In the battle to see which magical girl anime could hit the bottom first for dealing out sensationalist violence without substance, this one is a strong contender for victor unless it actually does have some point other than misery. What did you think of this first episode?
Other than Killing Stalking and the occasional BL manga, I haven’t had to issue content warnings on most the stuff I cover because I either don’t directly discuss or show the truly horrific parts or because most of the stuff I watch uses the violence and misery it presents for some actual narrative purpose (King’s Game was probably an exception but you really couldn’t take that seriously even if you were trying to). And now we have this ‘Magical Girl Site’ which from start to finish during the first episode manages to be a bottomless pit of the worst attributes of human nature with little to redeem it or to even make you think this has some other point other than the writer was wondering how much suffering he could inflict on his protagonist (maybe the writer was female, I don’t really care).
I don’t actually mind seeing protagonists put through some horrific events, but usually that is because challenges help them grow, develop, find some hidden talent, make them realise some weakness in themselves, or something. There’s usually something. Even a power of friendship message might have been nice here, trite though that is. But no, we get to see Aya tormented, abused, threatened, assaulted, ignored, and generally treated as sub-human by every single person in her life. Literally every person in this show is scum. That includes every bystander in her classroom and the teacher that openly ignored the harassment that is being carried out.
And Aya herself is horrible. There’s no other way to describe her. She kills two people (accidentally of course as she gains a magical power she has no control over) and her first thoughts are of self-preservation and denial of guilt. Not one instant of actual guilt for killing them. All of her trauma is because she doesn’t want to suffer punishment for their deaths. This is after she’s spent the first however long it was telling us she wants to die. As much as she’s in a horrible situation, and the people who died really don’t deserve much in the way of sympathy, a single moment of thought for them may have helped me care a smidge for protagonist girl. Or, you know, any act that seemed like she was genuinely trying to overcome any of the situation rather than just trudging along and accepting it. This isn’t bullying she is suffering from. These are criminal and violent acts being inflicted upon her.
So this should probably hit my dropped list and yet part of me really wants to see if this show is going to sink lower or whether all of this misery is actually going to end up serving some narrative purpose other than just seeing how much the audience can endure of watching this.
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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Happy you didn’t immediately shut this one down once it started getting more graphic and actually watched the whole thing.
I’ve recently came across back to back MGS reviews that didn’t even make it ten minutes in.
I can understand that. Some people have no interest in viewing this kind of subject matter. I do more or less the same thing to most comedies. I make it to the first ‘joke’ and kill the stream.
So far, all I can say that this may be more violent compared to Magical Girl Raising Project. Truly the age where the mild magical girl genre is now evolving to something sinister and twisted is now upon is. I just hope this series will have a good ending for the main characters as a consolation prize for all her sufferings.
If they wanted to go that path, they may have tried to make her more sympathetic. She comes off as pathetic but they do very little to make the audience care about her or her situation.
I keep putting off watching this because, judging by all the pieces that have come out about it since the first episode aired, it sounds irredeemable. Dark shows can be great but there needs to be a point to it rather than being solely torture porn and abject misery.
That said, it is hard to know one episode in whether they plan to get to a point, which is why I’m going to watch a bit more. Still, I wouldn’t exactly encourage people to try this at this point.
This makes me remember Gantz where you have shocking scenes just for the shocking effect… Nothing more!! Although I ended up watching it all because of… Let’s see if this continue as bad as been… Well, it did lolol