Gushing Over Magical Girls

...yeah, I know.

Put down the phone, it's too late to call the purity police on me for daring to watch this one. I saw it while browsing the Winter 2024 seasonal lineup, and morbid curiosity got the better of me. Now, I could immediately see this anime for what it was - I wasn't bamboozled or caught unawares in the slightest - and while I don't make a habit of watching this specific subgenre of show, I don't regret watching this particular entry. Despite the obvious yikes factor on display here, this one knows exactly what it's doing, and hits on a few specific things I'd like to pry into.

Oral fixation isn't specifically on the list, but it's something I'm always down for prying into.

Let's go ahead and establish the elephant in the room. Gushing Over Magical Girls is one of those go-directly-to-jail loli-bait anime that features what clearly appear to be children engaging in sexual behaviors. Teenagers, children, same difference. You can't bullshit your way out of this one like you can with some other titles - trying to pass off some Interview With The Vampire nonsense about a 300 year old spirit trapped in a little girl's body or whatever - these characters look and act like middle to high schoolers, and I'm making it a point to establish this clearly so we're all on the same page here. I don't want the words I have to say to be twisted around.

The crucial thing to remember here is that this is a work of FICTION performed by ADULTS, and no actual children were involved. Got it? Good, let's move on.

In case there were any doubts about the explicit 18+ rating of this show.

Alright, here's our story. A garden variety trio of color-coded magical superheroes defend the city from semi-random monster attacks, but they're not the main characters of the show. That would be the shy, somewhat invisible mess of a girl named Utena. Aside from being a repressed nerd, she also happens to be a superfan of these particular power puffs (the Tres Magia), always watching them fight from afar, feverishly collecting all their merchandise, absolutely saturating her bedroom with posters and figurines, the works.

One fateful day, a magical familiar by the name of Venalita appears out of the blue and offers HER that same power to transform into a magical girl herself. Thinking her time to become the very thing she loves the most has finally come, Utena hastily accepts the offer, only to find out what she'd ACTUALLY been offered was a role as Tres Magia's new villain. And it's already too late to back out of the deal, as Venalita blackmails her with the prospect of spreading photos of Utena's saucy new villain outfit on social media.

Considering sexuality is usually synonymous with sin in our puritan-influenced media, it's fitting that this story is about exploring our young villain's burgeoning sexuality.

The real story begins when Utena (now calling herself Magia Baiser) gets into her first fight with her idols. As it turns out, she actually quite enjoys playing the villain. With her riding crop shaped magic wand, she is able to transform everyday objects around her into goofy monsters that she can use to wrap up and torment the Tres Magia, which seems to unlock a hitherto-unknown feeling deep inside her.

Hearing her heroes' adorable little cries for help as she teases them and rips off their outfits piece by piece becomes a heart-racing thrill. Venalita ascertains that Utena's hidden powers as Magia Baiser stem from an S&M kink she didn't even know she had. And from here, the show's main schtick revolves around Venalita pushing Utena further and further into the role of villain, refining her powers and amassing allies until she's ready to face the REAL threat, some kind of vaguely unexplained proxy war being fought between the two warring races of familiars, amassing armies of magical girls and villains to fight for them.

But who's paying attention to any of that?

Sometimes you have to wonder if the show is throwing all this nudity in your face to distract you from a far more nefarious and unspoken plot bubbling in the background. Then again, you get to watch an exhibitionist idol sing her heart out full in the buff, so who cares?

Naturally, the core of the show's appeal is its strikingly well-done S&M scenes. The anime is chock full of lingering shots of softcore bondage, with a heavy focus on sensual touching, squeezing, stroking, spanking, and teasing, all while romantic flamenco music dances along in the background. There's a surprising variety of kinks on display here as well, including tickling, wax play, hypnosis, age regression, exhibitionism, and even size play. Our horny little villain's endless imagination for teasing the Tres Magia is a twisted delight to watch, especially for the socially and sexually repressed among us who never got to experiment like this in our younger years. I'll circle back to that in a moment.

This isn't quite what I meant when I said younger years, but whatever floats your boat, I guess!

The standout scene of the whole series - at least in my opinion - comes in around the halfway point. Magia Azure, clearly throwing her fights against Baiser due to her less-than-subtle enjoyment of being tied up and toyed with, decides she needs to shape up for her teammates' sake and challenges Baiser to a one-on-one in an attempt to prove she can overcome her lustful desires. This desensitization therapy naturally doesn't work the way she wants it to, and Baiser, spurred on by Azure's sudden determination, easily outmatches her and has the last laugh. And in that moment, bound and teased to her limit, Azure gives in to temptation and begs for the domination to continue.

