English Dub Review: Mashle: Magic and Muscles “Mash Burnedead and the Unpopular Classmate”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

It is a match against Lance with their silver coins on the line. Victorious, Mash manages to rescue Finn, Lemon, and Tom from the bottle. While smoothly moving through classes and assignments, a joint extracurricular activity is held for the Adler and Lang Dorms. Their task is to dispatch the forest scorpions to earn coins. After entering the forest and ending up lost and alone, Mash winds up working with a first-year student from his dorm named Dot…?!

Our Take:

After a challenging duel with Lance, Mash faces another group of students during his quest to become the Divine Visionary. But not before he and the other classmates split into three dormitories based on personality. Mash, Finn, and Lance are part of the Adler dormitory, meaning bravery. Orca students are based on intelligence, while Lang students stand for ambition. Unfortunately, the Lang dormitory seems more ambitious toward themselves, as they plan to steal the Adler members’ coins during a forest class assignment, in which they exterminate forest scorpions for coins.

One student that Mash meets is Dot Barret (Benjamin Diskin), a first-year student with profound explosion magic and a hot-blooded and dense personality. Dot also becomes Mash’s self-proclaimed rival because of Dot’s jealousy toward him for unintentionally stealing Lemon from him. Yes, you read that right. We have ourselves a love triangle between Mash and Dot for the affection of Lemon Irvine.  

The other classmates are Silva, a Lang student who’s another irritating and psychotic asshole attempting to make the students’ lives a living hell, and Lauren, a manipulative girl who can enchant any man to do her bidding. Fortunately, the emotionless muscleman is immune to the latter’s charm, although I can’t say the same for Dot, whom Lauren commands to fight Silva. Due to Silva’s iron magic, the fight didn’t turn out well for Dot. However, it looks like Silva’s victory will be short-lived due to Silva accidentally knocking Mash’s cream puff out of his hand.

Like the previous episode, “Unpopular Classmate” continues to provide some similarities to the Harry Potter lore, with the episode showcasing the characters dealing with the screaming mandrake plants. If you’ve been enjoying Mashle so far due to the comparisons, there’s no doubt you’ll feel the same for this episode. I would also add that Mash creating cream puffs out of potions was by far the most hilarious sequence I’ve seen. As for Dot Barrett, the self-proclaimed rival of Mash has its moments, including his explosion magic. However, like Tom, Dot’s hyperactive personality causes concern that he’ll become the most annoying part of the series. As long as Dot’s disruptive behavior is balanced well with the show’s comedy for the remaining season, he’ll likely blast out of the “irritation zone” with no issues.