Anime / Shamanic Princess

Our heroine and her "friends", ladies and gentlemen

Shamanic Princess, a six-episode Original Video Animation series from The '90s, is a Darker and Edgier Magical Girl created years before it was cool. It starts with one of the oldest anime character tropes, the Cute Witch, makes a quick stop at Magical Girl Warrior, and heads directly into Psychological Horror territory without looking back. While it is a Shōjo narrative at heart, focused on relationships and personal growth, it caters to the male Periphery Demographic so well that it ceases to seem peripheral. Let's just say that the fight scenes are impressive and the fanservice is plentiful.

The story follows the titular shamanic princess, Tiara — a remarkably capable (and stripperiffic) Cute Witch who works as a special agent for the Guardian World — as she goes to Earth disguised as an Ordinary High-School Student to recover the Throne of Yord, a mystical artifact stolen from her world. Her mission becomes complicated when she discovers a terrible secret surrounding the artifact — and when some of Tiara's friends and colleagues from her magical world fight her to keep her from retrieving it. As Tiara soon discovers, the Throne of Yord is no mere MacGuffin, but a sentient being bent on making her suffer for its amusement.

Those who know of Shamanic Princess remember the OVA for its Mind Screwery and its somewhat-infamous non-linear storytelling (which drops the viewer into the action with little explanation and shows the circumstances that caused it all to occur as a 2 episode prequel after the story's conclusion).

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Tropes:

