So, enough of those bright and cheerful magical girl shows, how about something dark, painful and miserable? Something about suffering girls trapped in a dead-end hellscape of abuse and pain that magic really only makes worse. That’s what people want, right?
No? Well too bad, it’s time for Magical Girl Site.
So, before really diving in to the story of this show, I’d like to take a moment to talk about what it is, and that’s a clear imitator of Madoka Magica that can’t recapture the original’s magic. In a sense, it makes sense that this exists; Madoka was a major hit that represented a transformation in its genre, and whenever that happens there are bound to be a horde of copycats trying to follow the leader for a quick win. Some of these work better than others and actually manage to either build something worth seeing on their own or move out of the shadow of their predecessor. I’ve looked at one of these for Madoka before, in the form of Yuki Yuna is a Hero.
I feel like I owe Yuki Yuna an apology, because as close as it cut in theme and feel to Madoka, Magical Girl Site is much more the copycat. So, while our main character won’t learn these rules and facts right away, let’s get the copycat elements out of the way.
In Magical Girl Site, Magical Girls are chosen from normal girls by a patron entity. They gain magical power, but using this power will cut into their lifespan (which, unlike in Madoka, there’s no normal way to replenish here). Further, the Patron entity has an ulterior reason for empowering girls, and that ulterior motive is related to a mystical scheme to gain power through absorbing human misfortune and misery. And, if that weren’t enough, there’s some big terrible event that’s going to descend at a specific time, and everyone has to gear up for that. In addition to the general background conceits about Magical Girls and a force that serves the same role as Walpurgisnacht, Magical Girl Site also steals some notable plot beats from Madoka; mercifully never enough to be pillaging in full, but enough that you sort of notice.
None of these elements were the elements that made Madoka Magica great; they’re set dressing that Madoka used in excellent ways and Magical Girl Site… well.. let’s dive in and see.
We begin our story with Aya Asagiri, a poor unfortunate girl living the kind of life that only a show drenched in the edgy leftovers of Elfen Lied would give its main character. She contemplates suicide and bemoans how there’s no place for her, as we see her mercilessly tormented by a group of bullies at school (one girl who gets really into it, one who seems just bored with the matter despite being the ringleader, and one who looks to have a couple tiny little scraps of empathy by asking if they might be going to far). Their torture is relentless, including just about every social scorn and physical abuse, which Asagiri takes. When she goes home, it’s time for more abuse, as while her parents seem to largely ignore her, her brother (a star student under insane stress) uses her as a literal punching bag, giving us more scenes of the tar being beaten out of her. The only solace she seems to have is taking care of a stray cat and, wouldn’t you know it, the particularly horrid bully gets the cat run over by a train.
It’s miserably hard to watch, knowing from the moment that cat is introduced exactly what the show is going to ham-fistedly do with it My only solace is that here, unlike in Elfen Lied, it is at least the actions of a sicko rather than someone intended to be ‘normal’.
This opening sets, frankly, an extremely low bar for the show. It’s like a pizza cutter – all edge and no point. When a show goes for this level of grisly darkness, especially as the opening, you know as a viewer that as pretentious as it can be, it’s not ultimately saying anything meaningful. This is the mark of a show that wants to shock you into thinking it’s doing something profound rather than one that’s actually doing something profound.
Around about midnight, as Asagiri laments her fate, her computer opens up a mysterious haunted website: Magical Girl Site. A strange figure in black and white with pig-tails appears, calling out to her as a poor, unfortunate girl and offering that she will have a magic ‘stick’ delivered to help her with her woes. The next day, when she opens up her locker at school, she finds, instead of a mass of mayo and razor blades ruining her shoes, a note and most importantly a cutesy heart-gun that is apparently her magic stick. She doesn’t know what to think, but takes it anyway.
Now, I did want to talk a bit about the Site conceit itself. This is something that, at least when pitched, probably comes off as weird or dumb to Western audiences. A magical haunted website? But Japan, reliably, does not have the West’s disenchantment with technology or desire to keep it separate from magic, even ghosts and hauntings. The idea of a mysterious evil website, often one that only appears to specific people at specific times and that can’t thereafter be found again, isn’t unique to Magical Girl Site and in fact seems to be a staple of relatively modern Japanese horror. So, that’s not something I’ll be counting against the show.
