English Dub Review: Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka “You’ll Surely Be a Wonderful Magical Girl”

We now have a contender for the worst show of the season.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

This episode opens on a grim sight: a young woman bound to a wheelchair. Her dad tries to sell her to some kind of seedy nightclub as a prostitute, but the buyer isn’t interested in damaged goods. Afterward, in a drunken rage, her father begins savagely beating her, until she’s saved by a hulking red-eyed man, Giess, stuffed in an enormous hoodie that obscures his face. Using his giant mandibles, he crushes the man’s head between his fingers, and invites the young girl, named Chisato, to become a magical girl.

Shifting back to high school, Asuka and her friends are having a beach day, enjoying the sunshine and blue skies. Meanwhile, Kurumi, who is beginning to show her inner crazy a bit more, tortures and interrogates the terrorist magical girl they captured in the last episode. The scene is brutal, to say the least, especially because Kurumi keeps fantasizing about Asuka, professing her love for her while savagely brutalizing this young woman. When the work is finished, Kurumi heads back to her friends as nothing happened.

Later that evening, at the hotel she’s staying at, Asuka has a nightmare/flashback about watching her magical girl comrades die. She wakes up next to Kurumi, and tries to get ready for the next day. A big military/magical girl conference is coming up and Asuka is expected.

Moving to Chisato once more, we see her “training” to become a magical girl with Giess. Chisato shares with Giess the cause of her amputated condition. When she was younger, her mother was killed in a car accident caused by a car full of drunk people. The same accident is what made her lose her leg, and since then she’s never been the same, stuck with her abusive father. Giess shares in her pain, instilling the belief in Chisato that by becoming a magical girl, she can become strong and move beyond that pain.

Giess’s promise isn’t just empty words, as Chisato finds out when Giess presents her with the four people responsible for her mother’s death, gagged and bound in the forest. Stoically, Giess informs Chisato that if she wants to become a magical girl, she must be willing to kill without question. Chisato is more than happy to make her first kills and proves to Giess that she’s ready for more.

Our Take:

I’ve got a pretty strong stomach when it comes to anime. As far as pedigree goes, I was alright with the level of violence and realism present in a lot of anime that separated it from western cartoons. Oh sure, I’d get a little squeamish watching “Higurashi”, what with its friend-on-friend butchery, but stylish violence is part of the fun sometimes in anime. It can be challenging, exciting, terrifying; the presence of violence separates anime from their traditional western counterparts. Yet, here, in Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka, I find myself disgusted, and that is quite an achievement. It’s one thing for a show to be bad, but disgusting is an entirely different beast. It is not just a failure of craft in this episode that brings it so low, that would be something more like an accident. This is badness with intent. The grotesque depictions of torture and slaughter present in this episode are not accidents; they’re there to be shocking and horrible.

But shock value is not a replacement for the story. Gore makes a show darker, but it doesn’t make it more mature. Especially, especially, not when it placed next to scenes of bubbly bikini anime babes jumping around in the water or wearing lingerie. I’m not sure what game Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka thinks it’s playing, but it has managed to offend even this leather-skinned cynical stone of a reviewer. It’s like a desperate plea to try and get some kind of viewership on this property, which needs to be buried in the ground and forgotten as quickly as possible.

This is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to watch, it’s no doubt a black mark for the poor voice actors and translators who have to find some way to rationalize their roles in this assault on the senses. This half-witted, idiotic attempt to try and be “dark” and “edgy” while still shoving this much suggestive material into the show is obscene. And it destroys any kind of story that this episode tries to tell.

Everything in this show fights with itself. Its art style doesn’t match its subject matter, and its awkward attempts at fanservice and humor right after Kurumi, in a goddamn nurse outfit, brutalizes a young girl make me want to stop watching anime altogether. How is anyone going to take this medium seriously when crap like this is still getting made, and dubbed into English, no less? Take my advice, please. There is nothing to value to watch here; put yourself far, far away from this episode, and do something better with your time.