Magical Girl Site, written by Takayo Ikami and Kentaro Sato. Directed by Tadahito Matsubayashi. Starring Yuko Ono, Himika Akaneya, and Aina Suzuki. Production DoA, 2018. 12 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 288 minutes). Not rated.
If Magical Girl Raising Project was a poor man’s Battle Royale, then Magical Girl Site is a poor man’s Magical Girl Raising Project. It starts out by trying too hard, though it gets interesting in its second half. In spite of my initial distaste, I found myself getting into it.
I’ve previously discussed my reaction to the first episode. That initial hot take, unsurprisingly, contained a few speculations that turned out to be incorrect. But I stand by its overall conclusion: This is a show too desperate to be on the edge, an edge that so many shows have been on already, it looks clichéd rather than groundbreaking.
Summary
As I mentioned before, the story starts with a young girl, Aya, being tortured by most everybody for no reason, including a group of school bullies and more especially her mentally sick older brother, who seems to be some kind of sexless version of a sadist (he believes he is a superior being chosen by God, and that his sister is his personal punching bag). No clear reason for his craziness ever gets revealed, though a brief, one-second scene suggests that he beats his sister partly because his father beats him.
Contacted by the mysterious Magical Girl Site, which seeks out “unfortunate souls,” Aya receives a “stick,” that is, a magic wand, which resembles a pistol with a heart-shaped barrel. When she accidentally uses it to kill one of her tormentors and a would-be rapist, Aya discovers that the gun is a teleporter that can send people to any place she holds clearly in her mind.
Leader of the bullies at school is Sarina. While Sarina is preparing to slice out Aya’s tongue with a box cutter, another magical girl, Tsuyuno, appears. She has a magical cell phone that can stop time, which she uses to rescue Aya and slit Sarina’s throat.
Tsuyuno informs Aya that using magical powers will shorten a girl’s lifespan.
She also reveals that she’s looking for the “Magic Hunter,” a magical girl who’s been killing others to collect their sticks. They eventually find this magical girl and defeat her with surprising ease, landing her in the hospital.
However, before she is incapacitated, the Magic Hunter reveals that she’s collecting the sticks because she thinks it will enable her to survive a coming apocalypse, the “Tempest,” with which the Magical Girl Site’s mysterious administrator will cleanse the world and wipe out most of the human race.
Shortly after this reveal, the Magic Hunter collapses into a coma from an excessive use of magic. Then Aya and Tsuyuno go on a mission to find a magical girl who can revive her so they can get more information about the Tempest. This leads them to Nijimi, the lead singer of an idol group called Dog Party, whose stick is a magical pair of panties that enable her to control people’s minds—which of course means lots of opportunities for gratuitous displays of a loli in her underwear.
Of course, the “fan service” in this show is as grotesque as everything else, so it’s difficult to say whether it’s really meant to be titillating.
Nijimi is also looking for the Magic Hunter to kill her in revenge for the death of her best friend.
Meanwhile, Sarina survives having her throat cut, but is left with a nasty scar. Bitter and out for revenge herself, she encounters the administrator of the Magical Girl Site and receives a yo-yo that can slice through anything, with which she chases Aya and Tsuyuno with vengeance in mind.
Repeated struggles and gruesome reveals lead Aya and Tsuyuno to a new group of magical girls who received their sticks from a different site and a different administrator. These girls also know about the Tempest and have banded together for one purpose—to capture the site administrators and kill them in the hopes of stopping the apocalypse.
Themes
The quick and dirty summary I’ve given here intentionally leaves out a lot of details, a lot of twists and turns and double-crosses. There is some real merit here: the action scenes are decent, though they don’t compare to the near-perfection that is the brutal fighting in Magical Girl Raising Project. The pacing is also good, though the story dithers around too much with side characters, especially an idol-obsessed otaku who ends up being unimportant to the plot. The story, too, is intriguing overall, if not exactly original.
Also well-handled, though it sometimes comes across as forced, is the friendship that develops between Aya and Tsuyuno. Both characters grow as a result: Aya gets over her suicidal depression, and Tsuyuno softens, finding a reason to live aside from the cold vengeance that previously drove her.
