Tag: Magical Destroyers

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

The Year in Magic: Looking Back on the Anime, and Beyond, of 2023

I am getting a little tired of talking about how tough my life is, so I’m going to skip most of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know things have been complicated around here lately. I bring it up at all only to explain why the format is so different from last year’s Year-End List. This year slipped through my fingers, so I have not had the time, energy, or frankly the desire to concoct a nice and neat worst-to-best list like I did last year and in 2020. To be honest, it’s just also felt like a particularly mediocre year for anime. Certainly it’s the weakest since I started this blog.

That said, a brief Top 5 like I did in 2021 also felt inadequate. So, instead of a carefully curated list where I weigh all of my options intelligently, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos. This is less of a curated list and more of a sideways data dump. Some of these things have been written for a while, and are only finding a home here. Others are new. Some are very long, and some are quite brief. Length has no correlation to quality here; there were a few things that I really liked but could only summon up brief takes on (or none at all, in a couple cases, but we’ll touch on that again at the bottom of the article).

Furthermore; the entries here are not in any particular order beyond a favorite being at the top (which is actually the bottom because that’s how listicles work). They’re still mostly anime that came out this year, but some of them, as the title implies, aren’t anime at all, and a few of these things are—gasp—not even from Japan. Instead of worrying so much about format and qualifiers I decided to just write about the things this year that gave me a strong emotional response, made me think, or brought me some comfort in these bizarre times. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the madness.

That said, I wouldn’t quite feel right—

MAGICAL DESTROYERS

—if I didn’t start off talking about one of the few true clunkers I watched end to end this year.

Ah, Magical Destroyers. There’s something tragic about the complete sputtering-out that happened to this series, a reasonably strong first couple of episodes lead into most of the rest of the show being absolutely dismal, and if you wanted the bite-sized review of the show, that’s about all you’d have to say.

Of course, we’re not interested in being bite-sized here. What’s interesting to me about Magical Destroyers, some months on, now that the dust has settled, is the sheer scale of the drop-off. There was a big fall here, and I’m not sure how obvious that was to people looking in from the outside.

In premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Magical Destroyers. As I’ve said many times, its core conceit of a world where general, sneering dislike for the nerdy and withdrawn among us turns into outright persecution is a bit indulgent, but it’s not completely crazy. Nor is the idea that they’d then fight back. Other anime (Rumble Garanndoll and Akiba’s Trip, mainly) have done interesting things with this material, so it’s not that the show’s premise is the problem. Instead, what sinks Magical Destroyers is a massive sense of inconsistency, both in tone and just general competence. We’ve been here before, where an anime having bright spots makes the whole thing worse given their proximity to the mediocrity that makes up the rest of the series. Those bright spots aren’t meaningless, but with time, more removed from Magical Destroyers than I was when I first reviewed it, I mostly just remember the whole thing as a letdown.

Worse, there’s a particularly bitter postscript here. Like many anime, Magical Destroyers was created in part to promote a mobile game and hopeful cash cow. All told, Magical Destroyers Kai—the game in question—was active from just April to August of this year, a service life of less than six months. A failure to clear even the incredibly low bar set by such projects of ill repute as Pride of Orange’s mobile game. This is a truly depressing flit and sputter from what started out as such a promising project. Worse, given that I imagine quite a few people are out of a lot of money given Jun Imagawa’s pet project completely tanking, it seems entirely possible that the man will never lead an anime project ever again. Magical Destroyers represents more, then, than just the failure of a single series. It is the failure of one man’s entire creative vision, and the decision making of those who supported him. Worse shows definitely aired this year—the usual slate of iffy sequels, bottom-of-the-barrel narou-kei adaptations, deep pools of mediocrity like Revenger (brilliantly reviewed here by my friend Julian), and whatever the hell was going on with The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—but I can think of none that so thoroughly embody disappointment as a concept. The rest of this list is going to mostly be positive, but I felt the need to revisit Magical Destroyers. For better or worse, the letdown has stuck with me.

“SHINKIRO”

About half of you are cheering right now, and the other half of you have no idea what this is or why it’s on this list. What is “SHINKIRO”? Aren’t those two of those girls from Hololive? What’s going on?

Well, yes, they are two of those girls from Hololive; that’s Gawr Gura and Houshou Marine (operating here as a very creatively named idol unit; GuraMarine), two of the VTuber Agency Imperial’s most popular talents. This is a music video. Specifically, a really fucking good one that reimagines Marine and Gura’s friendship as a sort of bittersweet romance. It’s inspired, is what it is. The pirate and the mermaid, more or less. A summer that lasts the rest of your life. The key to that vibe—a mix of nostalgia for a time and place that never quite really existed and an implied sadness that it’s forever out of reach—is the music video’s art style, a dreamland pastiche of pre-Millennium anime, reinterpreted through a modern lens by Studio KAI of all groups. I’m guessing the general idea was either Marine or Gura’s (I’m not huge into VTubers these days, but I know Gura is a city pop fiend and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Marine was too), and was followed through by art director Yuusuke Takeda, who has been in the industry for long enough that he’d have been working when this style was current.

The song itself is worth at least touching on, too. I’m not a music critic, so my vocabulary here is even more limited than it’d be otherwise, but to my ear this is almost indistinguishable from “authentic” city pop from the 80s. Things like this can seem transient, and thus not worth discussing in the same breath as “real” anime or similarly longform art like games or manga. But here, when I’m writing this in the second week of a particularly dark December, it reminds me that summer, no matter how far away, is real somewhere.

Oh, and Marine and Gura totally fuck in this video. Like, they don’t literally show it but there are a limited number of ways to interpret “two people wake up naked in a bed together.” Wild.

MAKE THE EXORCIST FALL IN LOVE

Here’s an elevator pitch for you; psychosexual Catholic battle shonen. This is another rule-bendy entry, since Exorcist here technically started back in late 2021. But it’s still ongoing, and yours truly happened to only find out about it this year, so this is where it gets written about (for the first, but maybe not the last? time). Exorcist is a real oddity, a battle series that leans pretty heavily on Catholic myth and morality for its worldbuilding to weave the tale of a teenage exorcist forbidden from the usual affairs of his age because he’s destined to save the world from Satan, a rare appearance by the capital D-L Demon Lord in contemporary manga. The general premise of said exorcist having to protect a seemingly-innocent girl who is actually a demon might sound like the setup for a fairly goofy romcom, but that would belie the fact that Exorcist is actually one of the gnarliest things that runs in Shonen Jump, if only intermittently. There’s something very surreal about the more straightforward romance manga aspects rubbing shoulders with the battle shonen flash, body horror, and unflinching depictions of abuse that otherwise color the manga.

Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic but am contemporaneously a practicing neopagan. So, the manga’s strange mix of subject matter feels like it’s simultaneously meant to cater to and repel people like me, folks who have not set foot in a church in many years and might never do so again. I think this may also be why Exorcist has struggled to really find an audience over here, but at the same time, that singularity of theme and subject matter is what makes it so distinct. Every chapter is a parade of these disparate concepts, and there’s much to be found in seeing how they’ll manage to work together this time, even as the material itself is often grim (see, any number of the manga’s very upfront depictions of sexual assault) or puzzling (the character of Aria and her concatenation of every possible meaning of the word “idol”). Exorcist is a true oddball, I’m hoping against hope that it gets an anime someday, but even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely worth a read if you can stomach what it’s putting down.

CASSETTE BEASTS

The first of several “there is really no way to argue this is even remotely anime” entries on this list, Cassette Beasts is a creature collector game from smallish studio Raw Fury. If you just want the buy/not buy verdict on this charming little indie game, I’ll give it to you in two sentences. Cassette Beasts is Pokémon for depressed burnout Millennials. This is unequivocally a good thing, and if you’re struggling to imagine how, you are not the target demo for Cassette Beasts.

Creature collector games developed in “the west” tend to get slapped with the Poké-clone label regardless of how closely or distantly they adhere to Pokémon’s formula. But while Cassette Beasts is definitely a riff on that formula, it’s far from just rotely copying it; more than can be said of some games in this genre. Aside from a number of flavor differences—for one thing, you don’t command the monsters, you turn into them, here. Feel free to provide your own “henshin!” shouts at the start of each battle—there are some important mechanical ones, too. The vast majority of battles are two-on-two, and you go through the whole game with one of several partners, who you can swap out freely at a café. In addition to Pokémon’s usual types, or close matches thereto, there are also Plastic, Glass, and “Astral” monsters, who lack any real equivalent in that other series. (Astrals are often themed in a broadly similar way to Ghost-type Pokémon, but they work very differently.) Speaking of types; hitting a type-advantageous move doesn’t just do more damage than usual, every single interaction of that sort has some kind of effect. For example; if a Fire-type attack hits an Ice-type beast, it’ll melt, turning into a Water-type. If that same attack hits a Poison-type, the toxins within the monster will ignite, causing a burn status. Metal attacks will shatter Glass-type beast, spreading damage-dealing shards all over the battlefield, but that same monster could strike a Lightning-type beast and cause it to become “Insulated”, reducing its targeting range in the process. There are quite a few of these interactions, and learning the ins and outs of them is recommended for those seeking to truly master the combat system.

The monsters themselves are fun, too. Not every single design is a winner, but of the 120 on offer here, the vast majority are fun in a fresh way that gives them a distinct look in comparison to Cassette Beasts’ genrefellows. One minor point of contention might be the often-punny portmanteau names, which is a naming scheme directly cribbed from Pokémon and used in many other games in this genre besides. Still, it’s hard to get too mad about gems like “Salamagus” and “Crowpocalypse.”

Some might also take issue with that “120”, since that’s relatively small a number for this genre, but if the pool of monsters and moves seems limited, it’s broader than it seems at first glance. For one thing; techniques aren’t picked from a simple level-up list here, and you have far more than four slots per ‘mon, comprised of both active attacks, buffs and debuffs as well as passive skills that are always in play and require no further input from you the user. They’re also not stuck on the monster that learns them; instead, they’re items in the form of stickers (those are what you earn from levelling your monsters), and can be freely swapped out at any time. (Sadly, although understandably since otherwise there’d be no real gameplay reason to use different monsters, there is still only a limited selection of what stickers are compatible with what tapes.) This lets you build different instances of ostensibly similar monsters pretty differently, and if you’re creative with your stickers you can come up with some powerful stuff. My personal right-hand man during my playthrough was an Artillerex—a flak cannon / T. Rex hybrid—who I stuck a variety of “gun” attacks of different elements on, plus the very useful passive Roll Again, which gives monsters a chance to strike a second time at the end of their turn and use a random move they have enough Action Points for. The broad type coverage and multi-striking made it a machine gun of total elemental destruction, and I never got tired of using it. Other monsters have more narrow applications, of course, but the fact that you can fiddle around with your creatures like this provides a huge amount of appeal to even casual experimenters, and I’m sure those who love min-maxing will find even more to tinker with here.

For two; in addition to the basic 120 beasts, every single creature also comes in a variety of “bootleg” types, which tint its sprite a different color, give it a different typing, and change what attack stickers they get as they level up. If you’re not picky about art, you could only a little disingenuously argue that there’s really more like 1,500-odd creatures, and the vast majority of them just happen to be insanely rare, since bootlegs have a Shiny Pokémon-esque rarity to them. Still, they’re often worth seeking out, especially since bootlegs earn rare upgraded attack stickers with bonus effects more often than normal monsters do.

Now look at this, a half dozen paragraphs about the gameplay and almost none about the story or anything else. That shouldn’t be taken to mean Cassette Beasts‘ only strengths are on the gameplay side. The story itself is a little rough, but the general premise—CB’s world is a mysterious island that our protagonists, and everyone else who lives there, are isekai’d to from our own world without warning—is intriguing, and more than the actual narrative per se Cassette Beasts excels at vibes. The main town’s theme; the melancholic, gauzy “Wherever We Are Now“, is an absolute masterpiece of game music and sets the tone perfectly. My generation is all getting older, and it’s nice to play something that understands that on an empathic, thematic level.

IPPON! AGAIN

The first offering from new-to-the-game studio Bakken Record, Mou Ippon! rang in the new year with a smile. 

Some folks probably argued—amongst themselves or with others—over whether Mou Ippon was a sports anime or a school club anime. The truth of course is that it’s both, combining the former’s invocation of intimacy by way of physical contact with the latter’s easygoing warmth. Lot of blushing in this one. Between that and the constant grappling between girls, it’s hard to argue that this show isn’t at least a LITTLE gay. (There’s a pretty great sequence at the show’s halfway point where a new girl, the self-proclaimed “Wonder Child” Ana Nagumo, joins the club and demands to be thrown. Said girl joined the club in order to get closer to her friend. I leave the conclusions there to you.) It’s not the best-looking show on this list by a long shot (the actual judo is always drawn and choreographed quite nicely, anything else is a crapshoot), but it has heart.

At the end of the day, this is a series about the pure joy of athleticism. Anything else is secondary. Both our central cast and the series’ many supporting characters (mostly other judoka) face a fair number of trials during the show’s run—outside pressure to succeed, the difficulty of overcoming natural differences in ability, etc.—but inevitably, the spirit of the sport wins out.

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY

I’m fudging my own numbers here, since technically Witch From Mercury started last year, but I didn’t cover it in the 2022 end-of-year writeup, and the second season aired this year. So it gets to stay here, keeping the company of 2023’s motley crew.

I’ll be honest, I mostly think of Witch From Mercury as a yuri series. That’s not strictly true; it’s a war drama and a couple other things besides, but given that mousey protagonist Suletta Mercury’s relationship with her rich-girl crush Miorine Rembran defines the entire thrust of the series, it makes sense, at least to me, to put it in that category. Throughout, they struggle together and apart as the political landscape of the Utena-inflected school they both attend whirls around them, eventually engulfing the whole solar system in a conflict orchestrated by the main villain, Suletta’s sinister—and very attractive—mom.

