I highly recommend watching up to the bus episode (around ep 9). After that the lulz dry up and there's a drawn out sports-carnival arc (10! episodes long about a freaking sports day). It's more entertaining to just read the highlights for this arc that to watch it:
Shiba is rejected as the engineer for the guys, because male Blooms are assholes, so he ends up with a (surprise) harem of hot Bloom girls to work with. The friendly athletes are helped because Engineer Shiba hacks their magi-computers with super-secret science only he knows, and provides "impossible" flying magic that Inventor Shiba created. A female friend is injured due to race fixing, and Doctor Shiba stands there directing the paramedics. Later, Detective Shiba uses forensic computing to track the culprits. Shiba's dear Imouto wins many matches, but at the end, all the male athletes are injured (probably because they refused to let Shiba rig their gear with his cheaty shit), and only one person can take their place: Athlete Shiba. Athlete Shiba uses super-secret regeneration magic that rolls back his body to a "save point" when he is injured and saves the day. After winning (either directly or indirectly through his magi-science) literally all male and female sports events, Shiba discovers a Chinese syndicate who has been tampering on the events to make money from gambling. Dirty Harry Shiba then goes to town on the syndicate and outright murders 30+ people in the gambling racket, thus saving the day and making him True Hero Shiba.
We haven't really touched on:
- outright misogyny / slut-shaming, for basically any woman wearing less than a full burqa, though this is meted out on whim:
the author's proxies comments negatively on the girls wearing "revealing" clothes (which aren't actually revealing) more than once. e.g. there's one busty girl who has the temerity to wear a summer dress, and other characters chastize her slutty choice of attire (even though you know, everyone else is dressed the same), and the hero comments negatively on a teacher wearing a sweater that shows of the curve of her breasts (to which the female teacher is all "sorry mr Shiba sir, I won't do it again")
- right wing logic, worthy of the Rush Limbaugh show, or Ayn Rand:
poor people are poor because they earned their poverty, and attempting to balance this would unfairly bias things against those who worked hard. This is reflected in the core dynamic of the series: the hero was shunted into the downtrodden peasant class by accident, but he should have been a noble. When discussing the horrendous treatment of the peasants, the only argument given is basically "but he was meant to be a noble all along", and never "but abusing the peasants is wrong". And when the peasants finally stand up for their rights, a noble gives a speech about "isn't it really the peasants who define what 'poor' is? Aren't you really the ones creating the prejudice against yourselves?". To which every peasant has a sudden epiphany and never mentions being downtrodden, ever again. Imagine if you code this to the real world, where the classes are "black vs white" or "rich vs poor". It would be totally repulsive.
- the show actually makes you fondly remember the female-on-male violence in shows like Zero no Tsukaima.
It happens in Mahouka, but only to the less obnoxious sidekick character. So the writer knew he needed elements like this in the series, but didn't understand why they exist: they are there to make the main character more relatable and less of a Mary Sue. The guy who wrote Mahouka however clearly sees the character as a proxy for himself, so he cannot accept anything negative happening to the MC, even for 5 seconds.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3065281 times)