Gushing Over Magical Girls

Episode 5

If you're not so desensitized that you can still feel such things towards the show, the setup for this week's Gushing Over Magical Girls may inspire some apprehension. Not content with eroticism at the eighth-grade level, Venalita's newest villain recruit is an actual-factual little girl named Korisu. It is very darkly funny to hear Utena protest to her bad boss about bringing in a kid since, well, they're all kids. But it also results in some wonder about exactly how far down this deep, dark rabbit hole the series is going to go with its material. This is what I get for cutting the show some slack last week, I suppose.

Fortunately (for a given value of "fortunate"), for now, Korisu has mostly just been adjacent to Gushing's graphic antics. She still gets a nudied-up transformation sequence into a villain costume based off of Alice in Wonderland. Fitting, when you think about it, and there are more parallels between that piece of literary canon and this anime apart from both being works made by people who are clearly attracted to kids. Korisu/NeroAlice is all about trapping people in her own private Wonderlands and playing with them using toys. No, not those kinds of toys—though every other element is as saucy as would be expected from a series like this entering a realm limited only by imagination. That's the bulk of this episode—as is plainly espoused by Venalita when showing off the potential of NeroAlice's kinks powers.

If you're just here to see Haruka and Kaoruko sex up Sayo in a dollhouse with a whole mess of forbidden family roleplay involved or watch Utena "play doctor" in every sense of the phrase, then this episode of Gushing ought to theoretically serve you just as well as the previous ones. Still, the subtler, more explorative sense to the sexytimes this go-around lacks a lot of the impact (as it were) of Magia Baiser's infamous initial attacks on the magical girls. That means that languid feeling that's always plagued Gushing's approach to alleged atmospheric comedy is ever more palpable here. With no follow-up on the intrigue elements from last week, that results in an episode that plays like a whole lot of deviant dead air.

Not to make it seem like there's nothing here. The show's vibe results in some raw discomfort of waiting for some other shoe to drop as the audience is introduced to Korisu's home life and hobbies. That makes it relieving, for now, when there really doesn't seem to be any sinister or unsavory aspects to her relationship with her mom and her endearing love of her toys. There's almost a heartwarming spin to it, Korisu seemingly cherishing both her fabric and flesh-and-blood friends—and wanting to care for them and keep them around as long as possible. It leads to an interesting exchange wherein we see Utena help someone she knows in a wholly constructive way (repairing Korisu's treasured doll), which is then repaid in Korisu herself using her magical villainess powers to help someone for a change in this show. Well, you could argue that Utena "helped" Kiwi after a fashion, but awakening that girl's latent "sub side" was hardly the intention of giving her the ol' electroshock.

Are those oddly endearing thematics enough to overcome all the other shortcomings of this episode? There are a couple other neat bits, like NeroAlice's power to shrink down Tres Magia (a whole other fetish the show hasn't yet really exploited) being depicted through classic Alice in Wonderland tricky perspective physics. But other than that, it's a whole lot of mildly uncomfortable meandering, rendered with art and animation that continues to devolve into jank (apart from the still A+ face game). While I can almost appreciate an effort at a turn towards the sincere by the end, this show doing that in this way is still only side-eye-worthy at this point. But maybe that's on me for letting just one decent showing get my hopes up too high for Gushing Over Magical Girls.

Rating:

I know, I know, I messed with you again on the bonus review image last week. You can blame one of my fellow writers for that one, they had a funny idea I just had to see realized. No foolin' this time though—as here I'll provide you a 100% guaranteed NSFW bonus image, suitable for only the finest multimedia news outlets!

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.