In an intellectual, detached sense, my main criticisms remain the somewhat spotty plotting; the conclusion is just a bit too neat and it avoids asking many really hard questions. In addition—and maybe this is a me problem—the show’s sheer complexity and the amount of overlapping power plays, etc., prevented me from getting emotionally invested in much of the story in a very immediate way. Suletta and Miorine’s relationship ups and downs were really the only exception there.

Yet, it’s hard for me to be mad at something that can muster up this much genuine optimism and empathy even in the face of an overwhelmingly bad situation. (And the things going on in the show’s universe are certainly not great.) Plus, it has a canon gay-married couple. That’s genuinely significant, given how huge Gundam is as a franchise, even if the show’s owners tried and failed to walk it back in one of the most comedically cowardly company moves I’ve ever seen. A move that was eventually undone by the show’s own director. You can’t keep a good power couple down.

HELL’S PARADISE

It just ain’t fair. Back in the day, Hell’s Paradise would’ve gone to a workman studio and aired for a good 2, 3 years straight. It would’ve picked up innumerable filler arcs along the way. There’d be shipping wars. It would’ve been great.

But we are not back in the day. It isn’t 2006, and Hell’s Paradise was brought into a significantly less forgiving anime industry and absolutely choked out by the sheer volume of competition. That in mind, I really don’t know if I could tell you why this show, of all the ones I started but didn’t finish this year, is one that I went back to and eventually completed in the dying days of December, here. Maybe it’s just that despite various deficiencies (janky visuals, rote character arcs, questionable gender politics) it’s still pretty good at delivering good old fashioned brawls, with fights that make up what they might lack in visual polish with a genuine cool factor and a powerful sense of rhythm that lets our protagonists always feel like the underdogs in their quest on the violently hostile island referred to by the show’s title. Maybe it’s because it had the year’s single best opening theme. Maybe it’s because Gabimaru managed to be the ultimate wife guy in a year where we also got another season of Spy x Family (and on that note, I was dead sure his wife and Yor Forger shared a voice actress, but nope! Different people). Maybe it’s the killer aesthetics, with gnarly monsters derived from a deliberately twisted interpretation of Taoism.

Whatever my reasons might’ve been; the themes don’t hurt; by its end, the first season of Hell’s Paradise stresses that we’re all in this together. Perhaps appropriately, this ended up being the last anime of 2023 I finished, and that spirit of solidarity is worth carrying into the New Year.

OSHI NO KO

Lady Gaga summed it up best when she called the rerelease of her first album The Fame Monster. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Pop Machine eats its own young, and few in the industry are ever really spared. This is the thematic thrust of Oshi no Ko, and is a huge preoccupation that takes up most of the manga (and of course, this anime adaptation), irrespective of its actual plot points. But we’ve gone over that on this site before. What’s interesting to me about OnK is how as a piece of art, it itself is complicit in this cycle. This is both why it’s on the list at all and why it’s not higher up.

Oshi no Ko‘s main characters are Aquamarine and Ruby, children (/reincarnated fans of. It’s complicated) of the late idol Hoshino Ai. Yet, it’s Ai herself who ends up on posters and in key visuals, in the shockingly large amount of tie-in commercials related to the series, and so on. There’s haunting the narrative and then there’s haunting the broader sphere of Japanese pop culture at large, and that latter stage is where Ai is really at. There’s an apparent contradiction here between Ai as a symbol of promise and life snuffed out too soon and Ai as a commercial titan, but any disagreement between these aspects is illusory. Ai is viable as a commercial idea because she dies in the show’s debut episode; that’s the start of her legend, and is why people care about her at all. One leads to the other, and no matter how convenient it might be to try to separate the two, doing so is impossible.

On a more serious note, this same self-contradictory nature is why I haven’t really covered OnK here since abruptly dropping my Let’s Watch of it back in June. For some fans, the strength of the narrative overtook its real life influences when the mother of the real person who Akane’s early story arc is based on complained, and that woman was subsequently harassed by fans of the series.

Things like this make it difficult to go to bat for OnK, despite its strengths. The unfortunate truth for me is that, like a problematic pop star who ends up in headlines as much for bad behavior as great singles, I will probably keep following the anime, and it might even show up on this list next year, if I make one. Don’t expect to see it between now and then, though. Sometimes it’s best to keep your fandom to yourself.

THE 100 GIRLFRIENDS WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE YOU

In a sense, what is there to say here? It’s a comedy show and it’s funny. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, though, there’s a real accomplishment in how affable 100 Girlfriends is despite the fact that it’s an over-the-top horny harem comedy that by its premise requires The One Guy to date many, many girls simultaneously. That sounds like a recipe for disaster in the context of a romantic comedy, but our boy here, Rentaro, just genuinely is that good. If you can remember the general sell on Catarina from In My Next Life as a Villainess!, the general idea is the same. Rentaro manages to feel like he really is the right person for all of the show’s women just by dint of the fact that he’s insanely likeable, with eyebrows the size of banana leaves and an even bigger heart; a total genius of emotional intelligence who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, a supernaturally smooth operator just because he’s so good at connecting with people on an emotional level. No wonder a half dozen girls and counting are falling over themselves to smooch him.

Which would be meaningless if the girls weren’t also great, but they thankfully are. Each is a classic harem series archetype either dialed up to eleven or tweaked in some other way, all of whom work together to create an absolutely pitch-perfect ensemble cast. Tossed in a blender of absurd comedy, overflowing with puns (thanks in part to a delightfully loose official sub track) and slapstick while mostly remaining good natured, a handful of exceptions aside. (I could probably do without the entire character of the old schoolteacher. But she’s a bit character and doesn’t show up much, so we’ll forgive it for now.) It’s also shockingly good at the more tender and serious parts of romance. It really seems like this stuff should suffer given the sheer amount of characters, but somehow all of them feel like they really do work not just with Rentaro but also with each other.

100 GFs is a silly, sometimes outlandishly horny show, but I think its genuinely big heart makes a case for it as perhaps the year’s single best comedy and one of its best shows overall; a perfect polyamorous fairy tale for the modern age. What else could you ask for?

TENGOKU DAIMAKYO

It’s probably for the better that this list isn’t organized like last year’s. If it were; where the hell would I put Tengoku Daimakyo? (Heavenly Delusion unofficially and widely, despite the Disney+ English release using a straight transliteration of its Japanese title.) We’re in murky waters, here. Heavenly Delusion goes some very strange and very dark places over the course of its 12-episode run. A run that feels, frankly, too brief to possibly contain everything the show explores. The series maps out a grim coastline populated by all the horrors, real and imagined, of the human psyche. Abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy, mental illness, human experimentation, the damaged relationships between people in crisis, eugenics, murder, and rape. This is bleak, bleak, bleak territory. Maybe too bleak? It’s hard to say.

