Let’s talk about feelings.
But not any specific feelings. Feelings in abstract. The idea of feelings. Let’s ride the fine line between deeply exploratory science fiction and outright Care Bears as we treat feelings, categorically, as well-defined things and not aspects of mood, situation, personality, or so on.
And let’s make this talk at least somewhat interesting by having magical girls battle over the outcome. Let’s talk about Blue Reflection Ray.
Blue Reflection Ray begins (well, after some out-of-context action) with the arrival to a new school of Ruka Hanari. She’s shy, closed off, and feels a fundamental distance from other people, like she can’t understand another person because she doesn’t know what they’ve been through and hasn’t walked a mile in their shoes. This means she’s extremely quiet and patiently sad, since she seems to want to change this, even going so far as to buy a book about how to connect with people.
The book never really seems to do her any good, but what does is that she gets bumped into by a Magical Girl who is running late (mercifully not with toast in her mouth), and said untransformed do-gooder drops the magic ring that lets her do her thing. Ruka picks it up, the ring shows her a brief image of the world painted over in Madoka Labyrinth wallpaper, and the show goes on.
Over the course of her first days at school, Ruka interacts with two other girls. One is a standoffish rich girl, Miyako, who is suffering in secret because her family treats her like trash compared to her highly-accomplished brother. The other is her roommate at the dorms, the impossibly friendly and generally hyper Hiori Hirahara. Hiori also has a magic ring, a trinket left behind by her MIA big sister.
Ruka and Hiori are together when some dark magical girls – Red rings instead of blue and nasty personalities – target Miyako, being still able to move when the supernatural stuff starts going down. They rush to the rooftop, and Hiori ends up getting her magical girl transformation to fight back and protect Miyako. After the incident, they’re found by a senior Magical Girl (or Reflector, as they’re called in the setting) called Momo Tanabe. She’s the one who lost the ring that Ruka found, though she seems to have another for herself. Momo gives them the basic details on the magic rings and how they react to strong feelings. What feelings? Any feelings, apparently, as long as they’re strong. Momo decides right away she wants to be a magical girl and help people, but Ruka isn’t so sure, what with her lack of connection to anyone.
They intercede again when the dark magical girls target Miyako (who seemed about to commit suicide after her mother throws out the one relic of her kept in the family space) once more. The dark side doesn’t explain their purpose freely or well, and one of their team members (named Uta) seems absolutely psycho, but they do explain: they want to take away the painful feelings that exist within people (their “fragments” – the physical manifestation of their feelings, which look like crystal lotus flowers) in order to “save” those people. Seems noble enough but a mysterious voice tells team blue to not let it happen and team red also acts like jerks, so Hiroi transforms to fight.
However, it’s two on one this time, and so Hiori gets pretty beat up, enough that Ruka finds the strong feeling inside herself – that she wants to change – and gets her own magical girl transformation. Their struggle beats back the baddies, and also changes Miyako’s fragment from gray and wilting back to bloomed and colorful, which is probably good. While this was happening, Momo was also trying to get there. However, she was engaged by a different dark magical girl, namely Hiori’s missing sister, Mio. She declines to tell Hiori this and it seems they have some history.
After foiling team Red a couple more times, and fairly easily at that (Miyako even resolves a situation as mission control, despite not being a magical girl), we start to focus on them, seeing how one of their number, Niina (the one who isn’t a crazy sadomasochist, Hiori’s sister, or the mysterious girl they keep at their base), went from abused child of a mentally ill mother, to orphan, to finally being scooped up when the nice prostitute she moved in with was murdered and replaced by the local gang leader. Mio and Niina mystically teaming up also hits Momo with a psychic shockwave, and we see the flashback from the first episode again, now with the relevance that the characters there are Mio and Momo in a past Momo can’t remember.
This leads to Team Red actually scoring a win. Niina fights Hiori with a double dose of hate after Uta starts the fragment claiming process, and when Mio arrives on scene this both horrifies Hiori into submission and blackens the girl of the week’s flower to be plucked trivially. They deploy an extra hit after the fact, with several girls Team Red “helped” in the past giving Team Blue a breaking speech about how they felt much better after their feelings were taken away, and calling out Team Blue for wanting them to keep suffering.
