This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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“If I round up, I’m basically 30.”

Well folks, I’ll admit it. I’ve basically been had.

That’s dramatic, but it was legitimately my first thought upon sitting down to write this piece. Where to begin? I’ve gone to bat for Magical Destroyers, even as I’ve gone back and forth over whether or not I thought the show was actually, you know, any good. Now that it’s over, we can settle the question with a definitive “no.” It’s not even the high-speed trainwreck some might’ve been hoping for. Taken on the whole, it is simply bad in a broadly disappointing way that feels all too familiar in the present anime landscape. Embarrassingly, this series—not the rightly polarizing but unquestionably effective Heavenly Delusion, not the relentlessly dramatic second season of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, not even the low-stakes fun of Dead Mount Death Play, but this series—is what I’ve written about most of the Spring 2023 anime crop. (Other than Oshi no Ko, at least.) This is embarrassing not because the show is bad, but because I let myself be taken in enough by its occasional moments of brilliance—moments that are real, and genuine, but do not do enough to justify the mediocrity around them—that I was convinced it would pull everything together in the finale somehow. That didn’t happen. Spoiler alert.

I won’t flagellate myself over this mistake, if it can be called one. Sometimes anime just aren’t any good, and if you go into every anime expecting it to eventually become the best version of itself—and I generally do—you’re going to sometimes be disappointed. That’s just how the game goes. I might feel worse if I had a larger audience and had inspired legions of people to watch this, but I didn’t. To be honest, I don’t think much of anybody, inside Japan or out, watched Magical Destroyers. Nonetheless, because I was so convinced I’d eventually be vindicated, I feel something of an obligation to try and take the show apart and see why, specifically, it doesn’t work. Because I do think that much of what little criticism of Magical Destroyers there has been has been misaimed, in that it assumes that this is an idea that could never create a good or even great TV show. I don’t agree with that, I think Magical Destroyers had many opportunities to be brilliant, and more than one chance to salvage things once they started going off the rails. It blew almost all of those opportunities, which is, in my mind, worse.

But we’re starting with the conclusion, here. It’s probably best to lay out what Magical Destroyers actually is, for those of you just joining us. Here’s the very short version; Magical Destroyers is an admittedly novel fusion of magical girl trappings and some stylish red-and-black anarchist chic paint with what I’ve taken over the past few years to calling the otaku action anime subgenre. It ends up doing rather little with this fusion, but that’s the general idea.

About the otaku action anime microgenre. These shows, of which there are only a small handful, are all broadly similar; they combine the general highs and the structure of action anime with a premise that asks what would happen if society’s general dislike of the weird and socially awkward—specifically in the form of otaku themselves—were actively persecuted, like a dissident political movement. It’s an indulgent thought experiment, to be sure, but as I said back when this show premiered, it’s not a wholly irrelevant question. In the US alone, bans on artistic expression designed to catch minorities in their net are a real thing, and have been an ongoing issue especially this year specifically. Extrapolating from stuff like that into a full-on nerdocide is still pretty out-there, but it’s not entirely crazy. Especially if the show in question actually does something with that connection. Magical Destroyers really doesn’t, but other anime in this subgenre occasionally have, most notably 2021’s Rumble Garanndoll and its direct line-drawing between hatred of “undesirable” subcultures and out-and-out fascism, an observation that is actually pretty on point. (The other entry in the genre that sticks closest to this model is Akiba’s Trip. Not as good as Rumble Garanndoll but still decent, certainly. Slightly farther out, dealing in different specifics, are the second half of Anime-Gataris, undersung metafiction clusterfuck Re:Creators, and emotional fireworks display The Rolling Girls. All of these are better than Magical Destroyers, some significantly so.)

