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No. 75511
>>75505
Actually, the origins of the magical girlfriend go back to ur-time. Man-"taming"-magical-woman-into-wife (who then assists him in his adventures) is a fairly common fairy tale trope that is generally presumed to be a facet of the Levi-Straussian-identified female<->nature/the animal male<->culture dichotomy of myth, and like all fairy tales most likely served as a subconscious enforcement of the norms of all society up to pretty much this point (i.e. completely patriarchal.) In a substantial amount of fable and myth, a prevalent theme is that a women without a man (usually a husband) to guide her is both powerful (threatening) and if not explicitly wicked then at least dangerous (uncontrollable). It's only when the male either disposes of her or wins/earns her servitude that her magic becomes beneficial - the really, really obvious metaphor for the cultural ideal what women should be under men, made even more obvious by the fact that fairy tales' magical assistants are almost always animals (to be domesticated, as is "man's right") or women (to be domesticated, as was and still is in many places "man's right") You can always find some, but human male magical assistants are few and far between and generally don't stick around in the story.
The male relationship with the female in stories before the modern era can generally be sorted in to two types - women are frail and must be controlled to save them from the world around them (chivalry) or women are primitive and must be controlled to save them from themselves (hysteria). Magical girlfriends were one of the foremost examples of type 2, which is reflected in modern tropes today - one of the most common plot devices in magical girlfriend stories is that either she won't control her powers (Lum's comedic abuse) or can't control her powers (Jeannie's comedic mishaps). Women who are in complete control of their powers and are not romantically attached to a man in some way are more often than not villains.
(To go on a tangent, my personal theory, though I'd have to do more research to back it up, is that this is why Western female superheroes don't really get Lois Lane-equivalents that are memorable or stick around for long and pretty much exclusively date other male superheroes - after millennia of stories where powerful women always end up tamed, relationships where a woman holds all the power and the man none end up feeling weird to us, and unlike Japanese audiences the Western audience is not so amenable to the whole "it's okay because she devotes her everything to him because she's just so in loooove" thing that generally negates the power imbalance in anime/manga.)
Though that's not to say there are no exceptions to all of these things! Belldandy and pretty-much-all-female-cast anime/manga series come to mind. And while it certainly is based on misogyny, it's becoming less so now that women are getting on on the action and leveling the playing field with their reverse-harem mangas and shiny supernatural boyfriends.
Sorry for the unasked infodump. I wrote a paper about this just recently, so it was on automatic recall.
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