The big Discourse Point about Heavenly Delusion was its adjacency to queer issues. “Adjacency to” because the plot point in question—spoiler alert, here—that Kiruko, one of the leads, has the brain of their own younger brother Haruki, forcibly transplanted into their own skull via some horrible procedure. This was criticized for appropriating the transgender experience, a point of view which, as a trans person myself, I sympathize with but don’t really find compelling, if only because Kiruko/Haruki’s experiences are so different from actually “being a guy in a girl’s body” (or any permutation thereof) that any similarity seems coincidental. (I’m open to the idea that I might be wrong, and if it is intentionally supposed to parallel the trans experience then it says some very bad things about original author Masakazu Ishiguro‘s opinion of trans people, but that seems like a big if.)

I’ll admit, though, it took me a while to come to that conclusion, partly just because wow is that a fucking plotline to put into your show, but also because Heavenly Delusion legitimately does dip into some dicey territory. I find it hard to justify the show’s ogling of Kiruko’s body, for example, and I have no idea what to make of a lengthy subplot that, without getting into the details here for the general sake of saving space, I found weirdly ableist. But I’ve also seen the exact opposite interpretation. Was I just reading it uncharitably? It’s hard to say.

But then again, I don’t entirely know what to make of most of Heavenly Delusion in general, and all that in mind you might think I dislike it. That isn’t really the case, though! In addition to its more obvious visual merits, the show has a real warmth and empathy to it in its best moments that does feel, despite the vast differences in just about every other respect, of a piece with the original mangaka’s best-known prior work, And Yet The Town Moves. A core part of a certain strain of post-apocalyptic fiction is that regardless of circumstance, people are fundamentally the same. Heavenly Delusion seems to believe that too, and is undecided on whether or not it’s a good thing. This is without getting into the show’s more bizarre, out-there sci fi elements. Even in brief summary, there’s just so much to this thing that it’s hard to condense into tidy little phrases.

I feel much the same about the show overall. I wouldn’t sort my thoughts into neat categories like calling it good or bad or even saying I have “mixed feelings.” But I have a lot of feelings, and a lot of thoughts. I think to a certain degree, simply being so memorable will count for a lot in the long run. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I’m just not ready for this one yet.

VOID STRANGER

Inside the box is just another box. Void Stranger, a Sokoban-inspired block puzzle game from Finnish development team System Erasure, is by an order of magnitude the most opaque thing on this list. It’s also, just a fair warning, one of those pieces of art that is impossible to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it. So if you’re just looking for an endorsement, I would recommend buying this game immediately and enjoying being lost in it with the rest of us.

For the rest of you; Void Stranger‘s simple-on-the-surface mechanics and deliberately retro presentation belie what I’ve come to loosely term an experiential game. That meaning; figuring out just what kind of game exactly you’re playing is part of the game itself. What sort of story is this? What exactly can you do with these puzzle elements? Are there things the game isn’t telling you? These are some of the broadest questions you’ll be asking yourself as you work through this thing. During which time you’ll learn about Grey, a woman from a fantasy kingdom, and how protecting her charge, a bratty princess, led her to the bizarre labyrinth that is the game’s primary setting.

For a while, it will seem fairly standard, until it becomes clear that it’s very much not. To me, it really clicked when I “finished” the game for the first time. On your first pass through, you’re locked into what’s essentially the “worst” ending. The dungeon dissolves into incoherent chaos around you, a song plays, the road ahead becomes less and less clear. You have succumbed to despair and the world is nothing but a whorl of confusion. But then you start again, and things start to make a little more sense. Rinse, repeat, spend many hours cracking the games ludicrously elaborate codes, and things become a little clearer again. The game is a tug-of-war in this way; between the constant hazy fog that comes from knowing you don’t really know what’s going on and the little gemstone moments of clarity that do shine through. It’s an interesting, rewarding experience, and one I recommend if you’ve got the stomach for the game’s truly staggering difficulty.

Even if you do, it will take you a very, very long time to properly finish Void Stranger. I got quite far myself and still haven’t actually finished the whole thing. I plan to, of course. What’s the other option? Stay trapped in a monochrome labyrinth forever? Don’t be silly; even when you leave the maze, the memory remains.

SOARING SKY PRECURE

Sky fly high. They didn’t have to go this hard, is what I kept thinking to myself. Pretty Cure’s 20th anniversary is essentially an ongoing holiday, in between two adult fan-oriented sequel seasons as we currently are, but it was the main line of the series, Soaring Sky Precure, that best held my interest in 2023.

It’s not fashionable to say this, but at its heart, Precure is a fairly change-averse franchise. The series more or less found its pay dirt formula with Yes 5! and has been riding that train to the bank every year since, but what this means is that even changes that would seem minor to an outsider can be absolutely seismic in context. See, for example; Cure Sky, this year’s lead, being blue. It’s hard to overstate how enthused people were about the simple fact that the lead Precure of this year’s season was identifiably a color other than pink. Similar hype followed for similar reasons; Cure Wing is the first boy to ever join the main cast (he’s not the first male Precure full stop, that’s a different character from a prior season), Cure Butterfly the first adult, and so on.

This spirit of comparative experimentation did not stay throughout the show’s run, as what followed was a fairly typical (if notably episodic) Precure season. The ebb and flow of online discourse has of course led to some concluding that this makes the show bad. I say fuck that; this season ruled. Sure, you could describe Precure as artistically conservative if you wanted to, but the flip side of that coin is that it’s consistent. Every year you get 4-6 girls in colorful outfits punching the themed forces of evil to death, and it kicks ass every single time. This year had a particularly strong cast of villains, with the oafish Kabaton being succeeded by the leering, smug Battamonda, and then the honorable, upright Minoton, before looping back to Battamonda, giving him something of a redemption arc, and then finally revealing the main bad’n for the final few episodes. It was a ride!

Admittedly, I would not personally place Soaring Sky in my absolute upper echelon of Precure seasons; Fresh, Heartcatch, Tropical Rouge, and—sorry, haters—Healin’ Good, but it’s still a delightful and entertaining piece of work. I expect I’ll say much the same about Wonderful Precure next year, and I’m looking forward to doing so.

That said, there’s more than one way a kids’ anime can be great, and while some stuck to the tried-and-true methods, others were much more willing to experiment.

POKéMON HORIZONS

As I discussed when the original anime finally, incredibly, came to a close back in March, I have basically loved Pokémon my entire life, for better or worse. It’s baked into my DNA, and I’m never going to be rid of it. Pokémon Horizons, though, has made the series feel essential—like an actual part of the cultural current, relevant to non-lifelong fans—for the first time in what feels like a million years. There has, in actuality, been lead-up to this of course. Some of that was when Ash Ketchum finally became a Pokémon champion in November of ’22, some of it was in the making long before that, but with the new series it really feels like a page has been definitively turned, and a lot of that has to do with how different it is from the previous Pokémon anime.