Magical Destroyers’ twist on the formula is that the otaku are being persecuted by a dictatorial being named Shobon, a man with a TV displaying a (•ω•) face for a head, and his army of similarly-decorated troops. They round up otaku and put them in reeducation camps and confiscate their stuff. It’s all a big to-do. But of course, there is a rebel army, led by our protagonist Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], and aided by his three weed-smoking girlfriends¹, the magical girls Anarchy Red, Blue, and Pink [Fairouz Ai, Aimi, and Tomoyo Kurosawa]. I’m being glib because the specifics really aren’t important here. The first half of the series follows a broad threat-of-the-week format that it mostly (but not entirely) manages to make work. The first three episodes are legitimately pretty great, especially the second with its Pepto Bismol-pink psychedelia, and if that were all there was of the show I would think fairly highly of it.

Unfortunately we hit our first major obstacle soon after, with a truly tasteless fanservice-focused episode. Things pick up somewhat again after that, but the show becomes markedly spotty from there on out.² Throughout, it often threatens to make a greater point beyond its core slogan—and slogan really is the only appropriate term for the constant repetition and variations on the phrase “people should be able to like what they like”—but always backs away when that would jostle the show’s status quo. This is an absolutely bizarre approach for an anime about a group of rebels fighting against an oppressive government to take. Forget any specifics here, this is just bad writing in the broadest sense possible.

Sometimes, it gets by on audacity, style, or weirdness. The show’s visual quality is inconsistent, but the episodes that look good can stand up to anything else from this season. The aforementioned episode 2, along with a few other highlights, namely episodes 9 and 11, are full-on standouts. In addition, the show’s stylish, post-modern take on the whole “bank system” idea, where certain elaborate sequences are made to be reused many times throughout the course of a show’s run, is pretty great. All three magical girls have really great henshin sequences that we get to see a few times, and they have similarly fun attacks that really pop, despite the fact that we only get to see a majority of them once or twice each.

The character writing is similarly of variable quality, but Anarchy, who serves as a secondary protagonist, is great when given proper opportunity to shine. She’s a loud-mouthed hothead with a showoffy streak and a sensitive side that she reserves for (of course) Otaku Hero himself. It’s nothing revolutionary, despite the show’s posturing, but it’s decently compelling stuff. (Blue is also fairly entertaining, if one-note. I could imagine being offput by her, but to me the idea of gender-flipping the “moron pervert who is unfortunately a protagonist” character archetype is actually pretty funny. Pink, a druggie who can only speak in the phrase “gobo gobo”, is much less compelling.) Even Otaku Hero himself isn’t a bad character per se. Despite the vibes that the show’s 1 guy 3 girls setup might give off, he doesn’t really feel like a harem series protagonist, and doesn’t much feel like a self-insert or otherwise generic either. He can even almost spit some decent rhetoric in the show’s better episodes. But again, any time the show has to get more specific than “people should be able to do what they want,” it backs off, and this kneecaps everything about the series, top to bottom. For much the same reason, the crowd of nerds who make up the Otaku Revolutionary Army is pretty narrow, too. They’re uniformly—and specifically—Somewhat Unattractive™ Dudes From Japan, with the only exceptions being Pink’s band of nightclub warriors and literally two (count ’em, 2) indie idols we see join the ORA’s ranks later on. Even the show’s visual style isn’t all-upsides. There are episodes that look outright bad, and even the good ones are often extremely homage-heavy, which can be a good or at least fun thing, but we aren’t talking about Kill la Kill here. Magical Destroyers does have style, but it doesn’t have enough to make that approach work.

Really, the fact that I’m having to get so specific and caveat-heavy with the show’s positives says a lot on its own, doesn’t it? You could say things like this for any anime that’s not truly terrible. And that’s really the issue, Magical Destroyers isn’t truly terrible, and I’ll probably never actually dislike it. I like too much about what it could’ve been for that, and what the show actually is feels too slight to warrant hatred. But that doesn’t put it above the level of, say, The Detective is Already Dead, another anime I’ve fostered a somewhat inexplicable even to myself attachment to despite it being fairly mediocre.

