What Do You Think of When...

I'm going to restart my forum. I've been attempting to run a generalized anime and role playing forum for five years now, and recently, it's been completely dead. Plus there ancient posts from when I attempted to merge my first forum into it from archive.org. It's a mess, it's ugly, and it's dead. I've decided that I'm going to purchase XenForo for the forum experience. There's just too many great interface feelz for me to ignore. Quite frankly, I think I've fallen in love with the software experience. After all, I'm here posting, instead of on my own forum.. but then again, shouting into the Void isn't all that satisfying anyway.

Um, to the point of this post. I'm going to focus my niche on magical girl anime, because I've been a fan probably since before I knew what anime even was. Ranma 1/2 was my first anime experience, and technically, that could be considered magical girl, if only because of the Jusenkyo Curse transformations, but also the Ki-powered marital arts is sort of magical in its own rite. Not to mention the strong relationship chaos/building that's going on in the background. Then came Tenchi Universe. And I got my first taste of Magical girl through one of the Adventures in Time and Space with Pretty Sammy's cameo appearance. Ah! My Goddess could technically fall into this category as well-- magic, divinity, relationships.

But the crown of my experience has been Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. I fell head-over-heels for this anime when it was first suggested to my back on my first forum over a decade and a half ago, and it's still going strong! I'd be in denial if I tried to create an online community for anything else.

I can still do the role playing aspect as well, especially because I do enjoy the possibilities that magical girls bring to a table (digital, virtual, or physical). And I'll because I actually like the domain name I've purchased, and I have access to like 50 or was it 500 subdomains? Anyway, I need help brainstorming! And I'd rather use a community of people's assistance than something like DeepSeek or ChatGPT.

Honestly, I could go with just nanoha.[redacted].com but, I don't want to fall into the same trap that I experienced with my first forum. It started out as a fan-shrine dedicated to Princess Ayeka, and then grew into a solid Tenchi Muyo community. But as my exposure in other anime expanded, I found myself boxed in. I don't want the same thing to happen again, and I feel that magical girls as an entire genre, one that I absolutely adore, would give me plenty of breathing room for expansion. Not to mention that this is on a subdomain of my main site, which I'll probably repurpose into a ... I don't know, a repository for role playing games or something?

I could also go with something generic like magicalgirl.[redacted].com, but I feel that this name would just be... boring? But I'm thinking, there might be other words or names that I could use that other fans of magical girl anime would know? I know there's mahou shoujo, but maybe something else would be better?

What do you think of when you hear the term magical girl?

Yes, kind of like that. You'd create a fictional character, either based on one you've seen on TV, in a movie, or in a book, OR you'd create a persona out of your imagination, or maybe a repressed personality quirk that you find fascinating.. Essentially, on a forum, any role play [game] just turns out to be a story that multiple people write in turn.

I hate to say it, but I have yet to find any hobby that doesn't cost any money. We do hobbies for the Pursuit of our Happiness. Otherwise, life just becomes boring.

And, it's true that the amount of time that people are spending on forums has declined over the years, but I think with the censorship and relentless advertising that is currently happening on the mega-platforms, I'm beginning to see more people inquire about old-school forums. So perhaps we'll see a Renaissance of participation?

I know that my hobby of forum administration is increasing from about $150 / year to like $300 / year. But, I'm going to end up with an awesome, clean, sleek, and attractive site. I've already found a possible theme producer, PixelEdit, I think, makes really nice looking themes. I've got a few ideas for a site-motto, now I just need to figure out what I want to do for a banner-- and I'll probably hire somebody to create one, because being partially color-blind sucks for graphics work.