A while back I had an odd notion that if I ever had the occasion to write a webcomic, I wanted to do a magical girl that teams with a mecha, because I don't think I've seen those genres sharing space before. I gave it very little thought beyond that, since the chances were low of me falling in with a would-be webcomic artist looking for a writer. This was before I learned that these days, webcomic writers are just going out and hiring artists outright, rather than all of the writer/artist pairs being pre-existing friends.
However, once I got into the erotica game and starting thinking about ideas beyond "Interview", this one eventually floated back to the surface. I realized I could use my old webcomic concept for this instead. All I needed to do was polish it up and add sex. That actually helped a lot, because monster-of-the-week genre stuff always has some sort of B-plot in each episode to balance out the fighting, and coming up with the B-plots is much easier and more fun when I can build them around a sex scene.
Eventually I starting thinking about the project less as the webcomic I would never write and more as the anime I would never write. Anime porn is only done as direct-to-video releases of course, but it's the genre shows of television anime that brought us the tropes that I'm making such good use of. So instead of chapters, I'm calling these "episodes", and I was quite delighted when my plot ideas coalesced into 13 of them, matching the typical length of a 1-cour series.
Once I had decided to use presentation elements evoking an actual TV anime show, I kind of wanted to have theme songs too, but I'm no songwriter and I wasn't about to listen through hundreds of random songs looking for something that would fit. But then one day out of nowhere, a two-word phrase popped into my head, and I thought that if I could find a song with those two words in the lyrics, it would be a song I could use. One Google search later, I found a song that not only contains the two words, they are its title, and the song turned out to be all too perfect for the story (it's the ending theme). Then I started poking at other songs from the same band, and unbelievably from the very same album I got everything I needed.
Of course one of the most important things about a magical girl is her costume. The decision to use the cheerleader theme was inspired by Sailor Moon, which used the Japanese "serafuku" school uniforms as the basis for their costumes. Cheerleaders are an easily recognized schoolgirl role with a general appearance that is recognized throughout the United States (and I guess Japan too), and I couldn't recall seeing a cheerleader magical girl before. This also helped with her characterization, since a stereotypical cheerleader provides a splendid contrast and counterpoint to a stereotypical nerd anime fan who suddenly becomes a mecha pilot.
Of course I needed to be able to describe Cheer Raider's costume in the story, so to help visualize it, I went looking through various internet cheerleader supply stores. Then I got the urge to do a little photoshop work so I could actually see it in front of me. That led to even more photoshop work like the series logo, the pony magical girl familiar, and Panther's unfolding axe. All of which and more I put together into the opening theme video, because I am insane apparently.