Total Party Kill Incoming?
Kafu’s total freakout was somewhat averted, but it doesn’t look like things are going to change much. We got some decent Haru focus, with moments for Rime and Koko, but then Maxwell decided to just, ya know, kick start the apocalypse, turning into an orb of darkness and sending forth a swarm of Tesseractors so thick that it blots out the sun.
Thus we enter a fighting secnario where the NPCs who we had introduced as being Haru’s friends and possibly even found family die horribly or heroically as the case may be as Haru races to get to the other girls.
Things go from bad to worse as evil palette swaps of the other familiars appear, the evil version of Sekai’s overwhelming the good while Haru’s familiar gets buried beneath a swarm of his alters. In the process, a kill is confirmed on Sekai.
Kafu, meanwhile, is still not mentally doing well. Confronted with this endgame, knowing that she ought to fight to save the world but being unable to feel like she really can or that the world is really worth saving, Kafu begins to properly transform into a Tesseractor herself, while it appears that the same thing may be beginning to afflict Haru thanks to all the death she’s just had to watch. This means that as of what we understand from the end of the episode, Rime is the only full-force Witchling active, with her Familiar Hastur still in the fight. Koko’s not to be totally discounted, but it’s still a pretty grim scenario.
And that’s a short summary, but a lot of the episode was taken up by action set pieces. Was the fight on top of a speeding neon bling truck awesome in a sort of “let me grab the controller damn it!” way? Yeah, but it’s also minimal plot beats per minute.
One note I did like is that most of the witchlings decided that Maxwell’s big breaking speech about Sophia the Witch and the world being fake sounded like a bunch of nonsense. As the audience, we know that even if he’s coloring things through his interpretation and to use his words as a weapon, there’s probably at least a serving of truth buried in there, because otherwise why linger on it for the audience without counter-evidence? But disbelief is kind of the right attitude to take when these heavy proclamations are coming from a known diabolical villain, and it’s taken so rarely in fiction, so good on most of the Witchlings for doing it.
At the current time, I don’t see how the show goes forward without triggering a reset. Not only have we lost one of our main characters with two more seemingly doomed to glitch out in total, but the city is pretty well and truly cooked. Sure, horrible things have been happening this whole show, but all the same I don’t think they’re just going to let this status quo stand until the end. Not when they’ve introduced resetting as a conceit in the setting and have at least four episodes to play with as of the current one. At least, not unless they throw convention to the wind and go with either a full “bad guy wins” story or something so off the wall that it defies such reason.
Part of me would be excited to see one of those options, especially the bonkers one, but ruminating over the possibility excites me for the same reason that I don’t think it’s going to happen: Kamitsubaki City, while not exactly “playing it safe”, has been too standard and derivative for too long for me to expect it to pull out something really wild.
And, there’s nothing wrong with being part of a genre, theme, or group. And when it comes to “Magical girls suffer, world is hell.” post-Madoka affairs I do think Kamitsubaki city has distincted itself enough from its predecessors by… being the one that goes hard, so to speak. Madoka and Yuki Yuna threw more powerful blows but weren’t nearly this relentless; they had more honest downtime to have the girls worry about normal girl things, rather than just the fate of the world. A big emotional backbone of Madoka Magica was Sayaka’s contested crush, running as an arc for the majority of the show and while something that certainly added in to the magical girling it was more the struggle of the girls as normal girls. Yuki Yuna had quite a lot of slice of life, and we were intensely worried about how real life was going to go for its cast, not just how the battles against the Vertex would go.
Kamitsubaki City, for its part, takes more of the traditional Shonen action approach, where we do get emotional work for our characters, explore who they are as people, and hear enough from them to empathize with their struggles… but it’s all in the contest of the fight, the mission. We don’t hear about how the Witchlings are doing at school. We don’t get much about any friends or family unless they’ll be promptly involved in the fighting and probably axed. Their stressors are all about their performance in their mission.
And in a sense, that’s fine. They’re dealing with some very big stakes, so keeping focused on them means the characters don’t run the risk of looking insane or insanely selfish by being hung up instead on the little, personal, emotional things. All the same, given what the show most evokes… We could have used the out-of-the-loop boyfriend, or the school culture festival, or a few more small intrusions that would take some of the pressure off these girls basically being soldiers in an active war zone, and shockingly well prepared for that sort of life.
It’s not something that every story needs to do. There are great stories that keep at least the vast majority of their character exploration plot-focused one way or another. But especially for what is, let’s face it, a singing magical girl show? It’s not what you’d expect at first.
Which, again, from one perspective is a mark in the show’s favor. It’s different. It has justified its existence against its most obvious predecessors. Now it just needs to find the skill and energy to justify its existence in its own right.
At the moment – and it is too early to call this a real judgment – Kamitsubaki City Under Construction feels like a weak show that was very close to being a good show, like it was one round or rewrites or one episode of pacing away from greatness. It’s not coming off as a terrible show, but neither is it shaping up as a particularly recommendable show.
Going forward, we’ll see how the last four episodes make or break that perception.