Magia Baiser's power level increases the more she enjoys this little game, indicated by the number of visible stars on her face. An excellent subtle detail.

But the kicker is that that is the LAST thing Utena wants to hear. She kicks Azure away in disgust, calling her a disgrace as a magical girl and denying her any further pleasures. For Utena, the thrill of this kinky little game comes not from simply toying with her precious idols and hearing them squeal, but watching them FIGHT BACK. In a later flashback, we see that little Utena's favorite aspect of magical girls as a concept is their boundless determination, their vow to keep fighting, and never give up on what they believe in, no matter how dire - or sensual, in this case - the situation ever gets. It isn't just spanking her idols that turns her on, it's about the give and take of pushing them to fight back, rather than just the desire to dominate someone who likes to be dominated. It's a stunningly mature outlook on the two-way street of sensual play, especially coming from such an otherwise silly and over-the-top show.

The way Utena immediately switches gears from aroused to stone-cold genuinely put me on edge, and was more exciting than any of the show's actual bondage play.

Alas, the double-edged sword of it all is that in order for this show to really explore the themes of sexual discovery in the way that it does, it must also depict the characters as young. Even if the show is ultimately nothing more than adult writers writing adult situations for adult voice actors to role play and no actual real human children were involved, what you're seeing on screen is still happening to kid characters. And there will always be a certain feeling of wrongness that comes with that.

And of course, it SHOULD feel wrong! I don't want to have sexual thoughts about young teens or whatever. I'm almost 40 fucking years old, that's just gross. But there is still a specific value to be found in shows like these, and that's what I really wanted to talk about here.

Was playing house always this sensual? I wish I knew.

I talked about this a bit in my Call of The Night review, but as an extremely sheltered child growing up isolated from my teen peers in the dreaded social prison that is Homeschool, I spent a lot of late teenagerdom discreetly learning about sex from questionable and uninformative sources like porn and image boards. I had somehow worked it out in my addled-lescent brain that if a thing was marked as "18+", it was Bad and I shouldn't be engaging with it. But like any curious teenager, I still wanted to look at butts and stuff, so I tricked myself into thinking that maybe if it was something more innocuous or closer to my own age, like nudity in classical art, or the cover art for Led Zeppelin's "Houses of The Holy", then maybe those butts were somehow more "acceptable", something I could reasonably get away with looking at.

It's a pretty fucked-up headspace to occupy in retrospect, especially in places like image boards, since that can put you in the same room with people who are on the road to legit pedophilia.

Make no mistake, this is what we do to real-life pedophiles around here.

But given that people who write sexual stories about kids in school are almost always adults themselves who know better, the flip side is that in fiction, every character is not a real human person. Fiction is a contained, imaginary space that can be used as a powerful tool for exploring and processing feelings or fantasies. It's especially useful for revisiting (often repressed) memories of sexual discovery in people's younger years using a controlled environment.

Shows like Gushing Over Magical Girls present a "what if" scenario that people like me can use to re-examine how they grew up, and what things they wish they had learned at a younger age. Watching Utena's face flush with excitement as she discovers what turns her on feels extremely familiar to my own teenhood, and I wonder how differently things could have turned out if I'd been allowed to engage with and understand my own kinks back then like she does here. There's a difficult-to-explain sort of catharsis to it that can only be explored in fiction like this, and I think it's not only valid but extremely valuable to have this type of show for that reason.

For real though, it would have been nice to talk to someone at that age who understood emerging sexuality and could have helped me navigate it safely without things getting awkward or creepy along the way.

Anyway, for being what it is, Gushing Over Magical Girls as a show was pretty damn funny. If it were an adult porn parody featuring adult actors ACTING like kids (for all intents and purposes, it IS that, but the animated characters on screen are clearly depicted as non-adults), I think it would be an instant classic with no hand-wringing to speak of. If your interest has at least been piqued, it's definitely something you should watch at your own risk, and definitely DEFINITELY something you should know exactly what you're getting into before you get into it. Like most 18+ shows, it's not something I would suggest everyone watch, but if you're interested, give it a shot.

As far as recommendations go, this is far from the first magical girl-centric porn I've ever seen. Lingerie Senshi Papillon Rose and of course Cutie Honey come to mind. If you're looking for something a little more adult-oriented that still explores some similar S&M-adjacent kinks, try Weather Report Girl. For more curious horny teenager stuff though, you might like Mysterious Girlfriend X, or even something wackier like Green Green.

...looks like I've got plenty more of these reviews to write, huh. Guess I'd better get comfy.

The translation team had an absolute field day writing some of these lines, can't wait to see what a full English dub will sound like!