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The story
A thread titled “Is there demand for female-only power battle stories?” popped up on 5ch’s Niche Speed VIP board, and in response to the OP’s question, posters kept naming real works one after another. With titles like Witch Wars, Part 6 of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, ViVid Strike!, Hayate x Blade, Welcome to Busu World (“busu” = slang for “ugly girl”), Issho Senkin, and Blue Wolfs all coming up, the conversation drifted from “is there even demand for this” to “isn’t this genre already a thing.” Along the way the thread veered into tangents about how the powers work and jokes about periods and menopause — more a show-and-tell of existing titles than an actual debate.
What people said
Witch Wars, for one
Huh, the art style's pretty serious, not moe at all
True
Though the prison guards were guys
Yep, they can
Their powers let them suppress it
2D bishoujo don't have periods (dead serious)
I guess magical girls count as power battles in the broad sense
ViVid Strike!?
Haven't watched it so I can't say if it's the same vibe, but the protagonist is pretty gritty
Personifying and bishoujo-ifying everything is basically Cool Japan culture at this point
That's a super recent one
The art style's unique, I like it
A Chinese company once turned Korean historical figures into a bishoujo game and it blew up into a huge controversy
Japan's the only place where turning anything into a cute girl gets welcomed with open arms
Even in Japan, people would probably balk if it was a Chinese company doing it
Oh, it doesn't exist yet?
Guess I'll be the pioneer then
https://tadaup.jp/AVHTGOPc.png
That's a crude name tag
Dirty Soul Eater
Fire, water, wind, earth, wood, darkness, light, and 'no powers' are already taken — what other clichéd powers are there?
In the Five Elements you're missing metal
Menopause never comes up
Even the teachers are all young
Googled it but nothing matching came up
Lol, not a single one of these has a cute art style
That's more women's fighting manga than power battle
They've got superhuman abilities, but only within the bounds of fighting — no flying or anything like that
I see. The more grounded ones are nice too
It's an old one, but I was pretty into Tetsufuu
For a lighter-on-powers female battle series, Hayate x Blade fits that too
The art style's cute, nice
I like it, but Hayate's a sexual harasser and Ayana's an abusive husband
And there's another sexually-harassing woman who's the awful comic relief
You mean they get sent to the battlefield?
Some get sent to the battlefield, others get turned into vegetables as research subjects
Using your powers at all shaves off your lifespan to begin with, so even if you try to live out a quiet retirement you end up dying young anyway
Some join the resistance and get killed by state-employed powered agents — basically everyone dies of something different, one way or another
And the teachers end up going insane and killing themselves
So living out your college years as a powered person is basically a hopeless stretch of time
What a rough future to look forward to
In this socialist state, becoming a powered person gets your family a pardon, so there are real upsides
Everyone enrolls with the mindset of 'if I'm going to live crawling at the bottom of society anyway, I might as well live a short but intense life'
The teachers, though, fully understand that inner conflict and the life waiting for these kids afterward, which is why they end up breaking down
By the way, the 'college' comparison was just to convey how rare it is relative to the real world — the actual setting in the story is high school
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Even under the umbrella term “power battle,” the titles raised in the thread actually split into two broad categories: supernatural/magic-based works like Witch Wars and ViVid Strike!, and works with superhuman elements that still stay within the bounds of straight fighting, like Issho Senkin and Blue Wolfs. One reply drew a distinction, calling the latter group “women’s fighting manga rather than power battles,” and where to draw that genre line became the real sticking point of the discussion. The thread also touched on personification/bishoujo-ification culture, citing a case where a similar project sparked backlash overseas while suggesting “Japan is uniquely receptive to this” — but that’s just one thread’s impression, not survey data on actual public reception. All the titles mentioned are real, but the finer plot details (such as powers shortening one’s lifespan) are fictional conceits, not claims backed by any real-world basis.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary of the 5ch (Niche Speed VIP) thread “Is there demand for female-only power battle stories?“
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