English Dub Season Review: Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka Season One

This is a new low.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka takes place in a world very much like our own with the exception that some years back the planet was invaded by a supernatural force from another dimension. These invaders, known as the Disas, are something straight out of a nightmare, usually taking the form of demented teddy bears or other childlike creatures. To combat them, humanity sought aid from the fairies, a race similarly from another world but looking to help humanity survive against the Disas. To help humanity, the faeries shared their technology with the people of Earth, most importantly the ability to create magical girls, who would serve as the main fighting force against the Disas and became the saviors of the planet. Three years later, and the Disas have been defeated, but the shadow of their invasion has not disappeared. Asuka Otori, a former magical girl, tries to live a normal high school life, but is plagued by the demons of her past, both within and without.

It’s not a bad idea for an anime. It takes the “Dark magical girl” concept that had been so successful in “Madoka Magica”, but moves it in a direction more keen to world building and the military genre, which can be host to some great action. The poison pill in this setup, however, is that Spec-Ops Asuka can’t stop getting it’s own way. Whatever goodwill it gets in the concept is completely lost in the wake of the bad writing, ugly animation, disgusting amounts of fanservice, and a narrative that takes every shortcut and fails to create characters worth giving a damn about. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this anime fails in every category of storytelling. It’s a fun idea, and maybe it was a better manga or light novel series, but as an anime, it’s easily one of the worst, and most insulting, things I’ve ever seen.

From the beginning, we have issues, as the show’s main character is very poorly conceived. Lacking any notable personality traits, Asuka exists somewhere between oatmeal and tap water in terms of how bland she is. She doesn’t feel like a real person, much like an android who doesn’t understand human emotion, except she’s supposed to be the emotional core of the series. Her main conflict throughout the season is her PTSD from the war against the Disas. The horror of that war is well-illustrated, but without an empathetic main character to care about, it doesn’t mean anything to the audience. The side characters, consisting of her former magical girl comrades and a couple of forgettable high-schoolers she tries to be friends with, are just as bad, if not worse. Kurumi, the most prominent side character, is little more than a walking torture fetish. It seems her purpose in the show is to lust after Asuka and then get off on dismembering people. The cast has not a single character among them, but you know what they do have? Sex appeal. In great supply.

This is what I mean when I say that Spec-Ops Asuka keeps getting its own way. Every single character is a sex object. We’re talking the full suite of fanservice here; walking mannequins crammed into tight, skimpy outfits that serve no purpose except to show off their abundant “assets.” It doesn’t work for the setting, and it’s especially egregious for the tone, which is supposed to have this dark, dramatic feeling to it. Yet, the show takes every opportunity to shove T and A into your face with beach scenes, gym scenes, and, the most sinister of the bunch, the torture scenes.

There’s an elephant in the room here, one that graduates this mess from “Bad” to “Grotesque.” There are scenes of intense violence and torture, which is no problem for a dark anime, but their depiction is nearly pornographic. Kurumi, who is already problematic, literally gets off on torturing others, and the show has no issue with playing that off in the most pandering way possible. You would think you were watching hentai given some of these scenes, and the particular “reactions” of some of the victims. I’m not one to shy away from the subject matter, but the sexualization of violence in the show is so obvious and so brazen that it makes me uncomfortable to watch. This isn’t “Higurashi”, where the violence exists to serve a role in the story and pull on your emotions. These scenes would be more appropriate in the depths of Pornhub, yet they can be found on the front page of Funimation’s website, headlining their season’s lineup.

All of this is underscored by some of the worst looking visuals in anime today. Get ready for some stiff character models, awkward movement, and a whole lot of fish-lipping. Even better, and this is something I’ve never seen before, potentially exciting special attacks are completely un-animated, in favor of showing a still frame of the reaction to the said attack. An obvious move to save on budget and cheat the show through a potentially costly action scene. God forbid a studio to spend time animating it’s action sequences.

You really have to wonder what people are thinking when they greenlight this kind of trash. It seems like any property that has gotten some minor success with the visual novel will get made into an anime, regardless of whether or not there’s a story worth telling the present. I can’t speak for the source material of this disaster, but I’d like to think that it takes the interesting setting it makes into a better direction than what we’re subjected to here. Obviously not every anime can be a winner, but this show is so cynical, so insidious in inception, that I can only surmise it exists to try and sell sex to lonely nerds who don’t care if the story sucks. Just slap on a character with a nice chest stuffed into a skimpy outfit, and you’ll always find someone willing to waste their time on this bullshit.