A Thousand Miles

Machi Macho

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Machi Maho (short for “Machigatta Ko Wo Mahou Shoujo Ni Shite Shimatta” or roughly “I Messed Up And Made The Wrong Girl A Magical Girl”) is a parody magical girl manga by Souryu. It started serialization Octber 2016 in Kurage Bunch magazine.

Cover Appeal

I’m not too sure what to say about this. This is a good primer for Kayo as a character, if not for the tone of the manga itself. You’ve got your gritty, smoking, angry looking magical girl in a skimpy, outrageous outfit. The back cover confirms what the front implies: it really is an impractical outfit all around. I guess they have to put it somewhere, because that outfit gets precious little paneltime until the final 30 pages.

Beyond that, I can’t say it telegraphs anything special since it seems so straightforward, but I do like how the gritty look of Souryu’s internal work translates well into color here.

The Gist

Myu is a magical creature that has come to Earth due to a recent influx of Atasunmo, or monsters. He needs to train a worthy magical girl to fight them, pronto. Instead, he finds one Majiba Kayo – a chain smoking, foul mouthed, pugnacious delinquent of a girl. Needless to say, she’s not anyone’s idea of a magical girl. But Myu’s hands are tied. Will Myu be able to shape Kayo into an upstanding magical girl or are we all doomed?

Cast

Myu – Your typical magical girl work’s magical creature, of the good variety. He hands out powers and the necessary exposition – not that Kayo listens.

Majiba Kayo – Ill mannered protagonist of this story. Unruly and unfit to be a magical girl. Regardless, she’s still a decent fighter and damn strong to boot.

Masaniedo Rei – A fellow delinquent (of sorts) that Kayo runs into while out fighting monsters. Becomes her right hand man – or perhaps “lackey” is a better term.

Magic Overwatch Council – No, that isn’t their official name. They don’t give one. They don’t give much of damn, either. They convene for a meeting to report on the Atasunmo congregation and, once they realize that it’s all on Earth and thus not their responsibility, all promptly run off on vacation.

Shusai – Student council president.
Gets wrapped up in Kayo’s magical girl mess. Well mannered and well liked, SHE’S the one that should’ve been the magical girl instead.

The Rub

Have you ever heard an idea or high-concept and thought “Wow, that sounds kinda interesting….” and then immediately followed that up with a “…but I’m not sure if it’s ‘an entire book/movie/show/medium-of-your-choice’ interesting, though”? In cases like that, it’s probably better to just compress said idea down into a character, spin-off, story arc, etc. instead of stretching it out.

That’s kind of how I feel about Machi Maho. The main conceit is right there in the title. Kayo is not fit to be a magical girl by most conventional standards. As such, all of the ways that she doesn’t fit the archetype are on display. But the overt focus on that does have a drawback.

Maybe I’m being a little too hard on it. Machi Maho is an ecchi parody. Heavy emphasis on the parody. Everything in this work is obsessed with subversion, inversion, aversion – anything to play around with genre tropes and the audience’s expectations. Even the ecchi elements get in on the gig. This manga has more than its fair share of panty shots (and let’s not even get started on the magical girl outfits themselves) – not so much because it’s “sexy” (the manga knows better and it usually isn’t the main focus of the panel) but because you just can’t fight in a school girl outfit like that and NOT have it happen. More importantly, it subverts the chaste, pure air of femininity one might expect.

I suppose that the real draw is supposed to be the humor that Machi derives from it’s comedic contrarianism. Kayo looks most angelic and pure when she’s nursing her smoking habit. Practically the only other delinquent in the story isn’t much of a delinquent at all. It’s a little ambiguous as to whether Kayo even needs her powers as she punches and kicks the monsters to death most of the time without even transforming. Hell, Machi even likes subverting expectations reasonably made from the precedence it set itself. One of Kayo’s few transformations fails, showing her naked body to Rei and a monster (boner gag and all). As expected, she gets angry. She pulverizes the monster to a pulp and goes to start in on Rei – only to forgive him with a droll “cut it out” when he begs forgiveness. Myu gets clobbered constantly for his “mew” puns, but when a fellow council member stops in and does the same exact thing, she gets away with it.

There’s this segment where we get to see Kayo’s house or, rather, the part she stays in. It’s a big, blank white box of a room, empty through and though. However, it has state of the art technology that seems to be able to materialize a host of items. So why is it empty? Kayo says “because once you get something, you just want more, right?”. But she also responds to inquiries about the absence of totally reasonable things like furniture and wallpaper with a “what a pain”. The more cynical part of me says that this is a self-aware, “highlight by way of negative space”, visual metaphor for how one-note and empty she is as a character. As a big ball of pugnacious anger and crippling nicotine addiction, she has a multitude of things at her disposal but is just too contrarian to be bothered. But the more understanding part of me can just as easy see this as a visual metaphor for how isolated and adrift she is as a person. This is the first time she’s ever had anyone over, likely has few (if any) friends and her parents are abroad constantly . Her world is empty. When she can’t even invest much emotional stock in people (which is arguably the most important) why should she bother with the far less important “things”? Then to make matters worse, her room (much like her empty world) is being invaded by monsters.

See that? There’s humor there, but there’s also something else. Some subtext, some gravity, something to latch onto and take seriously. If there were more events like that in the manga, it would’ve been a bit better.

And that brings me to my over all point – Machi Maho is so preoccupied with playing with tropes, that it neglects making a plot with any kind of teeth. I think someone recognized this because you get hit with a plot point near the end that hints at some kind of consequence stemming from the Atasunmo attacks that has some kind of staying power, much less presence at all.

The Verdict

Now, don’t get me wrong here, Machi Maho isn’t a bad manga. It just stays its hand a little too long with its humor and exaggeration at the expense of building any other kind of investment. Regardless, I really do like the art. It’s gritty and messy and the manga’s “exaggeration to the point of absurdity” aesthetic benefits the violence splendidly, lending blows heft and weight. But the most impressive, I’d say, is Souryu’s ability to switch between pretty depictions of characters one might find in a shojo manga to ghastly depictions that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror property. Machi doesn’t shy away from gore, either, despite its reluctance to take any of it seriously.

I didn’t regret reading Machi Maho. It’s just that around the 2/3rds mark, the experience started to ring a little hollow. Like a can of La Croix, it had the auroma and it had the texture, but it was lacking some in the flavor department. It had its pretty art and its subversion, but it didn’t take its own premise seriously enough for most of the volume. It was running on its exaggeration and multiple iterations of the same 5 gags for a bit. Not bad, but it almost missed having a hook to make me come back. Thankfully, it gets with the program in the last 30 or so pages and gives us something to chew on on the way out.

Continue?: Eh, Sure.