Meanwhile mainstream animation was created all over the place Recently, the indie scene has had a bit of a moment as new projects have emerged and courted online attention. In addition to Glitch’s Knights of Guinevere, one of the big animation scene stealers of 2025 is Pretty Please, I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl, whose second episode aired over the weekend.

Created by artist Kiana Khansmith, the series centers on 15-year-old Aika, who abandons the superhero life to try to become a regular teenage girl. He’s barely begun to think about what it’s like when his old life calls: his star-shaped guardian Hoshi wants him to return home, and to make matters worse, his nemesis Eclipse is back, intent on continuing their old dynamic.

Instead of running away or shrugging it off, Aika finds herself pulled back into the life of her geeky friend Zira, who can’t help but fall for it all. By extension, Aika is part of it too—even if it puts her in danger.

With that description, you can easily imagine the rest of the show taking shape, which may be the point: despite its title, Pretty Please, I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl currently doesn’t seem to want to slap its own genre around or do any kind of deconstruction. The part about Aika reveling in otherworldly teenage experiences like tests and bad cafeteria food is as sincere as the time she fights a monster that ruins her day.

Whatever the details that made him walk away from his old life-it seems less rooted in any incident than the usual burning, because he leads a group of magical heroes-his desire to return to the ordinary world instead of escaping it makes for a fun change that usually comes in stories like this.

He gets help from that through Zira and Hoshi, and the three of them find a fun dynamic almost immediately thanks to the performances of their individual actors. The show is consistently funny and feels good for general audiences without tipping to be too mature every time it swears. (The pilot got off a GREAT (use “fuck” to stick in your head for a while.)

Khansmith also worked on the Disney series Big City Greens, and it is easy to see the overlap between these two series; even if you don’t notice Greens in the past, he believes that you see something similar in the young characters, so the jokes in each episode come at a good clip and never feel out of place in the world he sets up.

Unlike other popular indie animations, THE Pretty Please Episodes are composed of storyboards, which are often used to preview later elements such as animation and camera positioning. It asks viewers to do a little more mental work than usual when watching, and Khansmith admits it will save him more time and money rather than going for full animation, but it doesn’t capture how well the production is done. His boards are clean, the actions of the characters are very clearly defined, and the performances of the cast are so well tuned that it suits the favor of the show and gives it a certain charm. And the one moment where the pilot’s full animation is deployed is well-timed, very funny, and hints at what the show could do if expanded into a full production.

Online audiences seem to be there took a light on Pretty Please, I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl, thanks in part to Khansmith’s engagement with his community and consistently releases doodles of characters hanging or developed his mythology. He meets his people where they are, and they’re sure to sing their praises for the show far and wide, which helps explain why Mercury Filmworks—whose credits include Centaurworld and The Ghost and Molly McGee—had gone in to fully revive the pilot.

Whether that’s a soft launch for an entire series or just a nice one-and-done, Pretty Please clearly has the potential to be as big as Khansmith wants and deserves any spotlight it gets.

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