Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

---

Somehow, this is a genre. I can only think of a few off the top of my head—2021’s Rumble Garandoll, 2017’s Akiba’s Trip, 2015’s The Rolling Girls, arguably Anime-Gataris, also from 2017 counts too—but it’s a real, if small phenomenon, one without a defined name, at least over here in the Anglosphere. I tend to call them otaku action shows; anime that cast the social divide between the hardcore nerds of the world and “normal people” (no one is actually “normal,” but that’s another subject) as a real source of actual, physical conflict. What would happen, they often ask, if society’s dislike of people who are just generally weird or are into things considered unacceptable, turned truly ugly?

It’s a bit of a loaded question. And I’ve never seen one of these anime that properly grapples with it, although Rumble Garandoll, with its art-hating fascist antagonists, came pretty close. The general premise of these things always sounds like paranoid nerd persecution fantasy bullshit when you spell it out; yeah man, what if they rounded up people who liked anime or kinky porn or J-pop or whatever and put us all in camps? That sure would suck. Thankfully, it doesn’t really happen. Nonetheless, that doesn’t inherently make the question these things are asking worthless, and while they tend to be very campy, they’re almost never intended to just be jokes; something can be silly but still ask serious questions. And honestly, as someone who is both part of an actively under attack minority in the country I live in (I’m transgender) and who is also a huge nerd, I find the comparison to be less nonsensical and offensive than it might appear at first glance. That’s not to say that Magical Destroyers, the first anime from fashion designer, A$AP Rocky acquaintance, and aspiring auteur Jun Inagawa, is necessarily the first of its genre to actually successfully thread this needle, but it’s going to make an honest go of it. That counts for something, even if not everything here works. (I’ll say upfront I mostly really liked this first episode, but a small handful of the gags cross lines I wish they wouldn’t. Hopefully there will be less of that going forward.)

The premise here is dead simple, and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the second half of Akiba’s Trip or any part of Rumble Garanndoll. One day, out of the blue, an army of mysterious Bad Guys yanks all of Japan’s otaku media off the shelf and starts rounding people up. Despite their hilariously stupid owo masks, these guys mean business, and things get bad fast.

Naturally, this spurs the country’s otaku to revolution, hoisting a black-and-red flag over the next several years as their chief organizer and leader Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], one of our protagonists and the only guy among them, turns the Resistance from dream to reality, and his people capture Akihabara from the tyrants, who go by the name “the Shobon Army.”

But that’s the past. By the time we’re flung back to the present, three years have passed, and the Resistance is in shambles. Things are looking bleak, and at his wits’ end, Otaku Hero quits his position as the informal rebel leader upon learning that an entire patrol, including one of his elite “magical girl” soldiers, Blue, has been captured. This does not sit well with Anarchy [Ai Fairouz], his de facto second-in-command, obvious love interest (yeah, this one’s straight. Sorry yuri soldiers) and another one of the magical girls in question. Minutes later, we find out that the government is launching an operation to snuff out the remnants of the otaku resistance. Things are bleak, and Anarchy and Hero have a bit of a fight over the future of the resistance.

It’s worth pausing for a moment here to consider the other genre that Magical Destroyers draws heavily from. It’s not a secret that the show is also working with magical girl material. Specifically, the genre’s latter-day format as being primarily about superpowered magical warriors fighting off the forces of evil. Some of the marketing pushed this angle hard enough that I can imagine some people being burned by the presence of a male co-lead at all, but Otaku and Anarchy get about equal billing, and despite a scene where she breaks down over his departure, it’s eventually her own act of courage—raising the otaku flag over the apartment complex that the resistance is camped out in—that convinces him to take up leadership again.

If that were all she did, I might still think Anarchy’s role in this story is a bit reduced from what it should be. But then, in the latter half of the episode, she basically takes over entirely, and Magical Destroyers goes from having a solid premiere to having an absolutely great one.

There’s a pretty amazing meta non-twist here, in fact. For most of the first episode we don’t actually see Anarchy use any of her powers, and given that the marketing was already a little misleading (much of it left out Otaku Hero entirely), it’s easy to assume that the “magical girls” here aren’t actually such at all, that magic doesn’t even exist in this setting, and that they’re all just cosplayers Batman-ing around with explosives or whatever. Then, we cut back to a scene we were shown devoid of context as a cold open, where Anarchy dives out of a plane to assault the otaku prison, and does so without a parachute. Then, this happens.

It is well and truly a moment, one of the year’s best so far, and if Magical Destroyers never reaches that high again, it would maybe still be worth it just for the 30 or so seconds that her henshin sequence lasts. Anarchy in all-business mode is an absolute powerhouse, and while Fairouz’ performance does a lot to sell the character’s more outlandish aspects, they arguably don’t need selling. After a solid 20 minutes where Anarchy seems, honestly, like all talk and no walk, it’s insanely refreshing to see just how much she’s actually bringing to the table. As she fights, her dynamic with Otaku Hero starts making a kind of sense; you can think of them respectively as the brawn and the brains of the Otaku Resistance’s operation. They’re complimentary forces.

They do eventually find and rescue Blue of course. (Who is tied up in bondage gear, one of the episode’s iffier jokes that gets pushed further over the line and back into genuinely funny territory when we find out that the reason she got caught in the first place is that she was catfished and wanted to hook up with someone she met online.) The episode’s triumphant coda leaves a lot of possible angles for the series to explore, and while it’s certainly always possible that something like this will crash and burn, I’m actually pretty confident that Magical Destroyers will remain worth watching. There’s a substance to this style, an order to the chaos, and a method to the madness.

---

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.