Magical Destroyers

Episode 4

I swear y'all, “R U Ready” is the kind of episode of Magical Destroyers that has me straight up pulling a Charlie from It's Always Sunny and getting a whole conspiracy board ready for this show. It's not because the plot is dropping any crazy breadcrumbs, or anything, either (though the cold open featuring the SSC TV Head Guy certainly seems to be planting the seeds for…something to come). No, I'm talking about the fact that I am losing my goddamned mind trying to figure out whether or not I should stake my artistic and professional credibility as a critic on whether or not all of the stupid bullshit going on in Magical Destroyers actually has a point.

Sure, if you look at it on the surface, “R U Ready” might just be the single dumbest twenty minutes that Magical Destroyers has yet produced, and that's really saying something. Basically, after Otaku Hero loses his “Godeen” mecha model to the depths of the Kanda River on account of a magically induced toy freakout, the gang gets into a turf war/obstacle course battle royale with a bunch of middle-aged Oldtaku who don't want all of the uppity young'uns stealing the decades' worth of merch that they've all also dumped into the river. The whole thing becomes the Magical Destroyers equivalent of a Beach Episode, except replace “Beach” with “The Filthy, Industrial Muck of an Urban River.”

(Yes, I am aware that the old dudes bring up the city's water-treatment efforts that have supposedly led to Kanda being as sparking and clean as any mountainside babbling brook. No, I do not know whether this is a real fact about the real Kanda River or simply the anime making a joke about how obviously disgusting it is to splash around in the local sewage runoff. The point is, every single person in this show needs to immediately get treated for Tetanus and Hepatitis.)

The point is, if you're just looking at this episode as the goofy filler episode that it is presenting itself to be, I couldn't blame you. This is, after all, the episode where one of the centerpiece gags features Blue writhing about in her usual masturbatory manner for all of the Oldtaku to see, only to be immediately outshined by the poor young boy who got forced to dress up in a revealing girls' swimsuit by the perverted whims of the lecherous old nerds that refuse to give our heroes the time of day. It ain't exactly classy material.

Then again, I'm still convinced that this rude, crude, and socially unacceptable riff on stale anime tropes really does have something that it's trying to say, even in exceptionally silly episodes like this. At first, I thought the “Old vs. New Otaku” rant that the characters get distracted with during their chicken fight game was simply a matter of sloppy writing since the Oldtaku's main beef—that the new generation of nerds needs to be gatekept because their hobbies and merchandise have become fully mainstream—doesn't even make sense within the premise of the show. Otaku Hero even points out that all otaku are literally at war with an oppressive regime of anti-nerd totalitarianism, and the old dudes' kids make it clear that the fathers' hobbies were never secret or subtle, which only makes the old guys' grievances sound more nonsensical.

By the time the episode ended, though, I began to suspect that the narrative inconsistency was actually very much on purpose. At the end of the episode, Otaku Hero reminisces on the days before fandoms were divided by labels, generational gaps, and matters of brand loyalty, as we saw with the Oldtaku this week, and the Car-taku last week. It used to be that you could just like stuff, without needing an “enemy” to be persecuted by in order to validate your own victim complex.

That, I suspect, could be the point that Magical Destroyers is building up to. At the end of the day, perhaps identifying as an “otaku” above anything else does more harm than good since it only serves to perpetuate the ostracizing and exclusive nature that can come to poison all fandom. What needs to be destroyed is not the systems that “oppress” nerds, but the very idea that “nerds” are a class of people that can even be codified and quantified, to begin with.

Or, maybe, this is just a gross and weird cartoon about perverted, steroid-abusing Magical Girls who beat up middle-aged men to get their boyfriend's toys back before waging war against a ludicrous army of Anti-Nerds with their bomb-ass superpowers. Who the hell knows, at this point?

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Magical Destroyers is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.