English Dub Review: Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story “I Want to Go Home with You”
Overview (Spoilers Below):
Felicia has given in to the temptation to accept the offer to join the Wings of Magius, but are they all they’re cracked up to be? They say they want to exterminate all witches, but the way they go about it is all wrong. Instead of fighting the witches, they enlist and control them… and they also view magical girls as something that shouldn’t need to exist.
Kyoko joins the group as well, but neither one of them last very long. When Iroha and her friends track Felicia to the underground lair, the two head masters who offered Felicia the job start to attack the magical girls with witches they’re controlling through magic. Felicia quickly goes back to her friends aide and together, they work to defeat the Lucky Owl Water peddlers. But defeating the two girls isn’t enough, because there’s still more leadership higher up the chain of Magius command – and one of them is Mifuyu.
Our Take:
This week on Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, we go deeper underground and get a firsthand look at the Wings of Magius and how it operates. It’s a pretty simple tale of an organization with an arguably noble goal that’s been corrupted in its zeal to go about that goal. There’s never really any question that the Wings of Magius is in the wrong, so most of the episode is just an extended battle scene between Iroha, Felicia, Kyoko, and the witches.
Still, there are some more subtle moments sprinkled throughout the episode. I really enjoy Felicia’s backstory. Her parents being killed by witches is what motivates her to destroy all of them. (Maybe inviting the girl with witch trauma to an organization that utilizes witches to do their dirty work wasn’t the best idea the Wings of Magius ever had!) But there’s a lot of pent-up emotion and anger that comes with being all alone, and Felicia hasn’t quite worked out the best way to work through that yet. She’s looked down on by Yachiyo as an out of control magical girl who can’t hold herself back. But maybe what she needs isn’t to be told to get control of herself, but a safe outlet for expressing her anger in a more healthy manner. I think that’s what the episode is trying to get at towards the end, even if it doesn’t devote enough time to totally make this angle work.
The biggest reveal of the episode is that Mifuyu has been secretly working for the Wings of Magius all this time. Yachiyo and the others have presumed her to be dead or at least to have undergone some terrible catastrophe. So the knowledge that she was here all this time, working underground is chilling. She claims to be the real Mifuyu, but she’s clearly a lot different from the girl Yachiyo used to call her best friend. Maybe Felicia and Yachiyo can work through these complicated emotions together?
The dub this week was very good, with a couple nice lines from Tsurune and Kyoko. Tsurune’s enthusiasm at the knowledge that Yachiyo secretly placed a GPS tracker on Felicia is funny: “That’s my master for ya! Always thinking one step ahead of everyone.” And Kyoko’s little pep talk to Felicia was really sweet: “If you’re gonna risk your life, at least make sure you do it for yourself.” The girls may not have all the answers about the Wings of Magius yet, but if they want to discover them, they’re going to need every ounce of magical girl power they possess.
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!