Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

Episode 18

It's always lovely to see a story come together. Madoka Magica may get a lot of mileage out of its slick, dreamlike visuals and its theatrical character drama, but there's something to be said about when an anime finally gives us a good idea of what the hell is going on with its plot. “I Won't Forgive Anybody” doesn't have a whole lot going in terms of action or anything, but it's damned efficient, and that really counts when you have a season as short as this one. With only a few weeks left until Magia Record goes on hiatus until “the end of 2021” (if we're lucky), this -Eve of Awakening- needs to start cranking the CLIMAX dial up a notch or two, and that's exactly what “I Won't Forgive You” is all about.

I want to avoid simply reducing this review to a plot recap, but much of what makes “I Won't Forgive Anyone” an effective episode is how neatly it ties together old and new strands of the Magia Record story so that the audience can be fully on board with the shenanigans that are about to go down in Kamihama City. I really do think that Magia Record's creative team made a point to take a good, hard look at what did and didn't work about that first season, because every episode of Season 2 has either course-corrected some of the show's worst habits, or consolidated and distilled the good ideas that just got lost in the shuffle (or both).

In “I Had a Feeling We Could All Become Magical Girls Together”, the show established a stronger connection between Magia Record and the original PPMM cast; in “You're Nothing Like Me”, Yachiyo's obsession with rescuing Iroha provided a clear emotional throughline to get the audience re-invested in this newer story; in “There Were Too Many to Carry”, Iroha's Labyrinth showed us a side of the heroine that helped her to stand on her own, instead of seeming like a second-rate Madoka clone; and in “Are You Okay With That?”, the new crew made demonstrable progress in their offensive against Magius, and we learned more about the terrible truth behind their quest to “free” magical girls from their fates.

Pretty much all of those threads are woven together even more tightly here, except for Yachiyo's whole arc, funnily enough, since she's still MIA after holding off the twins last week. Kuroe fills the role of Iroha's better half just fine, though, which makes the final scene of the episode make a bit more sense, since Kuroe's newfound feelings for Iroha are being given a similar amount of weight as the Yachiyo stuff. In any case, everything else feels very streamlined and focused towards setting up Magius' master plan, which is (mostly) explained in detail this week: Touka and Nemu have engineered an “Artificial Witch” that they call Embryo Eve, and as Walpurgisnacht approaches, they plan on feeding this creation of theirs all of the other Witches around.

How exactly this will bring about the freedom of the Magical Girls is still unclear, at least to me, but its good enough just to know the basic gist of Touka's plans, and watching this scheme unfold even leaves some room for the show's side characters to have their moments. Kyoko is back, for one thing, which is always a good development, and she also runs into Felicia and Sana, two more characters that I had more or less forgotten about, despite liking their individual stories in Season 1. Sana admittedly doesn't get a lot to do, but Felicia gets a nice moment where even she has to admit that what Magius is doing to the Witches is going too far, despite how much she hates them for what happened to her family. It isn't a lot of payoff, but its payoff all the same, so I'll take it. Plus, the scene where Embryo Eve straight up noshes on Witch after Witch in horrifically mechanical fashion is one of the coolest and creepiest visuals that Magia Record has given us to date.

There are still some things that feel underdeveloped, of course, especially when it comes to the inner workings of the Wings of Magius. With Touka locking up dissident Black Feathers, there are some interesting hints at fractured power structures and defecting members that would honestly make the organization feel a lot more real and threatening. Instead, every single Black Feather that isn't a named cast member is just some girl in a cloak, and it remains hard to consider Magius as anything other than an abstract threat that just so happens to have some faces and names attached to it.

Still, I'd say the conflict between Magius and our heroines has finally reached “good enough” status, at least, which is an improvement. There's also plenty more that could go down in the final episodes of this mini-season, given the pace at which things have been escalating so far. Kuroe, for one, ends this episode by sprouting a pair of jet-black wings and vowing to protect her pink-haired bestie, and I think we all know how well that usually ends for Magical Girls in this show…

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Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story is currently streaming on FUNimation.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.