That was, honestly, fairly necessary if we were to keep taking Team Red seriously as villains. To keep them villainous, we also see one of the girls who lost her feelings and now acts as a supporter being confronted by a new candidate about what she hoped to do, only to discover she can’t remember, and is in fact a being without identity, which is equated to being already dead. She walks into traffic and saved at the last second by the Blue team, but still seems basically brain-dead. The new victim girl, between that confrontation and the presence of Blue magical girls, calms down out of her victim state, but we at least now have a good answer to the questions previously posed about why Red’s ambitions are bad.
This is followed by Red Team’s mystery girl, Shino, doing something mystical to cover the whole city in a dark field that puts everyone’s suffering, however small, into harvest range. Hiori’s wavering feelings regarding her sister mean she can’t transform, so Ruka has to do most of the magical lifting. They actually don’t manage to engage the harvest team, who steal a lot of fragments, but their work healing those around them does seem to end the field of awfulness ahead of schedule.
Momo, meanwhile, tracks the baddies back to their lair, and there has a chat with Mio. This is actually fairly friendly, getting them to hug it out and showing us the same flashback of their last battle against a monster the likes of which doesn’t otherwise appear in this show, still lacking a full context because courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality I guess. A moment of silence for anyone who got that bit.
According to Mio, this means both she and Momo have already died once. In fact, the entire world may have died since this one seems to have different metaphysical laws and a different timeline, with their loss and deaths being three days in the future from this conversation yet also somehow in the past. I guess that explains how the two of them are still high schoolers when Mio vanished years ago.
Niina arrives and makes a fight of the matter, sparring with Momo and getting her butt kicked. However, her interruption does end the friendly chat, and the two former partners part ways with Mio promising that this time, in three days, she’ll do her Dark Magical Girl thing, explicitly promising a great cause and implicitly a horrible atrocity given how the getting there has been.
It’s a bit early in the show for the endgame, not even the halfway point yet, but we get a countdown to that time. In the first day, Team Blue and Miyako disagree, with Miyako saying they should fight while the Reflectors want to talk, while on Team Red Niina seeks more power and gets a black ring from Shino that will supposedly intensify the feelings that power her and then burn her out if she uses it.
Second day is mending bridges for Team Blue, as on Team Red we see that Shino is the power behind the throne with no one’s best interests at heart, setting up Niino as a human sacrifice, then deciding she’s not good enough and she needs Hiori instead. This horrifies Mio, but Shino pulls a mental whammy to put Mio firmly in her control, and then messes with Ruka, with it strongly implied that Ruka is kidnapped as the episode ends.
Dawn of the Final Day.
Team Blue goes to the showdown at the church, while Miyako gets exposition from an agent of the previously faceless agency behind the blue Reflectors. Between the two, we learn that the plan the Red Team signed on for is basically Instrumentality from Evangelion – they’ll open the door to the Common (collective unconscious, where Fragments should exist; their being in the real world is an ever-worsening post-reset distortion) and there Shino will take control of all human hearts to create a utopia (dystopia) without suffering, perfectly ordered by her command. Naturally, Blue Team thinks this is a pretty bad idea and fights back. They rescue Ruka, who reveals that Hiori was the target. Mio faces Hiori and tries to force her Fragment out, but Mio jumps in and takes the soul-ripping hit, which causes her Fragment not just to emerge but to shatter.
Seeing this, Mio flips out, and from Shino’s smirk you can guess that it means Mio’s is the ultimate suffering that she wanted to create her key. An episode-long struggle over that ends with Niina switching sides (after donning that black ring and having to be saved mid-fight by her opponents) but Shino fully blackening Mio’s fragment and using her such that Mio, Uta, and Shino all exit through a wall of black roses, suggesting that while they might not be able to tag victory yet, they’ve made an important step to it.
Some time later, spontaneous emotional meltdowns have become worryingly common, with a sign that the baddies are still around. Momo is in a coma like others who have lost their Fragments end up in, and Miyako is working with that AASA agent. Niina, meanwhile, seems to be living as a street rat and fighting against the darkness on her own, resulting in her jumping in when Mio (now afflicted with the same crystal growths as Shino) fights a lone Hiori, not that Mio or Uta seem to recognize her through her hoodie. Hiori decides to befriend Niina, even though Miyako is against it, while Ruka encounters and befriends a girl named Ryoka and her childhood friend Amiru, the latter of which seems to be doing surprisingly well despite having had her feelings stolen.