• Above Good and Evil:
  • The story has strong Gnostic influences — good and evil are two sides of the same coin, god is selfish, and enlightenment is more potent than god.
  • The Throne of Yord is the demiurge, Sara is Sophia.
• Action Girl: Tiara isn't just a magic user. She's a Full-Contact Magic User.
• All Love Is Unrequited: There's a lot of UST, and it either stays that way or shifts to angst. Depending on your definition, there could be one happy couple to come out of this show, but it's a Crack Pairing - Sara and the Throne of Yord. In a reversal, Tiara and Kagetsu will start over and try to make it work this time, if the ending is to be trusted.
• As You Know: The In Medias Res storytelling makes Info Dumping difficult to avoid. It mainly takes the form of Japolo telling an indignant Tiara things she already knows.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The OP video is fluffy, luminous and Moe. The series itself is much darker. The different visual style may be a relic of earlier drafts of the story (when it had more typical magical girl elements,) and were likely related to the staff's decision to use digital animation techniques, which were still pretty experimental in 1996.
• Big Brother Instinct: Kagetsu's protective instinct toward Sara kicks off the plot. He's willing to put the Guardian World at risk to rescue Sara from the Throne of Yord, forcing the authorities there to send agents to retrieve it.
• Blood from the Mouth: Leon, when one of his transformations goes awry.
• Bodyguard Crush: Afflicts 2 of the show's 3 Partners. Leon stoically adores Lena from afar, and Graham got it bad for Tiara.
• Cain and Abel:
  • At home, Tiara and Lena are friends. Now, they are enemies.
  • After everything's fixed, they become friends again.
• Cleavage Window: Tiara is a big winner in the Superpower Lottery, and her payout includes chest size. Her stripperific primary costume uses this trope to show it off.
• Crossover: With Magic User's Club for a one episode OVA.
• Cute Witch: The heroines hail from a magical world, and they are cute. Tiara is a Hotter and Sexier Cute Witch.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Tiara's magic is often dark in color, and her Super Mode is pretty demonic-looking, but this is in no way stigmatized. Tiara is just trying to do the right thing. Whatever that is.
• Dramatic High Perching: The heroines can actually generate their own tall, thin objects to stand on while fighting.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Graham's summoning is basically childbirth via magical portal.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Tiara and Graham's relationship is possibly the most twisted situation in the story, and that's really saying something. Her treatment of him is pretty much a textbook cycle of abuse and reward.
• Eye Motifs: If the Throne of Yord had a form, it would be an eye. There are numerous stylized eye images used represent it, from a giant, multi-colored, eye-shaped stained glass window to a primitive stone carving.
• Fantastic Caste System: Suggestions of this trope with the way Partners are treated. They are Familiars that border on a Servant Race - sapient beings that aren't given the same amount of social worth as the magic users that summon them. In fact, they're highly expendable (that is, unless a magic user treats his/her companion as a true friend.)
• Fictional Sport: There is a recurring image of a marble that changes colors from black to white. The origins episodes reveal the significance of the symbol when characters are seen playing a tabletop game on a vertical board using black and white marbles as game pieces. The mechanics seem similar to Go or Othello in that the pieces switch between black and white.
• Fighting Spirit: Tiara, Lena and Kagetsu can shape their powers into shadowy creatures which they pit against each other.
• Fusion Dance: The final Super Mode - a combination of Tiara and Sara that annihilates itself to set everything right.
• Gigantic Moon: The moon is drawn selectively huge.
• Gratuitous English: The Japanese voices say "Gaadian Waarudo (Guardian World)" instead of "Kōken'nin no sekai".
• Gray-and-Gray Morality: Tiara doesn't really have any real enemies, more like friends with differing goals at different times.
• Homoerotic Subtext: Tiara's muggle friends suggest that the attention she pays to Lena is the result of romantic longing.
• Intertwined Fingers: Tiara and Sara do this at one point. Except it wasn't Sara — it was the Throne of Yord.
• In the Style of: The style of the character design frequently makes viewers think CLAMP was involved in the production of this show, when in fact they weren't. However, the character designer had previously worked on the anime adaptation of Magic Knight Rayearth.
• It Amused Me: The reason why the Throne of Yord does anything. It's eternal, all-powerful, and catatonic most of the time from boredom. It really just liked the idea of having something interesting happen.
  Sara/Throne of Yord: I'm just playing. There's no meaning.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Graham adores Tiara — she is the center of his world. His literal reason for existing is to eliminate anyone or anything that threatens or hinders her, and he is merciless to Tiara's enemies. The trouble is that Graham's definition of "threat" is broad enough to include Kagetsu.
• Love Triangle: Tiara is at the intersection of three overlapping ones: Tiara/Kagetsu/Graham, Tiara/Kagetsu/Lena, and Tiara/Lena/Sara.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Tiara passes out from shock after seeing a Throne of Yord-corrupted Kagetsu threaten to kill her, and wakes up on a sunny hillside with her muggle friends. They chat about their pleasant, mundane hopes for the future, then Tiara wakes in her bed in the middle of the night. And that's not all. It goes at least another layer deeper before Tiara realizes what's going on.
• Magical Girl: Most of them.
• Magical Incantation: There are a variety, with transformation spells being the longest.
• Magic Contract Romance: Deconstructed. The fact that beautiful young women are summoning sometimes handsome young men to be their "Partners" which, despite the name, are distinctly subservient to them doesn't always work out too well.
• Magic Music: As opposed to Tiara's full-contact method of fighting, Lena uses a flute that manipulates a plant-like substance in battle. It's also used in invoking Leon's transformation.
• Marked Change: Tiara, Lena, and Leon all get facial markings when they shift into their Super Mode.
• Mirror Match: On two occasions, the Throne of Yord manifests as a duplicate of Tiara to fight her. Once in her normal form, and again in her Super Mode.
• Mind Rape: The Throne of Yord has a knack for the horrifying and likes pushing people to their limits. For example, when it assumes Tiara's form, then tells her about her personality flaws. Or when it tells Tiara it's in love with her and feels her up in the form of her ex-boyfriend.
• Ms. Fanservice: Tiara bounces her chest, gets a Shower Scene, gets Clothing Damage, gets to zip herself up, has a miniskirt and thigh-high boots, etc.
• Multiple Demographic Appeal: As noted above, the narrative tone is pure Shōjo, full of complex emotions and romance, but there's also a ton of Fanservice and magical combat to appeal to males.
• Nightmare Face:
  • Once, when Sara's face splits open, leaving a black gash running from forehead to ground and a vertically oriented eye appears in the gulf.
  • Again, when Tiara smashes her Doppelgänger's face.
• Nonindicative Name: The Throne of Yord is not a chair, it's a painting — of a landscape with pond. No thrones in sight. And there's more to it than that: the Throne is the all-powerful source of all magic, creator of the Guardian World.
• Painful Transformation: Transformations appear to cause physical pain by default.
• Platonic Cave: The cave is Tiara's perception of her friends. As the show gets into exploring the nature of the "true self," and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is an illusion, who is under outside influence, who's being forced to try to kill her, and who is "genuine". There are multiple exchanges that go more or less like this:
  Tiara: "Are you the real character name here?"
  Other character: "I am me."
• Power Nullifier: Kagetsu is a "neutralizer", meaning he can interrupt the powers of any magic user for a short time. Comes at a price of not having much attacking strength, so he uses a daemon to fight for him.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Tiara (red) and Lena (blue).
• Rescued from the Underworld: Subverted. All the characters fail to rescue Sara from the Throne of Yord. She cannot be saved and does not need saving.
• Rivals Team Up: Tiara and Lena join forces against the Throne of Yord, and even have a heart-to-heart in which they admit that the bad blood between them is fueled by mutual envy.
• Scenery Porn: The highly detailed watercolor backgrounds throughout the show.
• Screw Yourself: While Tiara, as a child, is trying to tame Graham, her "evil" self manifests as a red-skinned (and naked) version of her powered-up form as an adult. It proceeds to grab her and give her a deep kiss.
• Slasher Smile: Tiara directs one at her rival after completing her first Transformation Sequence, made even creepier by her weird eyes. It's one of your first clues that this is not your average Magical Girl anime.
• Smoking Is Cool: Leon smokes and looks cool while doing so. Lena admonishes him for it, but simply because it's illegal for people his age to smoke in the world where they're staying.
• Snow Means Love: It's snowing in Tiara's memories of when she and Kagetsu were together.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The scene in which Sara curb stomps Japolo is accompanied by a sort of lullaby, whose bilingual French/Japanese lyrics read like a Yandere love poem.
• Source Music: The background music is part of the scene when Lena plays her flute.
• Split-Personality Merge: In episode 5, Tiara's uncontrolled magic manifests as a shadowy, seductive Enemy Without which attempts to dominate her. Eventually Tiara realizes its power is a result of her fear, so she asserts herself and shows it who's boss. It merges into Tiara, giving her access to her Super Mode for the first time.
• Swallowed Whole: Leon and Japolo are making a good effort at defending their partners against the Throne of Yord, then it just shoots out some mouth-tentacles and eats them. And they're gone. Without a trace.
• Talking in Your Dreams: Tiara has several cryptic conversations with Sara in her dreams.
• Tears of Blood: Lena cries a bucket-load of blood when she loses her transformation in episode 3. Before that, in that same episode, Leon shed a few.
• Time Stands Still: Partners have the ability to freeze time so their masters can engage in magical battles without attracting muggle attention.