Angel Moxie is both a parody and an homage of the genre.Since only women are supposed to be able to use magic, any men with the ability, while rare, are imprisoned and sometimes executed. The main character, Amel, is actually a teenage boy who must pretend to be a girl in order to protect the integrity of his household and his own life. While the girls do have magic and costumes, the magical girl elements end there. Several of the main characters are young girls descended from the nobility of a parallel world, sent to earth in order to hunt down members of the Twilight Dawn organization, who are hiding out on our planet. Americano Exodus is a rather unique take on the genre.Agents of the Realm is clearly inspired by the genre, with parallel worlds, Monster of the Week and eponymous Agents being five Magical Girl Warriors whose Transformation Trinkets are shiny amulets.There’s something unspeakably unpleasant in seeing Aya get magical girl powers only for them to make her more miserable, when the genre was historically a source of positive escapism. This is a shounen horror series, and an irritating reminder of the industry mentality that the way to make stories about young women appeal to men is to make them cry and suffer-a mentality stemming from a genre-shifting work that strolled in and said “Hey, what if this genre that’s been pretty exclusively for women was also a thing that men could have, actually?” (and boy is Site doing a hack crib job: Aya’s future totally-platonic-bestie has time-stopping powers). The moments of grimdark hilarity, like magical girls crying blood, are few and located far between the long sessions of wallowing in watching a young girl suffer. It delights in showing the lines of exhaustion under Aya’s eyes, her bruises, the vomit and spit and tears every time she’s pushed down or hit. Magical Girl Site has no shortage of detail. Pictured: The writer of Magical Girl Site (or Madoka Magica, or Yuki Yuna, or…) But that kind of show generally relies on a certain level of technical incompetence and an eliding of detail that strives for the punch of horrible plot beats without actually wanting or knowing how to showcase them (see: School Days). This “pile on the misery” approach to plotting (“her mom is dead-no wait, she’s an orphan! With an eyepatch! And she HAS A PAPERCUT”) has been rife for unintended comedic appeal before, as it usually crops up in shows that have little to no grasp on how to powerfully portray even one traumatic event in a moving way, much less six all at the same time. Hell, our first glimpse of Aya is her internal monologue that “every day, all I think about it dying” as she imagines stepping out in front of a train. Over the course of this episode Aya is beaten, held down in a toilet bowl until she passes out, has her kitten murdered, has a box cutter stuck in her mouth, and is assaulted and almost raped. I can’t lie, I kind of had hopes for this one-there have been a few dark magical girl shows I liked, and sometimes they make me laugh-but the actual result is just too unpleasant to qualify for so-bad-it’s-good. “Oh Disposakitty, you’re my only friend!”
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