Since the lead bully had been growing tired of tormenting Asagiri, extra-horrible had a ‘great’ idea, calling in a male senpai to get in on the ‘fun’ and get with the raping. The threat of being violated actually gets Asagiri to struggle and ultimately she’s able to break and run. Rapist and Worst Bully (the ringleader and extra a good way behind) give chase, hunting her down. Scared out of her wits, she takes shelter in a construction site, but ultimately gets caught, pulling the toy gun stick when she’s cornered with her back against the wall. She fires, undergoing a kind of creepy magical girl transformation (her eyes glow with symbols and she cries blood as her hair turns colors and a glyph appears on her forearm) as a heart-shaped ring of pink smoke takes the bully and the rapist away, teleporting them to the railroad crossing where we saw Aya contemplate suicide and where the bully killed the cat, where the two of them are promptly obliterated by a train.
Asagiri, being a fairly normal girl, starts breaking down even harder at the thought that she just killed two people, but at least she’s safe for a moment. The next day at school, the lead bully (Sarina, to start using her name) is going just a little bit crazy, and corners Asagiri in the bathroom, demanding to know what happened to her friends and blaming Asagiri for their deaths. She’s not wrong, I suppose, but in her rage she pulls a box cutter and threatens to give Asagiri the joker grin, the one quasi-reasonable bully begging for this to stop. That’s when time stops for everyone but Asagiri and then new girl to arrive, Yatsumura. Yatsumura frees Asagiri and even has Sarina cut her own throat open with the box cutter (though she claims, correctly, that the wound won’t be fatal). Yatsumura is, of course, a fellow magical girl, and she wants to team up with Asagiri while telling Asagiri to go ahead and keep ‘taking out the trash’
Yatsumura wants to ally with Asagiri and potentially other magical girls because she’s become aware of an opponent she calls the “Magical Hunter”, a magical girl bumping off other magical girls. One of the previous victims was an information broker, Rina, who was known to Yatsumura. Soon enough, Magical Hunter ends up attacking Asagiri (and Yatsumura). It’s revealed that she actually was Rina all along, and she’s extra dangerous because she’s able to use multiple magics, wielding all the Sticks of the magical girls she’s murdered in the past. Between time stop and teleportation (which Asagiri is convinced to use despite the last time killing people), Rina is subdued, stripped of her sticks, and questioned as to what she knows.
Rina reveals her motivation, that she found out from an Easter egg on the Magical Girl Site that reveals that something called the Tempest is coming, an event that will arrive at a specific time and bring an end to the world before creating a pathway to a new world, and that Rina felt she needed lots of Sticks with a good suite of powers in order to survive. Then, her lifespan perilously low, Rina collapses, and is taken to the hospital in a coma, leaving Yatsumura and Asagiri with limited leads. Ideally, they want to wake Rina up and question her for more details, but they can’t do that with any of the Sticks they presently have access to. They did, however, get one other thing from Rina: her “Murder book”, which has pictures of many other Magical Girls in it. No other details are held, like identity or power, but it at least gives the girls something to go on.
And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s one easy-to-recognize girl in the Murder Book, a famous idol singer called Nijimin. Nijimin reacts extremely well to being introduced to new magical girls and wants to make instant friends, revealing a few other things: her stick (her panties, bearing the power of mind control) and that she has a normally well-hidden uncontrollable temper and a grudge against Magical Hunter, who killed the last friend Nijimin had and who Nijimin will certainly kill on sight. Considering that they need information out of Magical Hunter and that Nijimin’s stick might be able to compel her comatose body to give it up if only they could use it without Rina being dead, this is a problem.
While the two of them are considering this problem, Sarina spots them at the hospital. She checks on the room they were visiting (Rina’s) and finds the figure from the Magical Girl site in all his weird, often unmoving, monochromatic glory. This being (The site administrator, Nana) makes Sarina an offer, to take up the mantle of the Magical Hunter and claim revenge against Yatsumura and Asagiri. Meanwhile, Asagiri’s brother investigates, and starts to learn about this magic stuff. Shortly after, Yatsumura passes out in her apartment, and the audience is led to believe she might be dead or dying while Asagiri is ignorant of the situation.
The next day, Nijimin, who retired from showbusiness (to the chagrin of a creepy stalker of hers that the show repeatedly cuts to), transfers into the protagonist class as Yatsumura misses school for reason of dying. Asagiri heads over after school, unaware of Yatsumura’s condition, the fact that Sarina is now a magical girl out to kill her, and the fact that Sarina seems aware of Nijimin’s grudge and tipped her off to Rina’s status. Asagiri finds Yatsumura and brings her to, but in the process also discovers that she has a strange man bound and tortured in her apartment, giving us the flashback that this man is the source of Yatsumura’s misfortune, having murdered the rest of her family and only left her alive so she could grow up for him to come back to. She used her time stop magic to capture him, and has been torturing him ever since, living for her revenge.
