The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Gushing Over Magical Girls

Utena Hiiragi is a normal magical-girl-loving middle school girl—or at least she was, but then some talking mascot showed up out of the blue and cast a spell on her. Now's her chance to join her beloved magical girls as...a villain. This shy magical-girl fan transforms into a sadistic dominatrix.

Gushing Over Magical Girls is based on a manga of the same name by Akihiro Ononaka. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Wednesdays.

Content warning: This anime contains multiple scenes of nonconsensual sexual contact involving underage characters. Viewer discretion is advised.

Cards on the table: I really like the general concept of Gushing Over Magical Girls. The idea of a magical girl fan being forced to become a villain—only to reluctantly discover she likes being one—is a solid idea rife with storytelling potential. And, when it comes down to it, Gushing Over Magical Girls does a pretty good job of exploring it in this first episode.

Utena is a shy teen who is discovering her own darker desires—the deeper basis for likes and dislikes. Her internal struggle is a good one. We all have our own kinks and dark thoughts we reject and try to bury—or at least only indulge in while in private. Being suddenly confronted with your own is enough to throw anyone off balance—especially when you're a teenager going through puberty.

But, then we come to the elephant in the room: This show is basically BDSM-inspired softcore porn. If this isn't your kink (or if you aren't desensitized to even the most extreme cases of fanservice by decades of watching entirely too much anime), it's almost certain you won't be able to power through this one—regardless of how well the core concept is done.

That said, I'm not going to pretend I wasn't decently entertained by this first episode. At times, the humor really hit home for me. I even laughed out loud at the aborted transformation sequence gag. However, that doesn't change the fact that this is a show with a very specific target audience in mind. If you happen to fall within it, you'll have a great time. If not, well, there's plenty else this season to watch.

I'll give this show credit where it's due. For one, "Gushing Over Magical Girls" is an inspired bit of wordplay and suitably salacious for this show. I also appreciate that it has the temerity to actually run with a fetish to give its fanservice some flavor. So much of the T&A we get in anime is so boringly preoccupied with boobs and panties that it's nice to see a fanservice show with some real identity. Third, I honestly respect the choice to go for a full-on S&M porn parody of magical girls, if only because it's different from the typical "What if magical girls...DIED!?!?!?!?!" premise we usually get from magical girl shows for grown-ups. I just wish they'd fully committed to the "grown-ups" part.

The choice to have all the characters be – and look like – middle schoolers is a bucket of cold water dumped over this whole show. I'm not interested in litigating fictional character ages or anything like that – it's just that characters looking and sounding like children is the antithesis of sexy to me. It turns every lovingly animated bit of cheesecake into something I purposefully unfocus my eyes on. That's kind of the rub (no, not like that) with shows that are mostly porn delivery vehicles. If you're not personally revved up by what's on screen, you're essentially stuck reading Playboy for the articles for 20 minutes, except here, the centerfold will get you put on a government watchlist.

If you don't enjoy 13-year-olds getting spanked and tied up with tendrils, all that's left is a slow, repetitive, magical girl parody. All the characters are purposefully archetypal, with the trio of magical girls nearly indiscernible in personality and Utena herself being a passive pushover until her sadist switch gets flipped. There are maybe a couple of halfway clever gags based on longstanding magical girl traditions, like the characters being naked during their transformation sequences, but there's not enough chemistry between the cast to carry anything that isn't fetish material. Heck, we essentially repeat the same order of events twice across this premiere to identical results and the same jokes, just with tickling instead of spanking. Even the music feels phoned-in, plunking along to poorly punctuate every pitiful punchline. As-is, the funniest part of the episode was the inexplicable cameo from Popuko and Pipimi from Pop Team Epic in a few background shots.

At the very least, HIDIVE is streaming a largely uncensored version, so this doesn't come with the "wait for the Blu-rays" caveat most shows like this stream with. That's definitely a boon, because I can say confidently that if you're not into the porn, there's really nothing else here to keep you around.

James Beckett
Rating:

I used that classic Arrested Development gag up there as a rating for the premiere of Gushing Over Magical Girls, not because I am trying to imply that watching the show is literally like snacking on the rotting carcass of a neglected fowl, but because the title for this anime should serve as the same kind of warning as the note taped onto that suspiciously soggy looking bag. The "Gushing" in the title is one of those "horrifyingly literal" kinds of puns, you see, and the fact that HIDIVE's uncensored broadcast of the episode shoves a pair of very underaged boobies in your face within the first minute or so of the episode should make that abundantly clear. In other words, if you decide to open the proverbial bag after reading all this, do not be surprised at whatever traumatizing contents you will discover within it.

To be clear, Gushing Over Magical Girls has precisely one joke, which is that its degenerate main character Utena is going to use her newfound villainess powers to poke, prod, spank, tickle, torment, and otherwise humiliate the trio of magical girls that she has spent her life obsessing over, all while the girls' boobs and butts and barely covered crotches are thrust into the camera for Utena (and the audience's) viewing pleasure. Because of the gushing, you see. If you haven't caught on, the joke is that this sort of thing doesn't happen in your Every Day, Normie, Regular Magical Girl Shows for Babies.

There you go. That's the show. For those of you who haven't immediately decided whether Gushing Over Magical Girls is worth watching based on that description alone, there isn't a lot here that will sway any fence-sitters. The animation is mediocre, at least whenever the T&A is off the table, the characters are all one-note cliches by design, and there isn't a minute that goes by where some poor girls' nethers don't get exposed and/or thwacked with a magic stick, so it's not like there's anything for viewers to enjoy if they planned on just skipping through all of the material that might get you fired/canceled/permanently judged if you made the mistake of watching it in public.

I don't know if this is actually to the show's credit or not, but it says a lot about how much this job and this fandom have broken my brain that this isn't an immediate front-runner for the most terrible Magical Girl Parody I've ever seen, though it is almost certainly amongst the trashiest of them. I reckon most of you reading this will see the "Dead Dove: DO NOT EAT" warning on the bag and take it to heart. For anyone else who still wants to take a peek inside, well, far be it from me to judge what you do in the privacy of your own home.

In a move that might surprise some, I didn't hate the first volume of the source manga for Gushing Over Magical Girls. I didn't love it, but I thought it did a decent enough job of being what it was: a horny magical girl parody. Why, then, do I have such a strong dislike for the first episode of the anime? There are probably a lot of reasons, one of which is absolutely the addition of voice and motion, which makes it harder to distance yourself from what's happening, but it's also likely due to the fact that this just dives right into its uncomfortable elements and has at them. To call it unsettling might be understating it, at least if you're not part of the target audience.

The episode relies on exactly two things: uncensored middle school nudity (girls, of course) and a misunderstanding of BDSM, which requires that all parties be into it; if they're not, it's just abuse. Evil mascot Venalita (who has the word “venal” right there in the name, so you know Utena shouldn't be trusting them) may want to defeat the magical girl trio known as Tres Magia, but honestly, they seem much keener on corrupting Utena – but having her discover her inner sadist and use it to sexually abuse Tres Magia. Even more unsettling is the way that it's clearly being played for laughs – the three magical girls' sore tushes are the subject of at least three gags after Utena's evil magic form spends time smacking them with her crop. Prior to that? The flower she turned into a BDSM-themed monster graphically groped their breasts and opened legs, the better to get at what's in between them. As far as humor goes, this is falling very flat for me, and I was actively uncomfortable (and a little repulsed) the entire time.

It's uncensored, and I actually do applaud that. I'm not a fan of censorship, even if it's not something I want to see, and most of my issue here is the nonconsensual nature of the story. I don't find that funny or entertaining, and that makes this a hard no for me.