Sofía Reyes Castillo

Sofía Reyes Castillo discovered anime through the afternoon television block her older sister controlled without negotiation. *Sailor Moon* and *Card Captor Sakura* played back to back on Canal 9 in Buenos Aires in 1998, and Sofía was seven years old and immediately invested in a way she wasn't invested in anything else on television. She has spent the intervening years making sense of why those series hit differently, and what the magical girl genre has actually been doing all along beneath the glitter and transformation sequences.

Her MyAnimeList now lists 580 completed entries, weighted heavily toward shojo, magical girl, and josei, though she refuses to describe her interests that narrowly. She is the Spanish-language internet's most-cited voice on the magical girl genre's political and feminist undercurrents — her long essay on *Madoka Magica* as a deconstruction of labor in the idol industry was translated into four languages without her permission, which she considers a compliment. She is also deeply interested in the quieter end of shojo: slice-of-life romance, the Josei works of Natsume Ono, and how Kyoto Animation shaped a certain idea of "beautiful" in TV anime.

Before Otakiva, Sofía maintained a Tumblr-era blog called *Mahou Shoujo Archive* that migrated to Substack in 2020, where it gathered 14,000 subscribers. She has spoken at AnimeXperience Buenos Aires twice.

Her personal top five: *Puella Magi Madoka Magica*, *Card Captor Sakura*, *Fruits Basket* (2019), *Nana*, and *A Silent Voice*.

Based in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Contact: [email protected].