So to round us out, the question must be asked; what was Magical Destroyers actually trying to do, if anything? Be a real rallying point for otaku counterculture? Establish a lasting multimedia series that would persist well after the anime itself is over? Just simply be a good action anime with more highs than lows? It accomplishes none of this. Which is a shame, because there’s some real love in this thing if you know where to look. Certain individual animators and episode directors clearly cared a lot about the show’s visual angle, and most of the voice talent turn in good to great performances, especially Ai Fairouz, who, when she gets the chance to truly chew scenery as Anarchy, is just as unstoppable here as she was as Power in Chainsaw Man last year. Unsurprisingly, this combined with the fact that Anarchy is actually decently-written makes her the show’s best character by far. Looking back on the first two episodes I’m left to wonder if the show wouldn’t be more coherent if they focused on her a little more. It’s hard to go wrong with such a delightful little firecracker.

But again, none of this ever comes together to present any kind of coherent theme. The fact that I’ve seen all twelve episodes and couldn’t really tell you what the show is about on any level except the most literal is kind of a problem! “People should be able to like what they like” is a reddit comment, not a core thesis you can hitch your whole show on! This is to say nothing of the whole kerfuffle involving Origin in the show’s final arc, the goddess who it seems to present as sort of an ur-anime viewer. This idea is simply not around long enough to ever be developed in a really coherent way, and it ends up being just another extraneous idea that the show briefly plays with but doesn’t actually engage with in any meaningful way.

But perhaps the most telling problem with Magical Destroyers is not anything obvious. It’s how the show treats youth as a concept. One of the very, very few coherent thematic lines through the series comes from Otaku Hero getting older. This article’s lead-in quote is from him, reflecting on his life in his last moments as he’s killed by the now-evil magical girls in the final episode, the climax of a conclusion so pointless as to feel deliberately insulting. On the one hand; same, buddy, I’m 29 myself. But there is something genuinely dark and offputting about this alluded-to notion that it’s better to die as a young otaku than to live to be an old one. It’s also complete bullshit! I personally know more than one person still active in the fandom who is over 60, and those people have stories! Stories that matter and are interesting! The only positive gesture in this direction are the characters of the Kanda River Squad. Their big character moment is to engage in a pissing contest with the young’ns about whether or not they’re “real” otaku all the way back in the loathsome fourth episode of this show. It’s pretty dire that all this is the only coherent theme to be pulled out of this series, other than it’s incredibly weak sloganeering.

In another lifetime, Magical Destroyers could have been something truly special. Maybe there, its talk of revolution isn’t all only just that and it actually has some bite to it. Maybe there it’s more even, maybe it has stronger writing, maybe it has the self-awareness to call out problems within the otaku subculture too, and not just pretend everything is a black-and-white us vs. them scenario. But of course, this thing we’re constructing, an anime about four real revolutionaries whose adoption of anarchist rhetoric is more than costume-deep, is not actually Magical Destroyers; it’s a dream on a cloud. It’s easy to say how things might have been different. And as I always say, you review the anime you watch, not the one you wish existed.

Magical Destroyers, as it exists, is a sign of an anime industry in a fairly dire place. Sure, it’s still better than the lukewarm backwash of the isekai boom, and it’s too ridiculous to be in any real way morally repugnant, but, really don’t you want more out of your anime?

Maybe I’m just getting old—as I said, Otaku Hero and I seem to be about the same age—but at some point, watching things like this just becomes depressing. It’s not the worst anime of all time or anything, and it’s not even the worst I’ve seen this year, but it is one of the most pointless. There’s something to be said for being memorably weird, and Destroyers definitely at least clears that bar, but maybe that’s not always enough to make a show worth watching on its own. In the end, there’s not really anything for anybody here. Other than the lingering suspicion that these girls deserved better.

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^{1: This is a joke, of course. There is no actual weed usage in the show, since that would require actually pushing the envelope. God forbid an anime with a loose “anarchy” theme be on the same level of transgression as A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, an anime from 11 years ago.}

^{2: I feel the need to point out that I briefly consulted Wikipedia to check my episode order was correct here. In doing so, I noticed that no one has uploaded titles or descriptions for the last two episodes, proving that even the diligent Anime Wikipedia community is having trouble staying invested with this one.}

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