Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Waccha PriMagi!

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: TBA

Source: Related to PriPara, based on an arcade game series.

Episode Summary: Matsuri is a huge fan of Jennifer, the previous PriMagi champion. She wishes that she had the courage to compete to become a PriMagi superstar, but that dream seems to be nothing but a far-off possibility until a magical being named Myamu arrives through a mystical portal from her magic-suffused world and pegs Matsuri as a potential PriMagi competitor.

Matsuri is initially weirded-out by Myamu, whose forward nature and blathering about the differences between the “Treasured” (those who can use magic) and the “Earthly” (those who can’t) is creepy. Yet, Matsuri just can’t let go of her dream, and once she realizes the true extent and importance of that dream to herself she rushes to submit her application to the PriMagi competition. Luckily she seems to have the inherent gift of performance required by such competitors, and her initial success helps Myamu regain some use of her magic powers. But Matsuri isn’t the only person vying for this distinction, so what sort of challenges might she face in the future?

Impressions: I typically tend to stay away from the seasonal toy commercials, but it’s been so long since I’ve watched a magical girl series that hasn’t been trying to put its heroines through the emotional and physical wringer for low-key sadistic purposes that I thought I’d take a moment to enjoy something that I suspected would be mostly frothy and uncomplicated. And frothy this episode is, to be sure. However, I may have been mistaken by the “uncomplicated” assumption.

There’s an issue that certain stories have with insisting on their own jargon, to the point that it becomes almost an indecipherable code. This episode is full of Vocabulary™ – “Treasured” for magic users, “Earthly” for regular humans, along with PriMagi, Waccha, Lookbook, and other miscellaneous terminology. I’m reminded of a time when a friend’s young kid wanted to tell me about a video game he was playing, and in that way kids tend to do his story contained every single detail of the game’s mechanics and terminology along with the much more interesting information about the story and why he liked to play it. I love hearing what kids are excited about, but in this case after a while I could feel my eyes beginning to glaze over – at that age kids just haven’t yet learned how to separate the pithy, important information of what they’re trying to relay from the little bits that don’t really matter to the overall story. Or, I should say, all the information is equally important to them, and they want to share it all with you. That’s kind of how I feel about this episode.

Digging down through all those details, though, this is a pretty straightforward story. The protagonist uses her powers, a form of magic based around her ability to be true to herself and in that way inspire an audience of adoring fans, to collect “waccha” for her magical partner, Myamu. She gets a fun, sparkly transformation sequence, an upbeat song and dance routine, and a new fantasy wardrobe that has a lot of room to expand. Sure, it’s probably mostly meant as an ad for the Japanese game series it’s based on, but I can’t really fault an obvious toy commercial for acting in service to its purpose. And hey, at least no one gets brutally murdered!

Pros: I really like how upbeat and colorful this episode is. Looking at some of the key art it’s obvious that there’s a big emphasis on extremely eccentric, complicated fashion in this series; that seems to be the main collectible item that the characters obtain as they sing and dance. Anime fashion tends to be a little bit more complicated than what you see in “cartoons,” but with the cotton-candy-colorful hairstyles as asymmetrical hemlines, this series is really next-level.

I like Matsuri’s stated goal that she writes on her PriMagi application – she wants to become the coolest version of herself. I think life is filled with unattainable goals to which we unjustly hold ourselves, and many of us are prone to directly comparing ourselves to others when the comparison doesn’t actually make any sense. But simply working to be your own best version, whatever that entails, is a constructive goal that anyone could try to achieve.

Cons: I kind of had to laugh a little bit at Matsuri’s dance routine, which is primarily composed of her hopping back and forth to the beat of the music along with a few arm motions. During the performance the animation switches to CG motion-capture, and I found it kind of amusing that it seemed to be in service of something so simplistic.

Content Warnings: None.

Would I Watch More? – Probably not, but watching this episode was a good reminder that magical girl stories take many forms, many of which certainly are not the tragedy and torture porn that has, at times, reached a fever pitch in modern anime. Madoka was certainly not the first time that magical girls went dark; parts of Sailor Moon definitely toe that line and the history of the genre is peppered with so many stories that aren’t just cutesy fluff pieces. But sometimes fluff pieces, and specifically stories aimed at young girls as the genre originally intended (rather than adult otaku who’ve often as of late wanted to assert their ownership of it) are good, too.