Mahou Shoujo Site Manga Review: what the egg.

Mahou Shoujo Site is yet another dark magical girl series. Difference: no transformation, just plain ol’ high school girls killing each other amid impending doom.

This series has an excellent premise and aesthetics. Each magical girl gets their own stick from the Mahou Shoujo Site, which have different abilities, and their lifespan is converted to magical energy for the stick. So, the more they use the sticks, the lesser time they have to live. These girls are monitored by ‘Site Admins’ and I can’t say more because that’s spoilers. The Site counts down to an event called ‘Tempest’ represented by sperms fertilizing a… something.

Characters

Aya’s brother is a piece of shit. The end.

Just kidding, these people have got to be the most tragic group of magical girls I’ve seen (that including those from Ikusei Keikaku) There are so many badass and likeable characters, and they’ve got their motive and backstories and stuff. Even those that seem like were there just to expand the cast ended up being good characters. Down side is that I felt the characters weren’t treated fairly by many of the writing decisions in the story.

Story

To say the least, it was so depressing. MHS is about Aya, who’s abused by her brother and bullied at school in horrible ways, but in the end, Aya is still a nice, selfless girl.

MHS started out solid. Solid characters, solid conflict, solid mystery. I was dying to know what the hell Tempest was. It was the signature suspense that this author is good at. However, it dropped somewhere in the middle, where the story felt like it’s starting to drag itself out. Same issue as this author’s other series.

The late chapters of MHS just had me constantly going WTF because of… a lot of things. There are many inconsistencies (ex. with the issue of Kiyoharu’s gender, the plot only counts her as a girl only when it wants her to be). There’s time travel and alternate realities and all those fun stuff that aren’t actually so fun. I understand that this series is a spinoff of Mahou Shoujo of the End, but you just can’t jump right into the parent story and have the characters appear as cameos out of literally nowhere… I had to sit down and explain the whole plot of Mahou Shoujo OTE to my friend, who’s a MHS fan, who was genuinely disappointed by the ending.

I felt like many aspects of the plot are just there for ‘shock’ and weren’t necessary aside from that. Shock! Out of nowhere! Okay, let’s move on to more horrible things.

Overall

I don’t know how to feel about this series. I loved it when I started out, and my love died out somewhere in between when the plot started getting too long and messy.

The manga itself is quite good for a large portion of its run, but due to horrible writing decisions, crashed badly in the latter portions. How misfortunate. Fukou da ne.