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Machi Maho (short for \u201cMachigatta Ko Wo Mahou Shoujo Ni Shite Shimatta\u201d or roughly \u201cI Messed Up And Made The Wrong Girl A Magical Girl\u201d) is a parody magical girl manga by Souryu. It started serialization Octber 2016 in Kurage Bunch magazine.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Beyond that, I can\u2019t say it telegraphs anything special since it seems so straightforward, but I do like how the gritty look of Souryu\u2019s internal work translates well into color here.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not anyone\u2019s idea of a magical girl. But Myu\u2019s hands are tied. Will Myu be able to shape Kayo into an upstanding magical girl or are we all doomed?<\/p>\n
Myu<\/span> – Your typical magical girl work\u2019s magical creature, of the good variety. He hands out powers and the necessary exposition – not that Kayo listens.<\/p>\n Majiba Kayo<\/span> – Ill mannered protagonist of this story. Unruly and unfit to be a magical girl. Regardless, she\u2019s still a decent fighter and damn strong to boot.<\/p>\n Masaniedo Rei<\/span> – A fellow delinquent (of sorts) that Kayo runs into while out fighting monsters. Becomes her right hand man – or perhaps \u201clackey\u201d is a better term.<\/p>\n Magic Overwatch Council<\/span> – No, that isn\u2019t their official name. They don\u2019t give one. They don\u2019t give much of damn, either. They convene for a meeting to report on the Atasunmo congregation and, once they realize that it\u2019s all on Earth and thus not their responsibility, all promptly run off on vacation.<\/p>\n Shusai <\/span> – Student council president. Have you ever heard an idea or high-concept and thought \u201cWow, that sounds kinda interesting\u2026.\u201d and then immediately followed that up with a \u201c…but I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s \u2018an entire book\/movie\/show\/medium-of-your-choice\u2019 interesting, though\u201d? In cases like that, it\u2019s probably better to just compress said idea down into a character, spin-off, story arc, etc. instead of stretching it out.<\/p>\n That\u2019s 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\u2019t fit the archetype are on display. But the overt focus on that does have a drawback.<\/p>\n Maybe I\u2019m 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\u2019s expectations. Even the ecchi elements get in on the gig. This manga has more than its fair share of panty shots (and let\u2019s not even get started on the magical girl outfits themselves) – not so much because it’s \u201csexy\u201d (the manga knows better and it usually isn’t the main focus of the panel) but because you just can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I suppose that the real draw is supposed to be the humor that Machi derives from it\u2019s comedic contrarianism. Kayo looks most angelic and pure when she\u2019s nursing her smoking habit. Practically the only other delinquent in the story isn\u2019t much of a delinquent at all. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201ccut it out\u201d when he begs forgiveness. Myu gets clobbered constantly for his \u201cmew\u201d puns, but when a fellow council member stops in and does the same exact thing, she gets away with it.<\/p>\n There\u2019s this segment where we get to see Kayo\u2019s house or, rather, the part she stays in. It\u2019s 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 \u201cbecause once you get something, you just want more, right?\u201d. But she also responds to inquiries about the absence of totally reasonable things like furniture and wallpaper with a \u201cwhat a pain\u201d. The more cynical part of me says that this is a self-aware, \u201chighlight by way of negative space\u201d, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n See that? There\u2019s humor there, but there\u2019s 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\u2019ve been a bit better.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Now, don\u2019t get me wrong here, Machi Maho isn\u2019t 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\u2019s gritty and messy and the manga\u2019s \u201cexaggeration to the point of absurdity\u201d aesthetic benefits the violence splendidly, lending blows heft and weight. But the most impressive, I\u2019d say, is Souryu\u2019s ability to switch between pretty depictions of characters one might find in a shojo manga to ghastly depictions that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in a horror property. Machi doesn\u2019t shy away from gore, either, despite its reluctance to take any of it seriously.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t regret reading Machi Maho. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Continue?:
\nGets wrapped up in Kayo\u2019s magical girl mess. Well mannered and well liked, SHE\u2019S the one that should\u2019ve been the magical girl instead.<\/p>\nThe Rub<\/h3>\n
The Verdict<\/h3>\n