Pokémon Horizons has nothing to do with being “a Pokémon master.” Competitive battling in the usual sense is barely a factor, our main protagonist is meek and initially doesn’t actually care about winning at all. And, oh yeah, she’s a girl. Liko, who had the unenviable task of stepping into Ash’s shoes this April, has done amazingly well for herself as the new face of Pokémon. She doesn’t have to do it alone, thankfully, as co-protagonist Roy balances her out and makes up the more fiery, battle-oriented half of their duo. Joining them are the Rising Volt Tacklers, the do-anything crew of the airship Brave Olivine who initially meet Liko when their captain, Friede, is asked to keep her and a mysterious pendant she carries safe. Suffice it to say; we don’t really know for sure where the whole pendant business is headed yet, but we know it involves a legendary hero of a bygone age, the machinations of a villainous group with the deceptively innocuous name of “The Explorers”, and a smorgasbord of cool-as-hell Pokémon battles. Did I mention there’s a Pikachu in a captain’s hat? His name is Captain Pikachu and he is cooler than any of us will ever be.

The main thing is that the series excels at a sense of adventure. The first Pokémon anime had been airing for so long that it tended to fall into tropes of its own making, and that continued to some extent right up until its very end (not to say that it was bad or anything, it could certainly be great, too), Horizons manages to feel as fresh as it does partly by simple virtue of not being its predecessor, but there really is a genuine sense of the new and unexpected with each and every episode. The airship gives the show license to set its adventures basically wherever, and it often takes advantage of that, helping even inconsequential-in-the-long-run “filler” episodes feel fun and purposeful. There’s also a lovely paralleling between the makeup of the Brave Olivine’s crew and the actual people who’re watching this show, with both adults and children represented, with Friede and company helping to mentor Liko, Roy, and tertiary protagonist Dot. In a real sense, the series feels like it’s bridging the gaps between generations, and that’s a lovely thing to see as a long-time fan of Pokémon. Here’s to 900 more episodes, god willing.

CHAINSAW MAN: PART 2

Wherefore The Chainsaw Man? Part 2 of the manga—which we’ll be discussing here, so the spoiler averse should skip down the next entry—began last summer to a fair amount of anticipation. Some of that has cooled in the intervening months, but for the most part, the manga remains very popular and widely-read.

This is a little surprising, all things considered. Chainsaw Man‘s second half is a very different beast from its first. Most of the original cast have either died or otherwise departed the narrative. Denji has a costar now; Asa, human host of the War Devil, and a sort of adoptive little sister in the form of Nayuta. In the process, Denji has lost one family and gained another.

But the biggest change has actually been in terms of pacing, of all things. Chainsaw Man Part 2 is a noticeably slower affair than Chainsaw Man Part 1. Indeed, the manga has adapted a deliberately tease-y tempo as Part 2 has gone on, even as the tension has mounted and literal prophecies of armageddon have begun to fill the air. But it has kept its core emotional roughness; a kind of pain that resonates very broadly and is the main reason that this thing is still so popular. Denji’s old life keeps haunting him, as disparate forces conspire him to pull the ripcord once more. He is still searching for answers to life’s big questions, he’s still not happy, and the world’s still going to hell. So of course, they’ve succeeded. As of its most recent chapter—its final, before a hiatus into the new year—Denji has once again cast aside any pretense of ordinary life to become Chainsaw Man, laughing like a maniac in the manga’s final image of 2023. The poor kid can’t catch a break.

ELPHELT VALENTINE

Look, this is basically a filler spot, but what are you going to do, stop me? This is my article, and if I say a DLC character from a fighting game I like (Guilty Gear -Strive-) gets on the list, she gets on the list, logic be damned. I barely knew who Elphelt was two months ago, and now she’s my absolute favorite pink and white marriage-obsessed heavy metal singer of a blorbo. It helps that she’s fun to play (and fairly simple, which as someone who is still very much a neophyte to fighting games as a genre, is welcome). I paid another human being $30 USD (plus tax and tip) to make a chibi drawing of her eating a large pretzel because I wanted my own unique Elphelt icon that badly. She’s great, and you will pry her from my cold, dead hands.

I don’t have the space to earnestly get into Guilty Gear’s genuinely weird-as-hell lore here, but her backstory is genuinely pretty compelling, as is the silliness of her arcade mode story in Strive‘s story. Bottom line; she brought a damn sight more joy to my life than most things this year. For that, she gets a place at the table.

SLAY THE PRINCESS

The other video game with an expanding, changing narrative on this list, Slay The Princess is a good deal more accessible than Void Stranger by virtue of being a visual novel and thus posing no difficulty beyond reading and clicking. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s somehow the lesser of the two (I wouldn’t say I cleanly prefer either to the other), or even that it’s harder to spoil (this is another section you’ll want to skip if you care about that kind of thing). The story is simple; you are on a path in the woods, at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the cabin is a princess. Your charge? Kill her. Failing to do so will, at least so you’re told, end the world and doom everyone in it.

Of course, things are more complicated than they first appear. The stern narrator who tells you all this seems untrustworthy at best, and there are voices in your head beside your own. The Princess herself is no ordinary human, either. But eventually, you’ll make your choice, to either free or kill her, which seems like it should be the end of this story.

Except, it is obviously not. You are on a path in the woods. You find her and save or kill her again. You’re on a path in the woods.

Time loops are one thing, but Slay The Princess’ entire narrative structure is based on iterative rings like this. What you do changes the woods, the cabin, yourself, and the Princess. No matter what you do, you’ll discover that the two of you are deeply connected. This is, after all, a love story. You kill, you die, you try again. Slay The Princess reveals itself as a love song from one myth to another. You are on a path in the woods. You are a path in the woods.

LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO

Ecchi slapstick political satire fantasy!! It’s a genre jambalaya. And of the various fantasy anime that tried to tackle serious issues this year, One-Room Hero might honestly have done it the best. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth reiterating how utterly weird it is that this series, with its burned-out loser JRPG hero protagonist and his 404 gender-not-found shapeshifting demon lord frenemy, is probably the best satire of imperialism I’ve seen in a mainstream TV anime in years.

That’s not to say the show is an intellectual powerhouse or anything; there’s a difference between being witty and being smart, but it should probably say something that all of these cultural currents are so dumb that even a show with a character who dresses like this can poke fun at them. Other anime swung more for the fences this year, but I don’t think anyone hit higher above their weight class.

OTAKU ELF

In my head, Otaku Elf is this year’s version of My Master Has No Tail. Absolutely rock solid comedy / slice of life shows with a fantasy bent that seemingly rather few people actually watched. (I think Otaku Elf did a little better in that regard than My Master Has No Tail, but not much better.)

In premise, Otaku Elf is pretty simple. The title character, Elda, is a classic high fantasy-style elf who has inexplicably been enshrined as a kami in a Japanese shrine. Here, she uses her position to while away the centuries by indulging in her nerdy, nerdy interests, all while basically never leaving her house, often using her put-upon shrine maiden Koito as a go-between. Think Himouto! Umaru-chan if Umaru herself was taller, a bit less abrasive, and had magic powers, and you’re in the right ballpark.