Before Asagiri can give her a speech on that topic, Sarina appears, attacking with a Yo-yo that cuts through anything and even bisecting Yatsumura’s prisoner in the process of attacking our leads. They protect themselves, and when Sarina spills the beans about Nijimin, it’s revealed that they’ve taken precautions to magically protect Rina too, foiling Nijimin’s assassination attempt. As Sarina flails against them, she ends up doing massive structural damage to the apartment building, bringing it down around their ears. Yatsumura and Asagiri are protected by an indestructible box magic, and in a moment of truth while the building collapses, Asagiri chooses to teleport Sarina to safety rather than allowing her to be squished.
Now, most of what Magical Girl Site does tops out at adequate. It frequently had me saying “That wasn’t as bad as I feared” but rarely if ever “I actually liked that.” What follows from this act, though, is the exception to that rule. Given the show’s general tone, I initially expected that they might go for ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ and have Sarina still try to murder Asagiri. Instead, we get a small arc running in the background where Sarina, despite initially thinking that something like that wouldn’t matter to her, avoids engaging Asagiri, starts questioning the Site Administrator who’s giving her orders, and ultimately agrees to work with Asagiri for important anti-Tempest work. It takes a lot of episodes, and while we do get a number of Sarina scenes while she grapples with the situation, she never outwardly debates what she thinks of Asagiri. There are no big speeches about owing her a debt or forgiving her, the turn is told almost entirely in Sarina’s actions and even her subtle facial expressions as she thinks about what happened. This one arc, out of the whole mess that is Magical Girl Site, is actually well-executed with subtle but effective cinematography, the right pacing, and a good payoff. In abstract it’s not much, but the “Villain turns friend when shown kindness” arc is done to death, and often mishandled even in much better material (usually by having the turnaround take too little time or by discussing it to death in long and dry speeches) so it’s kind of weird to seen it done well in a show that mostly just does edge.
In any case, protected or no Asagiri and Yatsumura are both sent to the hospital while Nijimin (deducing that Rina must be the ‘friend’ they mentioned) checks up at Asagiri’s place and gets to meet with and fall for her brother – again, much to stalker’s chagrin.
At the hospital, a strange girl with an eyepatch appears and is revealed to be a magical girl, wielding a box cutter stick with the power of healing. She can’t restore lifespan, but by offering blood to a target she can fix their bodies up, getting Rina, Yatsumura, and Asagiri back on their feet. Box cutter girl, and her group of friends (Including two rich girl Magical Girls, one with a flying broom and the other with a katana for cutting victims; a sporty girl with super speed/strength; and a crossdressing boy with the power of mind reading and some degree of control) They want to recruit Asagiri, Yatsumura, Rina, and as many other Magical Girls as they can in order to prepare for and possibly stop the oncoming Tempest. They also reveal that they’re Magical Girls from a different version of the site, with a different administrator, opening up visions of the shadowy council of administrators (all creeps in black and white) who are pulling the strings.
Yatsumura and Asagiri also manage to bring Nijimin around (after Rina transfers into their class and almost gets ordered to bite her tongue off and die), stealing her panties in a bit of forced and out of place but not entirely unwelcome comedy and introducing her to the Tempest issue, with which she’s willing to agree to kill Rina later. However, the sticks that Asagiri and Yatsumura had before the apartment disaster (namely their two and all the ones Rina collected) are missing, scooped up by Sarina who was on-site first, meaning that the addition of four magical girls to team “heroes of a different story” doesn’t add a lot of firepower, if any. So they may be resolved that they need to kidnap and interrogate a Site Administrator, but they’re not immediately able to do it.
Because of this, we get a beach episode. It’s mostly just bonding for Yatsumura and Asagiri (who are the reason this show gets a “Yuri” tag even though it never goes for the sexually explicit in order to sell itself. Remarkable restraint for one so overwhelmingly exploitative in its darkness)… at least until the last bits. During their excursion, someone breaks into Yatsumura’s locker and steals Nijimin’s stick. That someone is fairly quickly revealed to be Asagiri’s brother, who gets an extra long and extra creepy scene dedicated to him taunting Nijimin’s stalker (who came to kill him) and then making the man kill himself. Asagiri sees this, but doesn’t want to tell the others because as bad as he is she doesn’t want her brother killed. Mind reader manages to read this off Asagiri (and, off Nijimin, that she suspected as much and was the one to leak the info) and decides to take matters into his own hands. Mind-reader, guiding super-strength, confronts Asagiri’s brother and Nijimin, but Nijimin has been put deep under the brother’s control and he manages to get enough words in edgewise to turn things around, having the attacking Magical Girl go and kill the Magical “Girl” guiding her. After the first brutal strike she comes back to herself, and races to the others to get our mind reader boy healed.
