Magical Girl Site First Impressions

“Oh you poor, unfortunate soul. For you we would like to offer special magical powers.”

Before watching this, I was planning on cracking some joke about it being roughly the same show as Mahou Shoujo Ore, but I honestly feel like that would be in poor taste. Magical Girl Site is an… ugly show. It’s deliberately unpleasant to watch. Technically it’s a horror, but one could argue it’d best be described as emotional torture porn. There may be an audience for that, but I’m pretty sure that I’m not it. This leaves me in an awkward position, as the show arguably succeeds at what it wants to do, but I’m unwilling to throw it any points for that. This first episode involves animal abuse, domestic abuse, physical & verbal bullying, and attempted rape. What, you might ask, is the point of that? The point is to force you along an emotional roller coaster where, instead of dealing with building tension and scares, you’re dealing with gradual hope and immense despair. It’s not good.

When I think about it, technically the core idea of using emotional anxiety instead of sheer tension isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it isn’t an original one either. Plenty of horror anime rely on the more psychological aspects of horror since the inherent unreality of the medium can get in the way of your more traditional scare. Higurashi used these methods by starting us off in a pleasant scenario where things inevitably would start to go wrong after a little while. The tension came from trying to anticipate who would lose their minds in the coming arc. Magical Girl Site takes the edgelord approach by just piling suffering on our main character, Aya, so that we go through multiple emotional peaks and valleys in just this first episode. It’s manipulative, tiring and ultimately just obnoxious. For the sake of giving an overview, Aya is a depressed suicidal teenage girl who is abused by a trio of her classmates and by her older brother. The only thing she’d able to find an emotional connection with is a stray kitten, since her classmates, teacher and parents are oblivious or don’t care about her plight. The kitten, of course, gets thrown in front of a train by the midway point of the episode. While Aya contemplates her death, a website called Magical Girl Site pops up on her laptop claiming that a ‘magic stick’ will be provided to her. Confused, she shuts it off, but finds an odd heart-shaped gun with her shoes the next morning. When the trio of bullies attempt to get Aya raped, she uses the gun on one of the bullies along with the rapist. This results in the two being transferred in front of a train where they are both killed.

On the visual side of things, Mahou Shoujo Site looks better than it has any right to. It has the stray design choice that doesn’t work for me, the mouths sometimes look odd, but, considering the content, it has more polish than I’d expect. I mean it is ugly, but not as ugly as its narrative content, so that’s nice. The OP is decent even if I suspect much of the footage in it comes from the episodes themselves. The ED… is odd. I don’t know or care what it was going for. It consists primarily of sperm swimming against a red background and two women (Probably seiyuu for two of the characters.) dancing. Most of the voice acting is fine, but I’m perplexed by the casting and design for the attempted rapist. By the way, every time I have to type out the word rape or a variation upon it, I get angrier at this show. He’s supposed to be a student, and, given Aya is a middle schooler, it would make sense for him to be one as well, but he looks and sounds like he is thirty. This was probably done to make him more intimidating, but, like everything else in this garbage fire of a series, it just confounds me. I have nothing against mature content in my horror. I enjoy Higurashi. I enjoy Hellsing Ultimate. Between those two titles I have shown myself to be capable of enjoying series that involved young girls stabbing themselves in the neck repeatedly and Nazi vampires eating babies. It’s not that I CAN’T watch this show, but I’m unable to think of a single reason why I would want to.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• The production studio is Production doA. I don’t know of anything they’ve done, and I don’t think I care to. They can go fuck themselves for this one.
• The OP implies that one of the ‘magic sticks’ in this show is a panty. I sooo don’t care to know what that’s about.
• At this point, I think I’ve seen more subversions or dark takes on the magical girl genre than I have normal ones.
• I am so irritated right now. Fuck this fucking edgelord bullshit. Someone needs to have the shit slapped right out of their shit-eating grin for this one (It is entirely up to Dead whether that last bit gets censored. I can’t be fucking bothered).
• In the comic Transmetropolitan, the gonzo reporter Spider Jerusalem famously submitted an article that was just the F-word repeated eight thousand times. I was tempted.