Gushing Over Magical Girls

Episode 8

Things were tentatively looking up for Gushing Over Magical Girls last week, but the show's had its moments before. This is where the series had to confirm if it had indeed turned a corner. So how does it deliver? I guess I've just got to come out with it like Sayo confessing her defeat to her teammates: The gushing magical girl show might be wholly, unironically good at this point.

It's a hell of an escalation, but it comes thanks to improvements in the series's storytelling. The appearance of the evil Enormita group immediately straps on some spike-studded heels and kicks things up a notch. Utena and her squad have been playing around in the kiddy pool (emphasis on "kiddy") all this time, but Lord Enorme and her founding members build on the story's previously dropped hints that something much larger and more complex was happening here. What's most immediately engaging, from the audience's perspective, is how that wider, wilder plot has less to do with all the magical molestation and BDSM bad times that the story has shoved in our faces up until now.

Enorme and her flunkies still seem to prioritize fighting magical girls instead of any proper world-conquering activities. They are genuinely taking the magical girls out. Whether they're killing the heroes or just stripping them of their power (as opposed to the more conventional kind of stripping) isn't certain, but it's upfront either way. It trips up everything the audience was trained to consider about this setup, especially since Venalita seemed so keen on only having Utena/Baiser rough up the heroines in cheeky and fun rather than cruel and tragic ways. It provokes genuine consideration of the narrative—and there's scarcely time to consider what the "true" status quo is even supposed to be before our girls find themselves in a full-blown villain civil war over the divide.

This sort of vivisection of villain factions will always be a personal favorite story trope of mine, especially in the structured superhero settings that Gushing Over Magical Girls is ostensibly built on. Better yet, it provides a place for the show's style (which was already on the upswing after last week's episode) to cut loose on some battle setpieces that aren't part-and-parcel to some fetish setup. Well, almost. The team's battle with Sister Gigant reveals the nun's ability to invoke the ol' giant woman kink. I've heard of a big sister, but this is ridiculous! Seriously though, this does also mean that Gushing is one degree closer to the salacious standard set by the actual most absurdly outlandish fanservice anime ever made, Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid and its legendary gigantism episode. So it's starting to approach the level of peak TV, so many commentators claimed this anime was going to be back when it started.

Really though, I can't overstate how well Gushing is put over this week thanks to the sheer amount of material it's indulging. There's another great fight between Kiwi and Loco Musica in the second half. It resolves with a sweet reinforcement of the camaraderie between Kiwi and Korisu and, by proxy, their bond with Utena. It also includes the sequence of Yuka Aisaka's brilliantly bad singing in-character as Loco. Between that and Utena's deadpan reaction to Lord Enorme's team-up offer earlier, this episode managed an incredible feat for the show: it made me laugh twice.

Is it damning with faint praise? Grading the show on the curve? Maybe, but the fact is even with those qualifications, there's no denying I was genuinely entertained throughout this whole episode of Gushing Over Magical Girls. The comparisons are entirely in its favor; throughout most of seeing this story spin on a dime, I kept thinking about how the anime had spent so much time spinning its wheels in its early episodes. We're now in the back half of its season, and as Utena's character grows into her villainous volumes, it feels like it's going somewhere engaging. It hasn't abandoned its primary audience either, delivering some BDSM fanservice punishment onto Loco as a bonus by the episode's end. And since they haven't technically confirmed if that character's a middle schooler yet, I don't even need to call it out on that! Yet.

Rating:

Funny meme photoshops are great and all, but I can't keep dodging the delivery of dirty pictures to you guys forever. But having already gotten dinged once for flying too close to the sexy sun, what's an enterprising anime critic to do? Hopefully, the best bowdlerization techniques of yesteryear will allow me to skate through without incurring any editorial wrath.

Gushing Over Magical Girls is currently streaming on HIDIVE.

Chris is hoping that following this series at the same time he's keeping up with Precure won't result in him being put on a special list. Please direct any call-out posts to his increasingly decaying Twitter, or whip him into writing more quality material for his blog.