Just as that’s starting to take, Asagiri’s brother arrives and starts to command all the girls, reveling in the power he holds over them. He uses controlled Nijimin to gather the Sticks for him, and that’s his critical mistake, since mind reader is able to break through to Nijimin and break the control over her. Nijimin attacks the brother right away in her rage, rather than plotting like mind reader wanted, and gets cut down with the katana Stick for her trouble, but she’s pretty much driven by sheer anger and manages to get back up just long enough to grind a broken glass bottle into the brother’s throat and die happy that she saved her friends. A mysterious figure appears and removes the brother while the other girls are still disabled. You’d think that would be a plant for future material, but it only comes back in what’s basically a stinger scene, so it’s really not.
This arc with the brother is a big problem. Even counting the beach episode, it is pretty much only two episodes, and it changes the group dynamic in a big way by killing off Nijimin. But it comes out at what might be the exact wrong time for the pacing of the show as a whole. Going into Episode 8 we had what felt like enough time to kidnap a Site Administrator and address the Tempest and all the nonsense around it about negative human energy, The King, and what have you. Coming out of Episode 9 with absolutely no progress in that direction and at least some degree of cleanup left to do, you know that there’s not enough time to do it well and there may not even be enough time to do it at all.
After that, we get what acts very much as an aftermath and turnaround episode where Asagiri has angst – she meets an eerie detective with “notice me, I’m actually a character” blue hair and who is looking into her brother’s disappearance, tries to search for her stick again, and ultimately ends up at the beach vowing to not let anyone else be hurt, at which point Sarina confronts her and we cut to the rest of the group. They visit Nijimin’s funeral, but on the way out Asagiri appears, confronts them, and teleports everyone away just before the building explodes, as Nana has attacked. Nana assumes the problem girls are dead (part of a program from the Site of bumping off troublemakers) and assigns the detective from earlier to recover their Sticks, but Asagiri of course brought everyone to safety. There, it’s revealed that she and Sarina are now on the same team against the site. Asagiri tries to demand everyone else hand over their sticks so she and Sarina can handle the fight, but the rest of her friends refuse to abandon her, which shocks Asagiri but Sarina seemed to expect, letting Asagiri go through the motions with slight annoyance at the necessary pageantry.
I know she started out as just the soulless bully character, but I actually kind of like Sarina. She has the best character arc and, in this phase, the best reactions.
Sarina passes out all the sticks she’s gathered (the ones Asagiri and Yatsumura lost in the building collapse and, since everyone is quite fed up with administration, they begin to hatch their plot to nab an administrator.
The next episode (11/12, recall) sees them putting that plan into action. They find info on a student in the city who’s likely to become a Magical Girl since the Site has taken interest in her, and set ambushes where the Administrator is likely appear to drop off the Stick. This Administrator is a new one, not Nana or the one the other group of girls dealt with, and provides us a decent fight until the real bushwhack is pulled, teleporting her up to the roof where Sarina kills her while she’s still disoriented. I’m not sure why this was the plan, since the point had been to get information out of the Admin and nobody has “talk with the dead” powers that we know of, but okay. They say that the Administrator appears to be a normal girl under the mask and weird black-and-white existence, but I’m not so sure; the animation has her bleed faint whiffs of black smoke and, when cut up, mostly sizzle and have her cross-sections look more like a circuit board texture than the innards of a regular girl. But, that’s really neither here nor there.