After some time getting to know these characters, Mio confronts Ryoka. Later, Hiori and Ruka touch the boundary of the Common in order to get some answers from the guardian spirits who guided them before, the mysterious voices (now seen as fellow schoolgirls in form) called Yuzu and Lime. They tell the two how to return stolen feelings, but Mio and Uta attack as contact is made, and bring with them two new Red Team Reflectors: Ryoka and Amiru.
We then get shown a full-episode flashback (courtesy of Niina, who previously did a mind meld with Mio, doing one with Hiori) to the first world-line, seeing Mio’s side of the story, including things like the fact it was Uta’s insanity that started her spiral of doubt, along with Niina having become lost to her bad situation and Shino just… being weird. The last straw was Hiori, on the eve of the final battle against that timeline’s monsters, having a fatal meltdown from feeling like Mio’s effort to send her to a good school had been a way of abandoning her just like their mom abandoned them. Thus, Mio’s failure in the fight and the subsequent global TPK.
While Hiori is still processing this, Ryoka and Amiru attack again (with Mio arriving late), and bring her to an emotional low point where her pain is able to catalyze the opening of the door to the Common without strictly removing her fragment.
“Shino Wins” isn’t quite that easy, though. Yuzu and Lime defend the Common against her entry, while pretty much all of Shino’s pawns succumb to Ruka’s and Hiori’s various friendship speeches: Amiru is out of the fight, Ryoka goes to confront Shino, and while Mio fights a bit more Hiori gets to the bottom of her sister’s guilt and pain, seeing how her life went this time around (including it being Shino who gave her memories of the previous world-line), and accepting her all the same. Before Hiroi and Ruka can heal Mio’s heart, though, Shino arrives on scene, having defeated Ryoka, and uses those crystal growths to force Mio into a controlled state. When this doesn’t overwhelm team hero, Shino opens her own Fragment and sends everyone into their most painful memories for a bit.
However, it seems like Mio hid a little hope deep inside her (in the form of a shard of Momo’s broken Fragment), showing Hiori and the others the light and freeing herself from Shino’s control. This even reflects Shino’s spell and makes her face her own troubled past… at least until she decides to just shatter her own Fragment, sprout black angel wings, and go for the Door. Yuzu, Lime, Hiori, and Ruka all rally to stop her and it looks like the door is going to get slammed in her face, possibly doing something bad like stranding her between dimensions.
We then cut to a moss-overgrown version of the city with most girls in a daze, a new character, a hint of a child mode Shino, and mysterious flakes of ash falling from the sky. It’s visually distinctive, pretty in its desolation, but to borrow from my review of Yohane… What.
You’d think this movement would have been the end. Door is opened, but Shino gets busted, Mio is good, and then maybe we can do a little epilogue about returning those stolen Fragments. But no, this deploys in episode 20 – Shino isn’t defeated just yet and we’ve got another arc to go through.
It turns out the overgrown world is the world after Shino touched the Common. Most people are dead soulless robots, with only a few special folk, notably the main Reflectors, seemingly unaffected (Miyako is protected by a reflector ring that her agency contact gave her at the last moment, though it doesn’t actually let her be a Magical Girl). The whole distortion seems to be spreading, and the first attempt to follow Shino fails disastrously, doing a number on Hiori. As Mio comes to terms with being part of the good guys again, freed from the crystal corruption and her own myopic and manipulated vision, she visits Momo in the hospital. And, wouldn’t you know it, with the Common overlapping reality and Mio carrying the missing shard of Momo’s Fragment, Momo wakes up.
After reintegrating her in some downtime, the team finds that Little Shino – revealed to be the humanoid form of Shino’s discarded feelings. This leads to learning all about her past, where her mother used her (along with her abused identical twin sister) as the figurehead for a cult preaching the elimination of the “weak” from society to end all ills. Mom’s abuse never abated no matter how much Shino wanted to save herself and her sister, and eventually the sister was even murdered as a “ritual sacrifice”. It was only after this that Shino was found by Mio, and Shino did not take a hand offered so late very well, even going so far as to commit suicide on that world-line. Armed with this knowledge and Little Shino, Team Blue plans once more to intrude on the Common.
