Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2

Episode 18

Turns out Mash does occasionally skip leg day. After taking a week off, Mashle has returned to jump straight back into the action. It goes so quickly that the Team Deathmatch portion of the exam pointedly, unceremoniously ends at the opening of this installment. This is what happens when something is operating on eliminations—Mash and friends just had to wait for someone else to take out one of the other teams. They didn't even have to worry about fighting their friend Lance! Dot wins by doing absolutely nothing.

Technically the majority of this episode then settles into the characters waiting for Mash's big, hyped-up fight with Margarette Macaron to begin, which might sound like a recipe for a slow setup. But this is Mashle, it's just going to keep barreling forward regardless. There is still room for jokes, as Mash and Lemon's melodramatic pontifications on bodybuilding and romance, respectively, frustrate Finn in their proximity. These are the kinds of shallow character meditations so often entertained by the sorts of action series Mashle is riffing on, so making time to make fun of them is a great way to indicate that the series actually doesn't have time for them.

Instead, as a fighting series smack-dab in the middle of a tournament arc, the Mashle anime knows its most important task is the time-honored art of booking. This season has been gassing up Macaron as Mash's upcoming opponent for a while now, and this episode is all about setting the stage for how intense this coming clash will be. Past the previous scenes of Macaron demonstrating their power against hopeless jobbers, this episode features a slate of peers describing how and why the musical misanthrope could prove such a challenging matchup for Mash.

Much of this is expected power scaling comparisons, as commentators make clear that Macaron is on par with the Divine Visionaries in ability, positioning them as the ultimate wall Mash will have to scale at some point. But it's still kept engrossing due to the audience's understanding of Mash needing to become a Divine Visionary himself in his fight for his right to exist. This comes alongside some effective internal politicking on the side of the Visionaries and administration, and even a pre-battle warm-up exhibition of the level Mash is about to jump up to.

Mash's quick game of lethal "You Look, You Lose" against Kaldo is demonstrative both of the series's core cleverness, and the effective treatment of the anime adaptation in particular. It's an absurd complication of classic childhood games that harkens back to nothing so much as early Yu-Gi-Oh!, with the artistry truly flexing in how cleanly it animates a guy standing in one spot, not looking in certain directions. It's also part of that aforementioned preview of what Mash will have to deal with: Kaldo is the Head of Magic Talent, and Mash has no magic talent, so how he gets through that is down to his raw physical tenacity. The system Mash has been dropped into has never played fair, so while he's not exactly the smartest musclehead in the gym, he still needs to exert some cleverness in how he deals with what that system's enforcers throw at him.

That strongly sets up the Mash/Macaron bout. Out of the gate, Macaron's raw magical power seems enough to overwhelm Mash with but a single basic spell, but it turns out Mash can quickly come up with an effective (and more importantly, silly) solution to escaping them. Mash's counterattack demonstrates one of my favorite things about this series, in how his necessary approach forces these kinds of lightspeed laser magic fights to be proper physical brawls. It's a knowing reversal of the way other fighting series will trend towards energy blast abstraction as they go on, and it continues to be rendered beautifully. That's another appreciable reversal: compared to how these things usually go these days, I swear this second season of Mashle has looked even better than the first. A lot of that's down to simply more continuous, sustained fights where the animators can flex, compared to Mash nullifying early encounters with anticlimax in the first season (as hilarious as that consistently was). With the fight against Macaron just getting heated up by the end of this episode, that all leaves me prepped to be very excited about where this battle will go next.

Rating:

Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is still the reviewer for Mashle, and wizards are still nerds. Get some reps in with him over on his Twitter, or peruse the magical back catalog of his blog.