn't know any other way to live, not least because it seems she wholeheartedly doesn't seem to be able to think beyond the current moment, like she just goes with the flow of time without having anything to ground herself on.
I think that, while having a fully fledged design added to her "inhuman" factor in a creepy manner, like, compounding to the idea of this beastly Magical Girl that rips people's organs off, her voice made her "inhuman" in a much crueler and sad way, in that it served to illustrate that she is the way she is because it's quite literally the only way of living that she knows.
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