Arguably, however, Magical Girl Site goes overboard with the shoujo-ai: Sexually charged yet platonic girls’ friendships are a staple of the genre, of course, but Magical Girl Site is too obviously self-conscious about it, with characters making snide comments to our heroines, like “Get a room.” Still, Aya and Tsuyuno’s efforts to save each other as the show approaches its climax feel genuine enough.
Difficulties
The show is trying so hard for edge, however, that most of the characters are hard to like. Aya is nice enough, if wimpy. Tsuyuno is intriguing if cruel, but her likability takes a serious hit when we discover that she’s torturing a man to death by inches in her apartment.
The new cast of magical girls introduced midway through the series gets dumped on us too quickly, so we don’t get the chance to learn much of anything about them, but what we do learn is largely distasteful: Among them is a meek emo girl who impulsively cuts herself, a crossdressing boy who gets beat up at school because he foolishly posted videos of his habit to social media, and a spoiled rich sadist who enjoys sodomizing her elderly butler with her high heels.
That latter detail, especially, has no point whatsoever and merely serves to make one of the characters hateful. Pretty much the only girl in the cast who comes across as admirable is the stoical daughter of a yakuza boss who is trying to live the ideals of the samurai. Unfortunately, that particular girl gets little screen time. I wish this was her show instead of Aya’s.
Also a problem is that the story ends up breaking its own rules. Sometimes it’s in minor ways, but sometimes in more serious ones. As an example of the minor, a girl gets sliced open by a sword that supposedly “hardens anything it cuts,” but instead of turning to stone as we might expect, this girl dies in the regular fashion, as anyone might from a sword cut. As an example of the major, the grand finale involves some phlebotinum performed with a magic stick that wasn’t set up ahead of time, so it looks as if the writers simply pulled it out of nowhere when they’d written themselves into a corner.
The Finale
Speaking of which, the final episode is overall a disappointment. I’m trying to avoid any serious spoilers here, so I’ll just say that it fails to wrap up. We were promised a global apocalypse, but it doesn’t happen. The final action sequences have some good moments, but they also have some animation cop-outs and some flat-out silliness, especially a ludicrous moment involving Tokyo Tower and a sword. Also, some idiot working on this project apparently thought a man getting prison-raped makes for a great final scene! I think that was supposed to be a villain getting his just desserts, but it instead comes across as yet one more instance of senseless brutality.
Discussion
The way the show ends indicates that there is supposed to be another season, though I doubt it happens. For the rest of the story, we’ll have to turn to the manga.
That being said, there are things about Magical Girl Site that I believe have merit, and it continues to develop the themes that the story’s creator, Kentaro Sato, had already begun to tease out in his previous (and more daring) series Magical Girl Apocalypse.
In spite of all the criticisms we may level against his work, Sato-sensei has discovered and chosen to exploit a fundamental paradox in the magical girl genre. On the one hand, magical girl stories are coming-of-age stories, stories about moving from childhood into adulthood. But on the other hand, they’re also wish-fulfillment fantasies, stories of girls escaping ordinary life thanks to magical creatures who grant them otherworldly powers.
Sato-sensei’s work says you can’t grow up if you won’t face reality, that escapism and coming of age are fundamentally opposed to each other. This seems to be the point of the decision the protagonists make in the final episode of Magical Girl Site: Aya and Tsuyuno determine in the end that they will not wallow in the hardships they’ve suffered nor try to escape from them but instead use their experiences and their hard-won friendship to grow stronger.
It is because of things like this that I grudgingly admire all these “grimdark” magical girl shows despite my distaste for their atmospherics. Puella Magi Madoka Magica and its derivatives refuse to collapse into nihilism. Instead, they confront nihilism head-on. They toy with it, certainly: They get right up to the edge and give it a good, hard look, but they refuse to go over. They stare into the abyss, and when the abyss stares back, they tell the abyss to go bugger itself.
Given how popular nihilism is these days, perhaps my reaction to the grim, gruesome, and bloody magical girl shows has been incorrect. Maybe these shows are exactly what we need right now. Maybe we need stories of young girls who suffer horribly but choose to keep fighting instead of giving in to despair.
