Gushing Over Magical Girls

Episode 12

The aftermath of any big scene has to include time for some comedown and aftercare, and that's exactly what the girls of the Gushing world are working towards this week. It's not completely devoid of effort, mind you. This episode opens with an exceedingly clever gag featuring Tres Magia having to physically, and manually repair the damage caused by the catastrophic battle. They're a far cry from the auto-magic terrain fixes that the Precure are so famously allotted, and it makes for a pretty funny subversion of a subversion—of all the "What would magical girls be like in the real world?" deconstructions, them having to moonlight as construction workers is a more amusingly mundane result.

That leads as well as anything else into one of this show's theses that manifests more overtly in this episode. Utena's explicit love for the played-straight (the only thing straight about it) Sunday-morning kids-show variety of magical girls, alongside her admonishment of Sayo halfway into the series, sketched out an interesting position for Gushing Over Magical Girls. That is, it nominally occupies the same sort of subverted piss-takes of the genre like Magical Girl Ore, seasoned with just a bit of the Madoka-style grown-ups-only deconstruction. However, not only does Gushing, as it laid out last week, hold nothing but reverence for the "pure" kinds of magical girls, but it comes through here that Utena would outright reject the swerves of her darker demographic contemporaries.

That's a whole lot of analytical language devoted to a series where I'm going to be praising its creativity in upskirt shots in another few paragraphs but bear with me here.

Utena deciding to contribute to the construction effort and running into Sayo/Azure affords the new Supreme Commander of the villain group the chance to relitigate her effects on the Tres Magia member. As a viewer, I'd been so honed in on what had been going on with side characters like Kiwi that I'd somewhat neglected the mental roller coaster Utena herself had been on. And she was seemingly detached too, since she temporarily forgot the kinds of character arcs her beloved superheroines go through. Utena needed that demonstrated proof that her beloved magical girls can and will always come back from their darkest hours so that she could continue gushing over them. Of course, Utena then demonstrates her psychological bounce-back by giving Azure one of the most graphic lower-body massages ever put into animation. That's something I can less critically tie into this theming, though at least the point that Utena enacts it without transforming into Baiser indicates some sort of movement along her character arc.

The real point is that the bizarre combination of girl boss and girl failure that is Utena has renewed her resolve, and that comes through in the other interactions in the episode. Glimpsing the joys of Haruka's triplet (!) younger sisters, the value of cartoon heroes for kids is demonstrated. And those magical girls can't put on the shows that spread their messages of hope without villains to do battle against. With that in mind, Utena's plan to keep fighting Tres Magia to near-losses is about the most heroic thing she could do in her villainous role and a refutation that for as graphic and adult-aimed as something like this gets, that doesn't mean it has to throw away its whimsical senses of hope and joy.

That means that while the big battle that does break out in this episode is rather arbitrary, it still connects back to the point of this entry. It gives the audience a peek at what a refreshed, almost "healthy" status quo could look like with Utena as the lead villain. Granted, that still includes escalatingly inventive ecchi scenes. Oh right, the upskirt thing—so there's this character from the old Super Friends cartoon named Apache Chief, whose whole bit was having the power to grow gigantic…while wearing a loincloth. Poor Magia Magenta gets that equivalently enacted on her while wearing a skirt courtesy of a magical Ultraman roleplay toy. And so the anime very graphically demonstrates the kind of show city civilians would inadvertently enjoy as a result.

That's certainly one way to swerve from the point that Sister Gigant was already doing the vanilla giganticism fetish thing previously (Has anything ever been "vanilla" in this show?) before the other characters start climbing around and fighting on Magenta's blushing body underneath her rapidly loosening clothes. Look, ambivalent about this show's primarily preteen fanservice as I've been, even I'm compelled to do an awed glasses removal in the face of such an ultra-galaxy-brained concept for a horny fight scene. After all that, it looks like there's still one episode left to go in this season for Gushing, alongside the manga's still-continuing story. So this isn't the actual stopping point for the series. Rather it functions, as the anime has in most of its best moments, as an idea. The, uh, "fun" antics here are the most positive iteration of her role that Utena could strive for. It won't last, but it's a damn sight more upbeat a place than most "grown-up" magical girl anime ever make it to.

Rating:

It's worth noting that Utena's molestational massage of Azure is pushing the limits of TV broadcasts even by uncensored Japanese anime standards. It makes me oddly recall Funimation panicking and locking even the censored version of Interspecies Reviewers in horny jail after just a few episodes. HIDIVE, by comparison, continues to gush unabated—save for any issues brought on by their recent interface update.

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.