Before they can actually do that, though, we need a final boss fight with Uta. At first this seems to be all set for an epic Uta/Niina showdown, but while their fight does let Niina reach redemption enough to turn her ring true blue, it’s cut short by Miyako braining Uta with a frying pan.
Thus, the team goes for the Common. The finale has about what you’d think: fighting off Shino’s projections, bleeding off members trial by trial, and finally confronting Devil Shino herself at the heart of the Common. Mio makes a sacrifice play to give Hiori and Ruka an opening, and (through another long walk down memory lane) they restore and heal Shino’s feelings, causing her to free the Common rather than continuing to strangle and control it.
Multicolored shooting stars fall on the world, restoring feelings to the zombie populace and even the coma patients in the hospital. The city goes mostly back to normal (the overgrowth is erased but we still see some weird ashfall) and it looks like everybody is fine, including a now good normal girl Shino but possibly not including Mio, whose sacrifice was played very seriously.
Thus ends Blue Reflection Ray.
Blue Reflection Ray sometimes feels like the second season of something, and that’s probably not an accident: it’s a tie-in to a series of RPG games with two major entries: Blue Reflection and Blue Reflection Second Light. Ray actually takes place between the two games, bridging their story. Now, I have not played the Blue Reflection games, though the second one seems fairly well regarded and the first no worse than average. But I shouldn’t have to in order to understand this anime. Looking up information does clear a few things up, like what the monsters fought on the first world-line were supposed to be or what happened to Mio in the end, but I don’t think any of that is really necessary to enjoy Blue Reflection Ray.
And enjoy it I overall did. I’ll be honest, I kind of went into this show expecting it to hurt me, seeing as it was a game tie-in with less than stellar general regard. I think I understand why it’s not normally thought of very well, but I will respectfully disagree with that.
The biggest sin that Blue Reflection Ray commits is that it’s slow. The opening arc is noticeably slow, and the finale is kind of glacial all things considered. Episodes at critical moments are dedicated to full-length flashbacks, and while those flashbacks are important and relevant, especially for the emotional state of the character, they mean it is kind of easy to get lost in terms of the present tense story.
In Blue Reflection Ray, Ruka shows up, she meets Hiori, they become magical girls, skirmish with Red Team, lose once with the showdown at the church because narrative law means you can’t foil stage one of the evil plan, lose again when the Common is opened for about the same storytelling reason, and finally follow Shino into the mental realm to get their full-sized win. Along the way they meet Momo, turn Niina to their side, and finally recover Mio from darkness.
If you were telling this as a more straightforward magical girl action show, how many episodes would you need to do that? Honestly, you could probably get through the major beats while still developing characters in half the running time Blue Reflection Ray actually takes. Blue Reflection Ray got 24 episodes, and it uses that space to really stretch out and meander at will.
The thing is, this isn’t all wasted. There is one and only one character in this show who is flat and unexplored: Uta, the villains’ team psycho and a loony sadomasochist. Everyone else gets a lot of time dedicated to rounding them out as people and developing them over the show as full characters. If you cut Blue Reflection Ray down to half size, many of these characters would become a lot more standard as a consequence. You don’t want the meat of two episodes diving around in Shino’s memories right at the end, slowing down the climax? Maybe it’s worth it, but that’s going to leave her as a bland antagonist who hates feelings because myopic one-liners she can spout off in combat. You think it takes way too long to get to the part where the Red Team presents a real threat and advances their evil schemes? Well, you’re probably going to lose out on developing Miyako as a competent, likable character and member of the team. Other likely sacrifices on the altar of pacing would be things like Niina’s redemption arc and struggles with her evil deeds, or the entire subplot around Amiru.
That is, potentially, a lot of sacrifice. Looking at it this way, feel as though Blue Reflection Ray is thinking like a video game – you know, the media it’s a tie-in for and that its creators probably have more experience with. In a video game, at least depending on the genre, there’s a strong degree to which the pacing is at least partially in the hands of the player holding the controller. A lot of JRPGs have absolutely sprawling stories with these detailed rabbit-holes of grace notes, but since there’s gameplay you don’t care as much that in a sixty or hundred hour game you might take a random thirty hour break from doing anything even remotely related to the main plot, running around the world and indulging in all the sidequests that develop lovable characters and make the world live and breathe.