Much of the comedy here is referential or (very) lightly satirical, but throughout, the show commands an impressive and easy charm that mixes well with its occasional moments of real pathos, like when Elda remarks that the way Koito eats her ramen reminds her of her late mother, the previous shrine maiden. Heart like that can’t be faked.

Undead Murder Farce

Another oddball that defies easy genre categorization. Undead Murder Farce seemed from a distance like it might belong to that millieu of Bakemonogatari-ish (and consequently, Boogiepop-ish) shows like In/Spectre and Rascal Doesn’t Dream of the Bunnygirl Sempai. In practice, it ends up watching like a strange cross between a detective novel, Bakemonogatari itself, and the Fate series if it were set in the Victorian era.

The detective part is the main hook, though, with the titular Undead girl being an immortal named Aya, a literal talking head who serves as a detective for supernatural cases that more traditional sleuths can’t really crack. Throughout the series, she, her assistant Shinuchi, and her maid Shizuku traipse across Europe solving supernatural mysteries and hunting for her missing body. Whether their cases are actually Fair Play ™ or not I can’t definitively say, but they at least seem solvable, giving the show an element of involving the viewer, as well as more traditional mystery series thrills. (And it does do those pretty well; it’s worth noting that this series is from Kaguya-sama director Shinichi Omata, and some of that style shines through.) Later, things get a bit more action-y as a plethora of period-appropriate public domain characters turn up—Sherlock Holmes, Carmilla, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, you get it—which is where that dash of Fate spice comes from. These disparate parts work together pretty well, with elements like Carmilla’s queer-tinged rivalry with Shizuku adding additional intrigue.

Really, the only bad thing about this series is that it ends without resolving its main plot, being adapted as it is from a series of novels far too long to condense into a single anime cour. If there’s justice in the world, we’ll get more Undead Murder Farce. But if not, at least it made a strong showing while it was here.

SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF

“At its finest, Scott Pilgrim is much, much more than it appears to be. It’s an ambitious meditation on what growing up means to a generation for whom comics and video games are not just cultural touchstones, but the dominant iconography.” That was The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, on the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novel and the then-upcoming live action film, way back in 2010.

I’m writing this, myself, on the last day of November, 2023 (and editing it nearly a month later). Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with this series whatsoever. I wasn’t really planning to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Science SARU’s still-inexplicable anime take on the series. I had no reason to, having never seen the movie nor read the comics. But, circumstance is a funny thing, and what initially started as me wanting to spite a group of deeply annoying people (it’s a long story) has led to me flipping this thing over in my head several times. The nature of this list makes me deeply hesitant to crown an overall single “best anime” of 2023, even in the narrow category of ones I actually finished, but if this isn’t my single favorite, it’s at least one of several.

First, if you don’t know the story of Scott Pilgrim in general, of how an uncomfortably relatable loser-everyman manages to forge maybe the first real connection of his entire life with an uncomfortably relatable loser-everywoman after being forced to (among other things) fight her exes in combat, this whole entry might scan as a little incomprehensible to you. Sorry about that!

Scott Pilgrim is one of those things that started out fairly niche, and then became a touchstone, and then (probably unfairly) a shorthand for a Certain Type of Guy. So Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is then much less about Scott Pilgrim (the guy) and much more about Scott Pilgrim (the story). In general concept and execution, it’s not entirely dissimilar to something like Rebuild of Evangelion, in that it’s not a reboot exactly or a straight sequel exactly but more of a front-to-back rewiring that keeps the main players intact but does pretty different things to and with them. It is also a sequel, though. So to understand it we should at least touch on the original comic, which I read essentially in preparation for watching this anime.

To be honest, I would’ve loved nothing more than to completely bounce off Scott Pilgrim. The entire franchise—from the original comic, to the live action film by Edgar Wright to, I assume it’s only a matter of time, this anime—has been simplified into a punchline these days. You’ve all seen the tweet; “you are not Scott Pilgrim and that girl on the bus is not Ramona Flowers.” This is wrong on several counts of course; the girl Scott meets on the bus in the original comic isn’t Ramona, it’s Knives Chau, a high schooler who becomes his ill-advised mostly pretend-girlfriend. Also, I absolutely am Scott Pilgrim. So are you. So is probably everyone who’s ever lived, or at least everyone who’s ever grown up in this strange, strange era of history we live in. Millennials, who are ostensibly “the generation” meant to identify with Mr. Pilgrim, are defined by anxiety. We don’t hurt people because we mean to—who does?—but because the alternative to hurting people is doing something scary, and lots of us don’t know how to handle scary things. We’re all Ramona Flowers, too—I’m aware I’m contributing to a stereotype by being transgender and identifying with the character in any respect—in that for many of us, at least sure as hell for me, the default way to disengage with people is to just silently drift away without a word. Reader, I would so love to tell you that this is all me being dramatic, but if there’s any projection here, it’s solely on my part; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World read me to fucking pieces. I was embarrassed. It was bad, but I can only respect a piece of art that prompts me to do some genuine reflecting.

Of course, this entry is, actually, technically, about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The brand-new anime from Science Goddamn SARU, that has, actually, not a ton in common, at least plot-wise, with its forbearer. But it’s important to understand what vs. The World actually was. Because, just to hammer this home one more time, while Scott Pilgrim (the comic) was largely about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), Scott Pilgrim (the cartoon) is largely about Scott Pilgrim (the story). It is also kind of about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), to be fair, but only in the sense that everyone is “Scott Pilgrim” (the archetype).

Because Takes Off is also a sequel, thematically if not entirely textually, it can get away with snipping out character arcs in some places. Knives, for example, is reduced to a bit player here, and, as others have pointed out, the actual damage of Scott’s insensitivity—in the original, he hastily breaks up with her in a rush after meeting Ramona that leaves her heartbroken and defines her character for the rest of the comic—is by consequence pretty much entirely erased. Is this harmful to the character? Is it harmful to the show? I don’t know! On the one hand; Knives gets to be happy for most of the anime because she had her character development back in the comic and came out the other side a much more mature person. The fact that the show doesn’t literally chronologically follow on from the comic, so this is not technically “the same Knives”, is true, but pointing it out feels like nitpicking. The emotional logic of this sort of thing is a lot more important than the actual logic. On the other hand; Knives being reduced to basically a series of fanservice (in the old sense of the term) cameos guts her character and thus most of the reason people liked her in the first place. Changes like this one are divisive, and they are so for a reason.

