Magical Girl Site, episode 1, “Magical Girl Site.” Directed by Tadahito Matsubayashi. Starring Yuko Ono, Himika Akaneya, and Aina Suzuki. Production DoA, 2018. 22 minutes. Not rated.
Available on Amazon Prime.
Speaking only for myself, I’m ready for the “dark” fad in magical girl anime to end. It’s been seven years now, guys.
Magical Girl Site is a twelve-episode anime series that came out this year and made a name for itself as one of the gruesomest and most depressing shows to appear during its season. The title has come up a few times during the controversy over the current (as of this writing) series Goblin Slayer, so I thought, given that I just recently finished up Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, now would be a good time to give Magical Girl Site a look-see. I doubt I’ll write an individual review for every single episode, but having watched the first, I wanted to put down some preliminary thoughts.
My initial impression is similar to my initial impression of Magical Girl Raising Project: that is to say, not very positive.
This anime is based on a manga by Kentaro Sato. Although I have not read the manga, I have read Sato-sensei’s other major title, Magical Girl Apocalypse, which is a genre mashup of magical girls and zombie survival horror—and of which Magical Girl Site is usually described as a spin-off. If Magical Girl Site is similar to its predecessor, then we can expect a lot of blood and guts, a lot of tasteless humor, a lot of cringey fanservice, and a regular round of violence and sexual assault approaching the level of torture porn.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about Magical Girl Apocalypse is that Seven Seas Entertainment chose to sell it in the U.S. as a title suitable for “older teens,” since it’s graphic enough to earn an M rating and shrink wrap.
Sato-sensei is unquestionably a skilled writer and illustrator. Magical Girl Apocalypse starts with a silly premise and successfully turns it into a nail-biting thriller before pulling a wild series of plot twists that bend the story into a shounen action series before flipping back around to horror again. Distasteful though much of his material is, it’s impossible to deny that the man knows both how to spin a yarn and to draw it.
Magical Girl Site, like its prequel, appears to be a mashup of sorts: instead of blending magical girls with zombie horror, Sato-sensei has here instead blended them with Hell Girl. The basic premise is quite similar to that of Hell Girl: there is a mysterious website, only accessible at midnight, through which a girl at the end of her rope can make a Faustian bargain, becoming a magical girl in exchange for … well, we don’t know yet. But probably nothing good.
Our heroine is a tortured (literally) young girl named Aya. For no apparent reason other than sheer boredom, four bullies at school torture her regularly. In addition to the usual pranks of thumbtacks in the shoes and glue on the desk, they even go so far as to waterboard Aya in a toilet.
Then, when Aya gets home, her brilliant but sociopathic older brother beats the hell out of her to relieve the stress he feels from attending Tokyo University.
Naturally, Aya is not a happy camper, so the show opens with her seriously contemplating throwing herself in front of a train. She walks around with head down and bags under her eyes, kind of like Tomoko Kuroki, except considerably less funny.
It’s easy to sympathize with Aya, since she’s nice and basically likable, but it’s also easy to ask why she doesn’t, you know, tell an adult—or why an adult doesn’t intervene even before she tells. It’s impossible that the entire faculty at her school could fail to notice this over-the-top bullying that she’s going through, and equally impossible that her parents could never, not once, hear her brother beating the crap out of her in her bedroom. Her parents seem like mostly nice people, if a bit strict about school performance, and it’s hard to imagine that they’d turn a blind eye if they knew what was going on.
Some of the missing details will probably get filled in later, knowing how Sato-sensei works, but some of them likely won’t be, considering how this episode plays out.
Aya, after an evening of being punched in the stomach, comes in contact with the Magical Girl Site, which informs her that she’ll soon receive a “stick” (the English loanword typically used for a magic wand), and the next day she finds a pistol with a heart-shaped barrel in her shoe locker. When the bullies come for her again and go further with the bullying than ever before, she in a panic shoots two of them.
They disappear in a heart-shaped puff of pink smoke and reappear a moment later on the train tracks, where they promptly die.
Aya panics, aware that she’s the one who killed them. Although her terror is understandable, from the viewer’s perspective, it’s easy to see that she’s not a murderer: this is an ironclad case of self defense, considering that a guy had her pinned to the floor by a wrist and was pulling his pants down to rape her at the time she pulled the trigger. But Aya apparently doesn’t see it that way, or hasn’t had her mind clear enough to see it that way.
Immediately afterwards, that evening, she inadvertently foils her brother’s plans to tie her up with a rope and beat her. She foils him by—get this—locking her bedroom door. Yes, that’s enough to stop him. So why hasn’t she done that before?
The next day, while another bully is threatening to cut Aya’s tongue out with a box cutter, a second magical girl shows up, freezes time, slashes the bully’s throat, and makes a cryptic remark about maybe needing Aya’s help to save the world or something. That’s where the episode ends.
The animation’s decent and the pacing is good. The scenes of bullying and torture are genuinely intense and sometimes even frightening. The show successfully conveys its brooding, moody atmosphere. So it is similar to the Magical Girl Apocalypse manga in that it is of good quality in its technical aspects.
But it is also similar in that it is trying too damn hard to be “edgy.” Aya’s daily routine of personal torture is exaggerated to the point that it invites a lot of “fridge logic” questions such as the ones I stated above. Some of these problems could be fixed simply by moving where a few of the scenes take place—having Aya’s brother beat her somewhere more secluded, for example. And although the brother will likely play a larger role as the story continues, so we might learn what drives him, the school bullies have no apparent motive, and they’re unlikely to have one established, since they’re dead.
In short, this first episode feels like a series of brutal images that are meaningless. Things happen to Aya, but there’s no reason they happen, and Aya herself does nothing; she merely lets the world pummel her—though that it likely to change in the proceeding episodes.
And that may, ultimately be the point. The moral of Magical Girl Apocalypse, if it can be said to have a moral, appears to be that escapism is wrong, that you should live the life you’re given as well as you are able and not fantasize about fairy worlds or magical powers. The point of Sato-sensei’s work is, I think, that the wish fulfillment fantasy of the magical girl genre is fundamentally wrong. Magical Girl Site may be saying something similar: don’t wish for an escape through magic. And that may be why this first episode has those “fridge logic” issues I describe above: there are means Aya could have used to escape her torments, had she wanted to, without using the sinister power that the Magical Girl Site gives her.
