The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians

Episode 7

Despite getting some very good answers, this is a frustrating episode. It's hard to see Kurumi, a determined ray of sunshine, continue to sabotage herself. Every opportunity she has to realize that her dreams of being a magician aren't that far away at all is turned on its head by her crippling new fear of failure. For whatever reason, her inability to make ancient magic work during the race was the final blow to her ego. Now she sees every opportunity not as a chance to prove she can do it, but as an inevitable disaster where she'll fail to activate her spell and only disappoint herself again.

Thus far Kurumi hasn't been able to successfully cast a spell under low-stakes conditions, so the leap to assuming that she won't be able to in a desperate, high-stakes situation feels natural. People tend to react to life-or-death moments (or those that simply feel that way) by either shutting down or miraculously putting aside their fears and rising to the occasion, as seen with Kurumi and Yuzu. Kurumi, despite perfectly drawing her spell array, freezes up twice. Yuzu desperately cast ancient magic despite never having really bought into it or her ability to use it before. Even after she successfully casts it, Yuzu isn't sure it is real, and she's less upset by the failure of her second spell than she is accepting as if the first time was a fluke. Kurumi takes Yuzu's initial success as a sign that she really has no talent or affinity for ancient magic. Yuzu, after all, is a Rettoran legacy and was within a hairsbreadth of getting into the Magumi. Obviously she'd be more successful than Kurumi, a nobody from the middle of nowhere.

The great irony is that Kurumi is also revealed to be a legacy and inherently powerful. The “her” Ms. Suzuki is going to see isn't Kurumi, but her grandmother, a top Magumi student in her day, with the implication that when she was there, ancient magic was taught. (This makes a lot of sense if we assume that modern magic is a stand-in for our technology, while ancient magic represents analog ways of doing things.) That makes Kurumi more of a shoo-in for Rettoran, although it also tramples a bit on the idea that Ms. Suzuki is trying to level the playing field by teaching everyone ancient magic since it implies that Kurumi's enrollment at Rettoran is a major factor. But Kurumi still isn't anyone's idea of a magician in Rettoran stratified world, and that alone could boost Ms. Suzuki's goals.

Still, it's frustrating to be halfway through the series and have our heroine in the middle of a slump that threatens to derail the plot, or at least what we assumed the plot would be. Learning that the cat/school nurse is an actual human who appears to be trapped in feline form is neat, and seeing Kyo's modern magic fail in the face of Element M is important, but Kurumi wallowing in despair sucks the joy out of the series. Hopefully, it will be resolved next week, and I do think that her newfound friendship with Yuzu will help, even if I'm not sold on “Yuzie” as a way to show the intimacy conveyed by leaving off the honorific. (I also don't love “Ms. Suzuki” in the subtitles when that's clearly not what the students are saying.) When Kurumi eventually reclaims her joy and spirit, it should be spectacular. Let's hope we don't have to wait too long for that to happen.

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The Stories of Girls Who Couldn't Be Magicians is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.