Mashle: Magic and Muscles

Episode 10

After last week's episode of Mashle managed to marry the show's stronger thematic underpinnings to the expected shonen smackdown showcases, I hoped to see the trend continue. So I was disappointed watching this tenth episode, as the storytelling very pointedly dips. It might be by design. The plot is in an awkward in-between phase, needing to fill out a couple of additional fight scenes and seed some stuff for future arcs. But it all still comes off like a clear missed opportunity since we already know the show can do much more than simply kill time.

Some of the choices of focus could be an issue. If you thought Dot was annoying, wait until you meet this girl who has his same schtick but without any of the base characterization that makes him at least nominally worth following. Love Cute here goes on for a bit about how she feels entitled to affection before pulling a hard gear-shift into extremely basic yandere territory, then she and Dot just bandy those bits about for a couple of volleys. It is distractingly simple, unfortunate enough, even by the standards of stock shonen genre humor, but even more so since we know just how clever Mashle can get when it wants to. Almost entirely repeating the same exchange with the same lines and basic frames of animation, even with Finn calling attention to it, comes off as economic padding after last week's battle action tuckered out the team.

Unfortunately, once the fight between Dot and Love gets going, it's still not enthralling, even outside its lack of driving ideas or clever humor. It's straight trading of elemental magic blasts before Dot gets a secret ability reveal and out-power-levels Love. There's an inkling of an idea a little earlier, in that we get a minor flashback of Dot and him reflecting on how he might consider Mash as a genuine friend. But very little of it feels informed by what's happening in the fight, save for Love expositing that Mash is in danger from a petrification spell. This gets nullified afterward anyway, plus I don't know that they've successfully sold me on Dot warming up to Mash. Nor does the reveal of his secret headband's hidden power seem to tie into any of these alleged ideas, and the writing doesn't even touch on any possible societal aspects of it, like with Razer's magic nullification last week. You get the sense that they wanted to do something akin to what Lance went through in the last episode, letting the narrative interface with the characters' earlier self-centered worldviews. But it's barely incidental in the case of Dot here, so the whole thing feels like a wash.

It feels weird that the best compliment I can pay this episode is that at least it's moving through its fights quickly when we could have skipped over these entirely and not missed anything. Dot's battle with Love is wrapped up within the first half of the episode. Then Milo Genius gets downed in some of the show's signature anticlimax to instead work as an introduction for another new character, Rayne Ames, our first actual look at a Divine Visionary. Technically, Rayne brings back some of Mashle's idea-based interests. He's a member of the ostensible "Good Guy" dorm, but his status and how he wields it in kicking Milo while he's down indicated he may still be his own flavor of superiorist. And he being Finn's brother means the series might finally do something with Finn…eventually.

But again, in practice, Rayne's main contribution is putting Mashle into a holding pattern for the rest of this episode. He mostly pops in on Dot and Finn to prevent them from going through another fight scene, then seemingly teleports further down to run into Mash and kill time with a mild misunderstanding. There are a couple of funny asides here, mostly courtesy of Mash, as expected, but instead, accomplishes little. We've already grasped how those steeped in this magical world's ranking requirements underestimate Mash. We don't need to see Rayne do that whole song and dance again, especially after the reveal that Headmaster Marky Mark already told him about the muscle-headed magic-less mage! It turns out Rayne isn't even going to follow up on this whole current Magia Lupus situation, and I understand it needs to set up future elements for later in the manga/seasons of this show that may or may not get animated. However, it still ultimately winds up a cumbersome distraction.

Last week's episode showed that Mashle can make this sort of stuff work, so I'm less inclined to be forgiving when it drops the ball and lets it roll around for a bit like this. Thankfully, we're right back up to Abel's door with Mash by the end of this one since the cour is almost over. But in getting there, I have to wonder if there was a cleaner, more exciting way to present stuff like Dot's developments or the introduction of Rayne that didn't feel like it was sleepwalking through this material.

Rating:

Mashle: Magic and Muscles is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.