In a game, of course you have Miyako’s arc, and Niina’s arc, and you learn more about Shino, and on and on. You include everything and let the player decide how to take it. And that’s the sort of philosophy of writing that Blue Reflection Ray is taking in here.
For my money, I think it paid off. I like these characters a lot.
Remember how Ruka starts the show painfully shy and unconnected? By the end of the show, she is the character with the greatest wellspring of conviction. She’s not as soft as some of the other Team Blue heroes, but she’s changed for the better into someone with a real ability to stand up for what she believes in. And she doesn’t change at once or through a sudden epiphany, she does so gradually and in a way that feels very natural. She is a person who learns and grows through her experiences.
And you’ve got Hiori, introduced to us as the chipper and overly-friendly ditz. But then we dig into her past, her feelings, her suffering, and understand how much effort she’s putting in to keep up that persona and where she’s come from, and it’s that much more meaningful. Hiori doesn’t outwardly change as much as Ruka, but in facing her past, both her loneliness and isolation in this world-line and her fatal collapse in the former, we really appreciate what it means when she’s challenged with these dark things and rises up to be the person she’d want to be.
But it doesn’t stop with the main characters. Niina has this awful, tragic backstory – all the more tragic for just how banal and mundane it is in its tragedy, dealing with her insane mother and then life as an undocumented street kid. We understand how this drove her to kill on the first world-line, and how it drove her to Mio on this one. We understand why she idolizes Mio so much, and that she’s not actually a bad kid at heart, so that when she turns around and rejects the dark side it’s an earnest and natural turn for the character, as well as one that doesn’t happen on a dime. Miyako, meanwhile, we get her full emotional meltdown, what it means to her to have someone reach out to her… and where she goes from there. It’s honestly nice to see a character who starts so prickly mellowing out without necessarily losing her abrasive qualities, and we also know that there are moments of weakness later, and where they come from. We see enough to really understand, when Niina turns around, why Miyako doesn’t want to accept her and also why she ultimately does.
And Shino, our main villain? She could have so easily been just a Care Bears villain who hates feelings because that’s what a bad guy does. But in, even at the eleventh hour, showing us her past as this tormented kid, so we know what she went through and where her turning points were, where she could have been saved and what she regrets, we get why she came to this conclusion that she had to end emotion in order to end pain, even as we also understand that she’s wrong.
Mio is part of this as well, of course. Since Mio is essentially the center of the tangled web of the named characters in this show, she’s very critical to understand, and it takes time – as well as seeing her through the lenses of a bunch of different individuals like Niina, Hiori, and Momo – to really understand who she is, who she’s supposed to be, and how the dark side got under her skin. If you had to cut half the show’s running time, that would probably get reduced down to “brainwashed, at least mostly” and forgotten and that would be a dang shame. Especially when the finale relies on the fact that Mio cares about Shino in a non-controlled and non-insane way as well.
That isn’t to say the pacing is not an issue. But at least it was in service to something.
Briefly on other aspects, the art is… idiosyncratic, but good. The shading on the characters can be a bit odd, making it look like everybody’s kind of sunburned until you get used to it, but on the whole the show is a good looking one. The characters are distinctive in their normal forms despite school uniforms and very “mortal” designs (no crazy anime hair or such) and their magical girl designs are colorful, distinctive, and also clean rather than being overdesigned. The environments of the show are mostly an ordinary city, but when it wants to show you something fantastic, it shows you something really fantastic. The overgrown city in the last arc also had some very powerful mood material to it. I think the only effect that didn’t quite hit was the time stop when a fragment is out and this weird wallpaper covers the world. That maybe could have been handled better. The music was fine, with the first opening being rather evocative and memorable, as were the performances, with none I can really remember being particularly off.
On the whole, I’ll actually give Blue Reflection Ray a B-. The pacing does hurt it, and drag it down a fair bit, but the writing is shockingly good for something that, as I mentioned in the opening, has to talk about “feelings” as discrete objects or a topic that can be weighed in on categorically. It never felt like it was straining to say something meaningful rather than letting the characters react to their situation in-character. It’s a rough start and a slow finish, but for fans of the Magical Girl genre, it’s certainly one to check out.