Tejina is cute, weird, and loves stage magic. She also has crippling stage fright. The nameless male main character first meets her practicing parlor tricks in her club room alone. His high school requires that he join a club, and for some reason he can’t take his eyes off Tejina and her fruitless attempts at magic. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: TBA (12 minutes apiece)
Source: Manga
Episode Summary: Protagonist-kun (he’s literally unnamed) needs to find a school club to join, since his school requires it of all students. He plans to join the literature club so that he can slack off, but hears some enthusiastic dialog coming from an open door and decides to peek inside. The source of the speech is Tejina, a pretty upperclassman with a love for stage magic. Unfortunately, her skills at maintaining illusions leave something to be desired. Somehow protagonist-kun gets roped into becoming her assistant, though his main duties involve playing the straight man and cleaning up after Tejina’s mistakes.
Impressions: In the Summer season’s second shorter-form offering, we get yet another series focused on some unique subject matter. While anime is riddled with fantasy series in which the characters use “real” RPG-style magic spells, I think this is one of the first I’ve seen dealing with Vegas-style stage illusions. Aside from its window dressing, though, this episode reveals itself to be fundamentally just another comedy – and one with a pretty poor punch line.
Tejina, the hapless “Sempai” (I’m not a fan of that romanized spelling, so I’ll be using “senpai” from now on) is the perpetrator of her own victimhood, getting herself so trapped in her own spell-making that she ends up in very precarious positions. The central gag seems to be that her own clumsiness and failure of technique cause her to end up in highly sexualized situations, whether that means being tangled in her own rope bondage, stuck in a box until she’s upside-down and sweaty, dunked in liquid (thus turning her shirt translucent), or caught writhing around with a pigeon stuck in her shirt. All of her “magic tricks” (which are mostly very basic and recognizable as such) are just a means to an end.
I have a hard time watching anime series that don’t seem to have basic respect for their own characters. It’s not Tejina’s character type that bothers me; not every anime character has to be a genius, or even all that competent. I don’t mind that she has stage fright/social anxiety, because I know exactly how that feels. Speaking in front of people is always a challenge, and I trip over my words and actions a lot, so I have sympathy for her in that sense. What bothers me, though, is that Tejina is treated as a punching bag, continually made to confirm her own incompetence with her ass in the air while protagonist-kun rolls his eyes and sighs. It feels mean-spirited rather than fun, and it makes it difficult to enjoy the episode.
Humor is difficult enough to begin with, and requires great dialog and excellent timing to be successful. Most of the time I’m willing to give comedies the benefit of the doubt as long as they don’t stray into hateful humor territory. This one is so rapid-fire and seems so intent on punching down on its protagonist that it quickly fell out of my good graces. As a short-form series, there’s really not a lot of run-time for it to talk its way around its many unnecessary creep-shots and fanservice moments, so it’s difficult for me to rationalize any possible positive attributes. This is great if you like seeing panties and “anime tiddy,” not so great if those anime standbys are not really to your taste.
Pros: The bread Tejina baked in one of the segments looked really delicious (I think it might be my lunch time).
Cons: The humor punches down on its titular senpai.
Content Warnings: Fanservice/sexualization of a teenage girl.
Grade: D+