Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2

Episode 20

As roughly 50% of tournament stories in shonen anime do, the one in Mashle has been forcibly formatted into an open battle against a terrorist attack. As far as disruptions go, this is fine. The lead-in to and execution of Mash's fight against Macaron wholly delivered on the hype, and our main mushroom-head even seemed to be swaying much of the student body into accepting his magic-less muscle-based means. So pivoting to another point of the plot is timed well here, and perhaps more importantly, gives the rest of the cast an abundance of action to get into after being sidelined in various ways for the last few episodes.

The anime plays with the positioning of its major plot twists up-front in this episode. It's not completely clear how literal Innocent Zero is in referring to Mash as his son—if he's his offspring or some creation or component he needs to complete his existence. I will say that the idea of Mash's lack of magic (and his compounding training-based overpowering) being part of some overarching plan doesn't rub me the rightest of ways. I liked Mash's whole deal best when it was an irreverent commentary on the existence of magic in storytelling, and a vehicle for blunt, comedic anticlimax. It's simply funnier if he can take on overpowered magic users purely through the power of doing a bunch of sit-ups. Trying to get too clever with the complications and conspiracies threatens to wholly morph Mashle into the very sort of stock shonen story it's always been riffing on.

That is, however, a concern for future episodes, as right now this is all speculation based on allusions made by Innocent Zero and Headmaster Marky Mark. It's there to give a sense of the stakes before Wahlberg un-time-stops the Funky Bunch and lets everyone sort into their designated corners of the fight scene. His battle with Innocent Zero is the bookend of all of this, teasing a climactic clash, plus perhaps some status quo shake-ups looming. Like Mash's nature and relation to Innocent Zero, that actual fight is still firmly in the teasing stage.

Fortunately, even though it just came off a top-tier tournament battle, Mashle shows no signs of slowing down in the fights department. After the decidedly direct action of Mash vs Macaron, things backtrack to the show's goofier sensibilities with all this combat, and I certainly ain't complaining. Mash's rematch with Cell War, naturally, embodies the purest elements of this. Just seeing Mash kick and punch the rows of the tower down until Cell War was at his level was enough to prompt an out loud "I love this show" from me. Then the series gets to wryly comment on the perils of ballooning shonen series casts as Mash just plumbs who this guy is. I had to look up his name to remember so no shame on that, Mash. They then further make the point of Cell War being so last season that Mash is just bored battling against his tricks a second time. Perhaps this is why I trust Mashle not to undercut its better storytelling sensibilities with whatever the twist around Mash turns out to be—it clearly still understands its fun factor.

That's evident in the pacing of the other battles in this episode. In a less smartly structured anime adaptation of yesteryear, I could see Dot and Lance's fight against the absurd Sitter Baby being painfully stretched into a separate episode. Here, it's just one short segment that even gets most of its stupidly simple "baby talk translation" jokes to land. Sitter Baby, for his short screen time, seems to embody the same bullying-based attitude of many of the most basic baddies in Mashle. In this case, it's mostly a reminder of the vibes of the overall system that Mash and pals are pushing back against, and makes it satisfying when even as a baby, Lance can get one over on him. As well, it's cool to see Macaron complete their shift from the completion of the tournament battle, getting to go right back to work in a fight after losing that one-on-one.

With so much happening in what's a split-off shifting point for the story, this episode of Mashle doesn't get to look quite as nice as what came before. But it still works, and is setting up for another spectacle, plus the music continues to carry it impressively. This may not be the formalized fighting of the preceding tournament section, but you can still officially mark this down as another one in the win column for Mash.

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Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is still the reviewer for Mashle, and wizards are still nerds. Get some reps in with him over on his Twitter, or peruse the magical back catalog of his blog.