Mashle: Magic and Muscles

Episode 4

The Mashle anime seems to be just cruising through its manga chapter material on the basis of whatever will fit into an episode without worrying about what makes for a "full" encapsulated story. That's fine, pacing-wise since it means the stories are afforded the right amount of time and space to play out satisfyingly without needing to be artificially stretched out or squished down. There's absolutely a version of this show in an alternate universe where this not-Quidditch conflict began and ended as its own episode, but here we're just continuing off from a minor cliffhanger we had last week, with it wrapping before the episode's halfway point and then going into a whole other story about Mash dealing with a new antagonist.

Like I said, that's good, keeping the irreverent pacing of Mashle snappy without dwelling too much on the bloated shonen battle storytelling that the series is riffing almost as much as it is Harry Potter (Mash didn't nearly doze off during the Headmaster's point accrual explanation last episode for nothing). So no sooner have the rules of not-Quidditch barely been explained to us than Mash is kicking his way through the air on a broom, running up the score on the opposing team in the name of "sportsmanship". Maybe Mash being able to just effectively fly without magic isn't the most clever solution we've seen thus far, but it's funny enough, particularly with bits that can only be done in an anime, like the ever-present sound of Mash's crazy legs whooshing whenever he's on screen.

But really, getting the Quidditch riff out of the way feels almost obligatory, and a way to ingratiate team captain Tom to Mash so he can be one of three acquaintances taken hostage by our next antagonist. There's definitely something funny about Lance Crown here playing off of Mash's compulsion to care about his friends right after a sequence showing how annoyed he actually is by all these people. It honestly makes Mash a refreshing kind of "anti-hero" in a very different use of the term, in that he is indeed a good boy who tries to do right by people, but he simply doesn't have the emotional energy or complexity to express himself beyond those actions. This is a guy who, when asked, puts cream puffs ahead of human life in terms of importance, so he at least has some personal priorities figured out.

The confrontation with Lance is also neat since it lays out the idea of escalation for the enemies Mash might face moving forward. Not just in terms of power level, though there is that in the initial presentation of Lance, being a signified superior-ist who shows off using magic for something as pedestrian as leaving a room. But just as you're wondering how this guy is meaningfully different from not-Draco in last week's episode, things hit a solidly satisfying swerve. That the reveal comes with the episode's biggest laughs, as Lance confidently asserts that he's not a lolicon, he's a siscon, is just a bonus.

Flippant incestuous tendencies aside (look, Mashle is a satire, I can roll with it), Lance's backstory broadens the ideas of this parody-based world in an appreciable way. Even before Mash cracks open his secret sister locket, we can tell from Lance's attitude and actions that he's grappling with an unfortunate case of Main Character Syndrome. So discovering that the real villain at play here is, as it has already been codified so many times for Mash, the overall system itself, actually works to swing some sympathy for this sibling-obsessed weirdo. It functions as another callout of Harry Potter's title-character-centric storytelling: Surely our hero isn't the only one at this magic school trying to climb its academic ladder for some greater good, so what happens to those other crusaders who don't happen to have the plot revolve around them? The good news for Lance is that he's in an irreverent parody series where the real hero might actually be able to punch down that whole system that threatens his sister, rather than leaving others as casualties of his own success.

It all serves to broaden our cast and their interactions, though going by Mash's annoyance, he'd rather not have to deal with all of that. I do wonder if the series will be able to do something with the non-Mash characters sooner rather than later, since "Mash sits with them yammering at them while he wishes he could just go home" isn't the most compelling dynamic. This is an episode that proved that Mashle can do stuff with its satirical elements apart from base dunking, so hopefully, it can parlay that into even more complex plots and character interactions.

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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.