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Magical Girl Hunters
is a dark comedy Round Robin story originally created on Improfanfic. It follows the exploits of a pair of sociopaths, Yoi and Itami, who have established a business killing Magical Girls. Within the context of the story, Magical Girls are being produced at a prodigious rate, to the point where they're running out of original concepts and proper evil enemies. Therefore, some magical girls have decided to branch out into more broad social evils such as polluting corporations. These corporations, unhappy to have their factories trashed by magical forces of goodness occasionally hire Yoi and Itami to rid them of their problems. Occasionally dark forces also hire Yoi and Itami. Some of the dark forces also support their own teams of magical girls... by the end of the story, it's become a grand battle of good and evil and Yoi and Itami are in it for more than just the money.
This series provides examples of:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Kumiko to Yoi. While Yoi admits that he doesn't exactly mind her advances, he just can't get over the fact that she used to be a stone-cold psychopathic Enfant Terrible that tried to brutally murder him.
- Air-Vent Passageway: Yoi's entry and escape into the Mashihaishi Ultra building. He gets lost a few times, but since he runs into others also using the vents (at least one of which has been crawling in them for several years and was engaged to kill the prior owner of the complex), he's able to get directions.
- Back from the Dead: Captain Kawaii, twice. She comes back good the second time, though.
- Black Comedy: Given that the story's told from Yoi's perspective and that it's about brutally killing Magical Girls, there's a lot of it. For one example, there's Sailor H strangling Pretty Marshal Rose to death while discussing with Yoi and Itami how to infiltrate the ones that sent her. Not only do they completely disregard the 9-year-old girl being lifted a couple of feet off the ground and slowly asphyxiated, but her choking is rendered as part of the conversation.
- Blade Enthusiast: Both of the protagonists carry knives because "knives don't jam or run out of ammo" but Itami stands out for preferring to use his knife or sword on the girls they hunt.
- Cape Busters: One appears in a chapter of the story, and enlists Yoi's help. The subsequent debacle makes Yoi realize that, as hard as his job is, it could be a lot worse, because superheroes are even more powerful, and more crazy, than the magical girls.
- Child Soldier: Almost all magical girls are treated as this by whoever empowered them. And, just like with real-life child soldiers, some of them fight for the cause and some just like the license to kill things...
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: The Crayola Knights are sixty-four girls strong. They are summarily butchered over one scene thanks to a Deus ex Machina and never get to fight, talk, or have any character development.
- Dark Magical Girl: Multiple cases. Pretty Deadly and Sailor H are both cases of magical girls who felt abandoned and have thus turned to killing magical girls themselves.
- Ear Worm: Princess Love's Happy Healing Song is treated as this. Neither Yoi nor Itami can take it out of their heads. Much cursing ensues because of this.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Sailor Shoggoths.
- Enemy Within: Yoi has Koi who starts out as a typo in one of the chapters, turns into a split personality, and eventually becomes an independent entity.
- Enfante Terrible: Captain Kawaii is a young magical girl with a penchant for knives, and a Slasher Smile as she puts down evil with them.
- Evil Weapon: Itami wields one of these. When the first one breaks, he acquires another one in short order.
- Gender Bender: Early in the series, Yoi gets turned into a Magical Girl temporarily. One of the "fixes" they acquire makes it permanent. Mai and Kyo provide another example. One is male and one is female. They've forgotten which is which because they tend to switch every time they die.
- Genre Savvy: One of the only ways Yoi and Itami have survived taking on the magical girls is their ability to exploit the aspects of the Magical Girl genre.
- Hunter of His Own Kind:
- Sailor H was initially the Sole Survivor of a team of magical girls that Yoi and Itami went after. She eventually channeled the trauma from her experience into hatred for other magical girls and set out killing them.
- Pretty Deadly was unwillingly turned into a magical girl. After trying and failing to get an assisted suicide from the Magical Girl Hunters, she agreed to work with them instead.
- Incredibly Obvious Bomb: In one of the chapters, Yoi comes back to find a bomb taped to the doorway of the office. In plain view. That has a note on it stating that it is not a bomb.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: The very first scene begins with a Magical Girl making her dramatic entrance, complete with song, and getting headshotted before she can finish the first verse.
- Knight Templar: Due to niche overcrowding, there are magical girls devoted to stopping littering or illegal software downloads. With deadly force if necessary.
- Magical Girl Warrior: Messily deconstructed. Most magical girls are little more than Child Soldiers being used by various factions claiming to be "good", and they tend to be fairly young because children are gullible.
- May–December Romance: Itami/Sailor H, Yoi/Aika.
- More Dakka: The other major reason Yoi and Itami survive their encounters with magical girls is that they have no fear of bringing in heavy weaponry.
- Neck Snap: Used for the second kill in the series. One-handed. With a Neck Lift. Of course, the target is also an 8-year-old girl...
- Of Corpse He's Alive: Pretty Marshal Rose's body is used to sneak their way through a complex.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: After Yoi steals money from Mashihaishi Ultra, he's visited by a very badly disguised youma.It stood there, sorta lopsided, dressed in a trenchcoat... it had a black wig over its head, and under that I could see a cheap plastic mask, of which the lower jaw area had been cut free so the “mouth” could appear to move. The best part, however, was the sloppily-lettered bit of cardboard hanging from its shoulders by a strand of twine, that read, “Me Itami.”
- Pink Mist: Frequent descriptor for headshots on the magical girls.
- Sickeningly Sweet: The magical girls, who generally have excessively saccharine getups that Yoi finds unbearable.
- Sociopathic Hero: Both Yoi and Itami could be considered this. Or possibly Villain Protagonists. They slaughter little girls for money, Itami is a stone-cold killer who's been mentioned to have "played doctor" back in school with real knives, and Yoi is unaware that he is the embodiment of chaos and entropy.
- Suicide by Cop: Aika's first appearance is her showing up at the Hunters' door with a magical girl problem she wants them to deal with. The problem in question is herself. However, Yoi talks her into working for them since she can't afford the price he named.
- Time Stands Still: The duo makes good use of an unexpected time-freeze to dispose of the Crayola Knights. Given that there were sixty-four of them and they were introduced as a very nasty cliffhanger in the previous chapter ("Screw Your Neighbour" was an established policy in the writing at the time), the alternatives would have been less than pleasant.
- Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Necronomicute
- Would Hurt a Child: Yes, we're dealing with magical girls that are extremely dangerous in their own right, but our heroes are still murdering prepubescent girls for a living.
