Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl “Whitewashing” Controversy

Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl is an animated indie series posted on YouTube in 2025 by Kiana Khansmith. The series immediately gained popularity for its unique concept and POC (Person of Color) representation. Its first episode was recently released fully animated, after spending about a year in animatic form, but it has unfortunately been caught in controversy regarding fans “whitewashing” the two lead characters, Aika and Zira, who are POC characters.

The most notable creator to critique the upcoming show - and also be the first person fans think of when it comes to “whitewashing” the main characters - is a creator by the name of Yanimations. Yanimations is a newer storytime animator who created her YouTube channel in 2020, and she recently created a short critiquing the fully animated episode for being “too expressive” and having a slightly different artstyle from the animatic. She also assumed the creator of P.P.P I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl, Kiana Khansmith, and her team were simply inexperienced animators. 

In reality, Kiana had not only been making art years before P.P.P I Don’t Want to be a Magical Girl, but she has also worked with story boards for Disney’s Big City Greens, as well as Steven Universe, and Pokémon: Path to the Peak. On her Yanimations channel, she recorded a speedpaint showing her process for drawing Aika and Zira in the background of the same short in which she made her critiques. Fans quickly noticed that the colors used for their skin tones were incredibly desaturated and gray-toned. After making comparing them to the skin tones used in both the animated and the animatic episodes, fans accused Yanimations of being racist and ‘whitewashing’ the characters. However, to give the benefit of the doubt, Yanimations’ artstyle features a lot of pastel and desaturated tones. It could have simply been a stylistic choice match her usual color pallete, although it remains a very controversial choice.

Yanimations has since made an apology video regarding the situation, but fans don’t like how she seemed to excuse the desaturated colors she used by saying she never went to art school. This has sparked a new trend where artists make POC characters, then suddenly “remember” that they “never went to art school,” and change the skin tone of the character to a desaturated gray color to match Yanimations’ color choices.

Image Courtesy of Elizabeth Babala.