Mashle: Magic and Muscles

Episode 11

The most shocking plot twist of this week's Mashle is that the big fight with Abel is wrapped up in just this one episode. It's actually less than one whole episode, as the run-time still winds up having to pad itself out with some goofy celebrating from Mash and pals at the end, as well as setting up a whole other conflict to follow into the supposed final episode next week. Props for efficiency, it's always nice to have something in the otherwise standardized shonen fight mold that doesn't feel the need to drag things out. We have a pretty good understanding of the ideas and conflicts that brought us here to see Mash stare down Abel, so all we need to do is watch our boy punch some puppets and go home.

The good news is that said puppet-punching is pretty solid. It may be finished within a single episode, but Mash's confrontation with Abel still moves through multiple phases, based on different applications of the antagonist's puppeteer powers. Turning Mash's fists on himself is a pretty smart idea, given that's the main (only) source of his actual powers. The irony then is that Abel isn't even aware of Mash's magic-less muscle-based status, so using our hero's strength against him is only his first idea which he doesn't think much of and quickly abandons. Mash probably would have found a way to break out anyway, since the rest of the sections of the fight all show him figuring out how to avoid, cut, or otherwise trivialize the puppet strings that Abel uses as his primary means of control.

And not for nothing, but it looks pretty cool too. There are bursts of surprisingly smooth battle animation between Mash and a puppeteered Finn, and even when things stretch into still frames between the fight phases, there's some really strong artistry to what's being presented. Yeah, Abel's big final puppet power only reinforces how the escalating abilities of Secondth in Mashle are wholly indistinguishable from other shonen setpieces like Bankai, but it does look pretty cool, giving Mash and the show one more opportunity to show off before the fight's finished in the episode.

However, while all the action antics Mash gets up to here look plenty cool, everything else propelling them still sees Mashle falling into the genre-complacent storytelling traps it showed an unfortunate predilection for last week. I get that Abel is exactly the sort of superior-ist big bad that works so well as a stock supervillain, but even by those standards he loves to hear himself talk. He's effectively narrating this entire episode, reiterating his fascist positions, describing his powers, and reacting to Mash's counters for them. It makes it come off as even more irritatingly redundant when Love Cute pops back in partway through entirely so she can also do the shonen-standard "explain what just happened in the fight" thing on top of Abel doing that and us watching Mash do it. It's already entertaining enough to see how Mash's mundanely effective abilities can cut through all this escalating power-level BS, but it would've been more entertaining had he also been able to break out of the confines of how the writing feels these events should be presented.

But Abel is just the type who enjoys overwrought explanations, it seems, exemplified by his dumping out a whole tragic backstory upon his defeat. This is another unnecessary element, in my opinion. The superior-ist Slytherin attitudes of Magia Lupus spoke for themselves, resembling real-world prejudices as well as the inherent inequalities baked into the sort of worldbuilding that Mashle was built on tearing down. Giving Abel an "excuse" for those feelings in the form of some stupidly stock mommy issues comes off like a cheap out. If I'm being generous I can see some narrative purpose to this revelation, since it presents a path that a guy like Abel might wind up befriended into allyship with Mash later on. And it might also be here as a way to have villains more wholly, uncompromisingly dedicated to the fascist philosophy make more of an impact later on. As-is though, it leaves this storyline, which started by detailing some extremely strong ideas, feeling like it ends on a conceptual anticlimax, even as the action-based storytelling is still entertaining enough.

At least Mashle remains overall efficient. We haven't even wound back down to any sort of status quo here before we're suddenly following up with Rayne and a fake-out against a new antagonist disguised as Lance. The way they immediately introduce a whole new baddie squad with their own scheme might be enough to give me whiplash, though it does make me curious as to what ways they'll undercut it once Mash inevitably finds his way into the story. It does feel like a weird move to make with only one episode of the anime adaptation left to go, but hey, Mashle has always been at its best when it's wholly dedicated to its unconventionality, so I'll try to wait for this one with some optimism.

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.