However, Nana appears rather suddenly after, and the Administrator of the other girls attacks them as they race to meet up, revealing that the just-killed Administrator was used as bait to lure the rebel girls into the open. Sarina strikes while Nana is still not quite done monologuing, but her accuracy isn’t the greatest and she only manages to take an arm off before the finger gun treatment sends her to the ground, badly injured. Yatsumura steps up ready to use her stick, but Nana proves that shooting first and then talking isn’t just for ‘heroes’ and shatters the Stick before Yatsumura can stop time, since he knows its power and that it would be fairly problematic for him. Yatsumura uses the shield box stick to enclose Asagiri, Sarina, and the other girls on the roof, faces down against Nana alone, and gets riddled with holes for her trouble. She and Asagiri, isolated on opposite sides of the impervious magical barrier, have a tender scene where Yatsumura, dying, thanks Asagiri for giving her a reason to live, and then slips away. Why she couldn’t have included herself in the box so Asagiri could teleport them all out, I don’t know, but she was pretty much out of her life span timer anyway so maybe she just wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
However, that’s not the end for Yatsumura. We enter trippy space and see the ominous council of Administrators welcome Yatsumura as a new Administrator candidate, chosen by the king for the depths of her misfortune. Yatsumura(‘s spirit. Her body is still on the rooftop) fights at first, trying to avoid being chosen, but eventually a big weird eye of the King catches her and presumably brainwashes her, since in the real world Lurky and Murky steal Yatsumura’s colors (rendering her in grayscale, but not quite the black and white of the proper Administrators) and she revives, Stick restored as well, with a cruel and almost robotic demeanor, not talking or showing any sign of the girl she used to be. Nana, amused by this, reveals that Yatsumura needs a little more misfortune to catalyze her ascension into the ranks of the Administrators, and that the source of that misfortune will be found in killing Asagiri.
There’s a bit of a running fight where Asagiri first gets her other friends safe (including healing Sarina) and the other team combats the replicating Administrator attacking them while Asagiri continues to run from Yatsumura. Eventually, the B team manages to kill their Administrator in an impressive fashion that would be really cool if we gave a damn about literally any of the characters involved (slicing through a river of armed Administrator clones acting as one, using a lightning-powered sword strike delivered via flying leap from a building.) and Asagiri brings herself and Yatsumura to the beach, since they’d promised to go there again some day.
At the beach, Asagiri gives Yatsumura a big speech about how much she cares, how much Yatsumura meant to her, and how she was fortunate to have met Yatsumura as brainwashed Yatsumura chokes Asagiri to death. Eventually, though, something reaches deep into Yatsumura. Her color returns and in horror she releases Asagiri. The show doesn’t fake us out for long into thinking Asagiri might be dead, just a beat really, and then it’s time to take on Nana. With Yatsumura and Asagiri fully able, it’s actually disgustingly easy. Yatsumura stops time and Asagiri teleports them to the rail road crossing, with Nana trapped in front of an oncoming train, sure to be obliterated with time starts again.
Nana can’t act in the time stop, but is still able to talk. He concedes he’s been beaten, but has one last question for the two girls: Do they think they’re still poor, unfortunate souls?
Yatsumura and Asagiri declare together that their fortune or misfortune isn’t for anyone else to decide, and Nana accepts both their answer and his death.
And… that’s pretty much where the show ends. Asagiri and Yatsumura resolve to use what time they have to free other magical girls from their misfortune, the site administrators stew that while rebellion and killing some of their number is fine, rejecting the show’s edginess is an unforgivable sin they’ll have to get the two leads for… and we get a disturbingly long scene where it turns out that the detective character that never mattered has Asagiri’s brother chained up naked in his study and intends to use him for raping purposes rather freely. I guess we just had too much positivity in this ending and needed a little more pointless darkness.
The Tempest? Still coming. The King? We hear that the the King is the “most misfortunate girl in the world” and see a brief shot of what’s presumably her, but really get nothing. I guess if you want answers you have to wait for the second season that’s not coming or read the manga.
And, personally, I wouldn’t. Though the show can have a couple effective moments, the overly pretentious, overly edgy, overly dark general presentation is a massive drag. There’s nothing here that’s worth slogging through the generic misery and occasional messed up moments to get. The show was at pretty much every turn less awful than I feared it could be, but it still has nothing of value to offer. I guess the choreography is kind of nice as little as it comes into play, and I did mention Sarina’s arc, but when the core is as hollow as it is here, that’s not really worth a whole lot. It’s no Elfen Lied or Magical Girl Raising Project, but I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone pretty much ever. If you want a dark Magical Girl show, you want to watch Madoka or Yuki Yuna. Even Spec-Ops Asuka, if you want to go for some edgy exploitation, would be a better overall experience than Magical Girl Site because at least it goes all the way with something and has a unique twist on the genre by being “magical girl Watchmen” rather than just Madoka’s table scraps.
As for letter grade, I feel it’s earned a flat D. It’s not uniformly awful, it doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out or cry, and every once in a blue moon it has a moment that works, but it’s still a bad show on the whole. You can watch better fairly trivially.