Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in NYC and Tokyo. She is a three-time Nebula Award and 2025 Astounding Award finalist. Her work has also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new narrative platforms. She now writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. Her stories and poems are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. “Magical Girl Eater” is her sixth story to appear in Uncanny, a grim take on the intersection of corporate interests and nostalgic fandom.
Uncanny Magazine: “Magical Girl Eater” is a fast-paced story that examines the price of fame and the pressures of the public eye. What did you know about the story before you started writing? What did you discover as you were writing?
Angela Liu: I started this story a long time ago when I first started seeing new Sailor Moon goods popping up. Everything from luxury bags to make-up cases shaped like the transformation compacts from the series to replicas of toys from my childhood repackaged into premium boxes. I found myself feeling a strange kind of nostalgia. On the one hand, I knew it was irrational to pay so much for something that used to cost less than $15. On the other hand, I really wanted some of those goods—they appealed to some deep-seated childhood desires, both on an emotional and material level. Growing up, who didn’t want to be one of the sailor scouts, with their own planet name? I never had a Sailor Moon crescent wand or transformation pen, but now, as a working adult, I could afford all those things I never could as a kid.
That’s when I realized I wanted to write a story about the commoditization of nostalgia. I wanted to look at all the typical magical girl tropes through the lens of capitalism. Who would be the “villain mastermind”? What kind of costumes and weapons would they have? Who would be their fans? What would “justice” mean? How would all these things change once money came into the picture?
As someone who grew up reading fanfiction as a kid, I’ve always been fascinated with the question “what happens after the original story ends”? In real life, there is no such thing as a happy ending because life keeps going. If Sailor Moon and her friends actually existed in our world, how would they have responded to their popularity, to all the merchandising and corporate partnerships? How would we have perceived them then?
Even I was surprised by how easily things got dark once you introduce corporate stakeholders into the most innocent scenarios.
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story? Did you learn anything that surprised you?
Angela Liu: I looked up new products/collaborations and remakes for series I loved in the ’90s and early ’00s. I liked analyzing which ones I wanted to watch/buy and which ones left a bad taste in my mouth. Over the past decade, there’s been a huge movement in making “live-action” versions of popular cartoons and anime, and whitewashing has been a problem for many of these “nostalgic remakes” (the Death Note and Ghost in the Shell live-actions being the two more egregious examples of whitewashing). This got me thinking about replaceability and what people consider vital vs. nonvital parts of the original. How superheroes are regularly replaced when a series is rebooted, how the person inside the costume matters less than the costume itself. How sometimes people are replaced just to inject some new life into a franchise. This idea of replaceability became the emotional backbone of this story.
Merchandising has also always been a big part of magical girl series, but I was really surprised by how expensive some of the items were and how most of them were targeting older generations rather than kids. There were Sailor Moon x Jimmy Choo shoes and a $10,000+ Luna-P bag, $3,000+ Sailor Moon bedroom furniture sets, and wedding rings by name brands. Casual cosplay has gained increasing mainstream appeal in recent years. Instead of spending hours to months making your own costume, now anyone can buy a mass-produced costume of their favorite character online and have it delivered within days. There are even cosplay-inspired clothing collaborations with real fashion brands for people able to drop $200 for a “uniform” jacket. That capitalism-driven cosplay trend is what inspired the line “anyone can be a magical girl!” in the story.
Uncanny Magazine: You are a prolific author of short stories—do you find there are themes or elements that you return to repeatedly?
Angela Liu: Memory is probably the most common theme in all my stories. I love exploring the different ways memories shape us (or trap us, or save us). Memories are something precious that everyone has, no matter how poor or rich you are, they connect us with others, but they are also something people use to manipulate each other (or even themselves). If you can change someone’s memories, you can change who they are, and that’s an idea that fascinates and terrifies me.
I also write a lot about transformation. I like monsters, and I’m always writing about the different ways people can become one (or save one!). The first story I ever had published, “Ppaka” is about a person who thinks he’s a frog. “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” is about a demon who might have once been a human. I think this is one of my favorite formats—starting off with the monster and working your way to backward to understand how they got there.
All my stories have food in them too. If I get stuck writing, I will always write a food scene to work through it. That’s how we solve problems in my family—talking about it over food.
Uncanny Magazine: There’s a moment of nostalgia looking back at when everyone came up with a corny Magical Girl name—if you were choosing one for yourself what would you pick and why?
Angela Liu: I think I’d be Angela the Ultimate Hair. When I was a kid, my parents always called me “Maomao,” which is literally two Chinese characters for “hair” (毛毛). It’s what a lot of adults call babies. They never gave me an official Chinese name (their own names were “Americanized” when they immigrated to the US), so I always felt awkward introducing myself as “Maomao” whenever I met relatives or coworkers in China. People would laugh or look sympathetic. Oh my god, how could they do that? they’d say. But I realize now how that name was also a kind of gift from my parents because almost always, everyone would relax after I introduced myself.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a shorter story, not quite flash but almost. Do you like to read flash fiction, and if so, do you have any favorites?
Angela Liu: I love flash. Like poetry, it’s a great form for experimenting, a real sandbox for playing with ideas, language, and format where every line matters. And as a mom and caretaker with mostly small pockets of time for reading rather than long stretches, flash is perfect.
Some of my favorites are:
“We Never Went Away, We Just Hid Better” by Sam Rebelein
“Piano Lesson” by Richard Siken (a prose poem that I read like flash)
“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones
“Quantum Eurydice” by Avi Burton
“Snare” by Seán Padraic Birnie
“First Girls” by Jessica Luke Garcia
“Within The Dead Whale” by Spencer Nitkey
“Things My Father Says About Tennis” by Binh Do
“Unsolved Mysteries” by Chris Scott
I’m probably missing a ton. I like to check out the flash fiction sections of magazines like Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and flash-dedicated magazines like Small Wonders and hex for my fix.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Angela Liu: I’m a part of the Clarion West Novel Writing cohort this year, so I’m dedicating the next few months to finishing my first novel!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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