The people who do get arcs are the exes—they’re the real stars of the show here, and in particular Roxie is elevated from basically a living joke about “girls having a gay phase in college” to a character with some actual pathos—and Ramona herself. It’s interesting that Ramona gets so much spotlight actually, because while the original comic was definitely mostly Scott’s story, she still got a fair amount of play. Perhaps it’s because the comic was definitely also guilty of sometimes treating Ramona as the unattainable, mysterious maiden she attempts to present herself as. Attempts that are, as the comic points out, covers for her own emotional flaws. Again; the main reason that Ramona and Scott get on so well is that they’re very similar people. The actual plot is a whole haphazard patchwork of goofy shit involving time travel and a whole very meta thing where the events of the series are made into a movie in-universe while they’re actively happening. Explaining all this in more detail would I think get in the way of an important fact; Scott’s biggest enemy is himself. No, literally, as in, him from the future, where he’s broken up with Ramona and is torn up about it and tries to sabotage his own past because of it.

Since, of course, a huge part of Scott Pilgrim is that trying to fix your mistakes is way more important than just feeling bad about them, they eventually reconcile to try again. They will probably try again forever. The amusingly huge Divorced Guy Energy of Future-Scott aside, it’s hard to imagine the two of them ever having a smooth relationship. But a smooth relationship and a fulfilling one are different things, and no matter what form it takes, Scott Pilgrim does understand that much.

On a more lighthearted note the whole thing just looks great. And it left a lot of questions in my mind, too. Questions like “if Scott Pilgrim met Shinji Ikari would they be friends or enemies?” and “how does Ramona dye her hair so often without it getting all dried out?” Anime that make you think are good, I’d say.

All of this then said, the question of whether or not this reimagining is actually “good” seems kind of quaint. I’m still not terribly keen on a future ruled by reboots, reimaginings, and redos, and I still think that this whole phenomenon of western companies hoisting sacks full of money on anime studios and telling them to make a Whatever Anime kind of sucks—although I should take a second here to concede that Brian O’Malley at least seems to have been much more involved in this than is the norm for these things—but if we’re going to keep getting more of these, more of them should probably be like this.

And that’s the list. More or less.

Is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off actually my anime of the year? I don’t know. I didn’t do the whole cutesy “guess my top anime this year, everybody!” contest on social media this time around. Partly because I don’t have a Twitter account that I use in any major capacity anymore, partly because it just seemed like a trick question. I’ve quite liked a few anime this year. Oshi no Ko was much farther back on the list, but despite what I said I probably like it more than this. Or do I? I go back and forth. The same is true with Pokémon Horizons, 100 Girlfriends, and Trigun: Stampede, which I couldn’t manage to finish a writeup on. Some of the older anime that I watched this year, like Earth Maiden Arjuna and The Devil Lady will definitely stick with me more than the vast majority of 2023’s own anime will. And even some anime from this year I genuinely thought were really good, obvious standouts like Skip & Loafer and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!, I didn’t actually finish. Because! You know! Life is weird and difficult and sometimes even something as simple as making yourself watch a cartoon can be tough! This is without factoring in shows that actively disappointed me, like, again, Magical Destroyers. Or hell, Frieren, a letdown that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. With no better place to put it, here is a short list of honorable mentions that I liked—really liked in a few cases!—but couldn’t come up with even brief writeups for, didn’t finish, or otherwise did not get a full writeup despite every one of them having definitely deserved it.

  • Anime
    • High Card
    • Buddy Daddies
    • Dead Mount Death Play
    • Trigun: Stampede
    • The Ice Guy & His “Cool” Female Colleague
    • Skip & Loafer
    • Helck
    • BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
    • SHY
    • YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-
  • Manga
    • Touge Oni: Ancient Gods in Primeval Times
    • Sakamoto Days
    • Witch Watch
    • Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World!
    • Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
    • Kindergarten Wars
    • Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!
    • Touhou Suichouka: The Lotus Eaters, Drunk & Sober
    • Cipher Academy
    • Otherside Picnic
  • Games
    • Ultrakill
    • Yume Nikki Online Project
    • Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask and Indigo Disk expansions.

Art really has helped me get through an immensely difficult year, and more than just being a source of comfort, it’s given me things to discuss with others, things to look forward to, and moments of genuine sublimity that make the time I put into this medium feel worth it. I’ve rambled a lot in this article, but at the end of the day, I really just want to help people appreciate art, in my own, very specific way. Hopefully, this article helped you do that in some fashion or another. That’s really all I can ask for.

So where does all that leave me, other than with another year down? I honestly don’t know! I have no idea what the future looks like. I was going to type “for this blog” after that, but honestly, it’s just true in general. The future is an open void of unknowability. These days, I’m just thankful for every day I make it through.

And on that note; who knows what 2024 holds? I’m reluctant to make any specific predictions.

But hey, Metallic Rouge looks pretty promising, right?

See you next year.

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Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) MAGICAL DESTROYERS Flames Out Forever

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

“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.

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.

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, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr 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.

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.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: MAGICAL DESTROYERS is So Fucking Back

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Look, if I’m going to rant about a show for falling off I have to give it due credit if it gets back in the saddle, too. That’s just fair play.

On the other hand, I really do feel like I’m tsundere for this goddamn show.

It’s not like Magical Destroyers has really gotten any easier to understand since I last wrote about it just two short weeks ago. If anything, it’s retreated even further into its own little world. Subtext and any real stab at a larger theme have been set aside for the moment in order to riff on disparate tropes and styles from all over the last 20 years of anime history. I really wouldn’t say, even as it closes in on its final third, that Magical Destroyers seems particularly in a hurry to get anywhere. (Apparently, there’s a tie-in mobile game, which might have something to do with that.) But even as it’s seemed less and less concerned with making any kind of point, Magical Destroyers has rediscovered its love of style. That counts for something. At the end of the day anime is both an artform and a medium of entertainment; if you can’t swing a compelling take on the former, the latter is a pretty good consolation prize.

Case in point; the last two episodes. Last week, the series dove into an almost Sonny Boy-esque hallucinatory flicker, constantly going back and forth on whether what we were seeing was real or not. (It eventually gave us a definitive “yes,” which takes away only a little bit of the magic.) This week’s episode, despite being much less conceptual, is almost even weirder, though certainly not in better taste. How do you put a compelling spin on the yucky “brother and sister who are like, Too Close” trope? Well, I’m not sure it’s possible. But making them respectively a mutant severed head and a creepy The Shining kid respectively is certainly one way to at least try.

“She will never be ballin.”
*Spits out cereal.*

This is to say nothing of the series’ ongoing habit of warping its own aesthetic around the characters of the week. This can, as we’ve established, backfire. But put to the right ends, it can really liven up an otherwise fairly straightforward episode. The series really does get into some proper horror aesthetics here. It’s mostly loving pastiche rather than doing anything “truly original,” but that’s in-line with the series’ general aesthetic aims, so it’s hardly a bad thing.

It’s worth shouting out the series’ commitment to one-off magical attacks that seem like they should be coming out of a bank system, but aren’t. Blue whips out two new ones here, and Pink gets one as well (in both cases, after the girls in question have taken a shady empowering drug. If the show’s edgy sense of humor wasn’t your speed toward the start of its run, it won’t be any moreso now), and they’re a lot of fun.

