So far we’ve been examining the building blocks used to create Magical Girl henshins, so now let’s zoom out and talk about the structure in which these techniques live.

Most Magical Girl henshins can be broken down into three sections:

The Invocation: The heroine performs various actions necessary to trigger the henshin. The Transformation: The changing clothes part. The Tada: Fully dressed, the heroine dances around a bit and strikes a pose.

Let’s tackle the invocation first. It usually contains one or more of the following:

shouting a Greyskull phrase (e.g.: Moon Prism Power Make-up)

fiddling around with compacts

waving wands

compacts and wands emitting blinky lights

dancing around

gesturing

raising a hand to the sky

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