As for the running B-plot of secondary villain Slayer, that finally comes back around here, too. Although mostly as a tease for next week’s episode. It’s pretty fun when she manages to out-aggro girl Anarchy herself.

All told, the series seems to be back on track. Or at least, as on-track as something this proudly idiosyncratic can ever be. For my money, that’s a good thing. I’m slef-conscious of the fact that this article, where I praise Destroyers, is shorter than the one where I yelled at it for getting lazy. But that is just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. (Ask anyone, it’s easy to write about things that are done poorly, it can be much harder to articulate why something works. Sometimes something is just cool because it’s cool.) And honestly, if all I truly have to say is “it’s back, baby!” why beat around the bush?

I’ve followed a lot of anime this season, and I’d while be hard pressed to say that Magical Destroyers is the best of the lot, but it’s damn memorable. In the seasonal churn, that counts for a lot.

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 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.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: When Did MAGICAL DESTROYERS Stop Being Fun?

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

It’s always a danger with this kind of show; anything that’s more than 30% or so pastiche by volume will get lost in the weeds if it spends too much time reminding you of other stuff instead of being good on its own merits, but that isn’t really the specific problem that Magical Destroyers has run into as it closes out its first half. Instead, the issues are more basic. It just isn’t much fun anymore; the show’s always-questionable taste, initially a forgivable quirk, has collided headlong with its lacking character writing, incoherent plotting, spotty pacing, and, as of the most recent episode, the visual side of things is also starting to fall apart. None of this is good, and even if the series recovers it will be, if remembered at all, rightly dinged for having a weak middle third.

You can map Magical Destroyers‘ episode quality over time pretty easily. After a strong premiere, an even better second episode that seems likely at this point to be the show’s overall highlight, and a solid third episode, cracks started to show around episode 4, where the entire thing is basically an excuse for some tasteless fanservice. Episode 5 is fine, and even seems to set up some ongoing plot threads for the episodes to follow, but the two that come immediately after it are easily the show’s low points. Episode 6 is a dull and pointless elaboration on the titular magical girls’ barely-there backstory, and episode 7 is just a top to bottom problem.

In episode 7, the girls face the second of the Four Heavenly Kings—gotta have those in an anime, of course—but in contrast to the brainwashed car otaku in episode 3, this guy is….an angry gamer named Adam who cheat at video games a lot until he was eventually banned from every online game. It really must be said, Adam has an unforgivably bland design for a show like this, and his AI girlfriend Eve (of course her name is Eve) doesn’t fare much better.

Adam of course traps our heroes in a virtual world where he has unlimited haxx0rz to torment them as he pleases. Except, he’s not very creative with any of this—which is maybe supposed to be a vaguely meta point about the sorts of people who are inclined to cheat at video games, but it doesn’t really come off that way—and his attacks are mostly limited to generic stuff like rocket launchers and pistols. The SNES-style JRPG mockup segments are a bit more interesting, but given how off-model the rest of the episode looks, they almost feel like an excuse to simply have the characters on screen less often.

While all this is going on, there is a massive battle happening back at the home base of Otaku Hero’s rebels. We’re shown approximately none of this, and despite the threat of Otaku Hero and the magical girls possibly not making it back home in time to save the day, the plot is simply resolved off-screen. This is indicative of the show’s poor writing at this point in general, plot points will be seemingly forgotten about or just dissolve mid-episode, proving to be of no real consequence. Anime in this “otaku action anime” genre do not have to be exquisitely-written, but they do need to have impact, and virtually nothing that’s happened in the past two episodes has had any.

On top of that, it must be said. No one comes to an anime like this for its themes, but watching it—again, especially this weak run of episodes 6 and 7—has made me realize just how well written some of them, in particular Rumble Garandoll, actually are by comparison. That series never lost sight of the fact that people who loudly express disdain for art and those who love it tend to have ulterior motives for doing so. There is a reason its villains were from an alternate timeline where Japan won WWII; they were literal fascists, whose hatred of otaku culture stemmed from it being indicative, in their view, of a weak mindset that did not sufficiently put the nation first. By contrast, Magical Destroyers‘ main villain seems to just hate otaku because they’re otaku. He gives a rather over-wrought speech in episode 6 that makes him come across like the sort of person who spends a lot of time on tumblr ranting about how fanfiction is destroying young writers’ minds. He’s still ultimately wrong, but the ideological scope is not there, and as such his plans—and the show’s entire plot as a consequence—come off as trivial.

Otaku Hero’s ideal of a world where you can “like whatever you want however much you want to like it” is a nice enough idea, sure, but it’s not very specific. Contrast Garandoll‘s broad messages of unity and inclusiveness—even accounting for that show’s own flaws—and you start to see how poorly Magical Destroyers‘ writing holds up even against other anime in its own very narrow genre. When Magical Destroyers began, I saw a few people express disdain at the fact that it took its own conceit seriously. That isn’t the problem; the problem is that it’s not taking it seriously enough to actually articulate any further ideas it might have. And if it doesn’t have any, if the only thought it has truly is “doesn’t it suck when nerds get bullied?” then that’s all the worse.

Finally, the show’s production has begun falling off as of episode 7, and as a result some shots and sequences look astoundingly poor, with low drawing quality and bad composition. One hopes it’s just a hiccup, but it’s genuinely hard to believe that shots like these come from the same anime as episode 2, which still stands as one of the single most visually inventive of the season. And for that matter, the show’s own stock henshin sequences, which stack up to any from any more conventional magical girl anime of the past decade.

Will Magical Destroyers recover? It’s not impossible. There are a few high points of episode 7; a bit where Otaku Hero and Anarchy rescue Pink and Blue sees them walking in on the two mid-Uno game, where Pink is “torturing” Blue by hitting her with a pair of Draw 4s. And there are a handful of good to great shots and cuts, although honestly that’s true of almost any anime (very few anime look uniformly terrible throughout).

And while it probably hasn’t sounded like it from most of this article’s tone; I am rooting for Magical Destroyers, here. I like stuff like this! There’s a real point to be made about how the persecution of art can abet the persecution of people, and while no show in this small genre has ever made it perfectly, they usually at least try. What’s really burning me about Magical Destroyers at this stage is that it feels like it’s not trying anymore. Not to beat a dead horse, but you’re going to go on and on about the glory of anime and manga, and then this My Hero Academia reject is the heat you’re going to bring?

I initially thought there was a method to this anime’s madness, but it really seems like it might just be making it up as it goes after all. For a show where the premise involves a rebelling army of nerd guerillas and a magical girl named Anarchy, it hasn’t really lit the fires of revolution under me.

Nonetheless, because I’m a mark, and because I tend to get attached to shows where my feelings on them change several times over the course of me watching them, if it ever does get its act back together, I’ll be the first person singing its praises. Come on, Magical Destroyers! Give me something to believe in!

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 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Wears Red and Pink in MAGICAL DESTROYERS

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.