Gushing over Magical Girls – 01 (First Impressions) – Magical Churl

Hiiragi Utena is an average girl who keeps to herself. Her town is protected by the Tres Magia, a trio of strong, beautiful magical girls. Utena loves them very, very much and wishes she could be them. Someone heard her wish, and decided to make it come true … with a twist.

That someone is the Kyuubey-like Vinalita, who presents Utena with a talisman that switches out her school uni for an extremely risqué get-up complete with star pasties. When she comments that the look doesn’t scream “magical girl”, Vinalita lays it on her: she’s going to be a villain.

When the Tres Magia spot them and think they’re up to no good, Vinalita blackmails Utena with video of her transformation and hands her a crop with which to turn a flower into a monster that binds the magical girls into compromising positions with its tendrils.

Utena admits that watching the girls squirm makes her feel “funny”, but it’s not a feeling she hates. Venalita, not content to let her simply watch, tells her to take an active role, and she does, spanking the girls repeatedly with her crop-like wand.

Venalita believes that Utena’s feelings for magical girls isn’t love, but a twisted delight from watching them suffer, and an even greater delight in administering that suffering. In other words, Venalita believes her to be a pure sadist—the perfect new recruit for the evil organization, Enormita.

Utena wakes up in bed, relieved it was just a dream (albeit one she somewhat enjoyed), only for Venalita to shatter the idea it was a dream. Due to magical interference, Utena doesn’t realize that the Tres Magia are in the same class as her, nor do they recognize her as their torturer.

Haruka, greets Utena warmly at school and and compliments the flowers she tends to; Utena is surprised Haruka even knows her name. Throughout the day Haruka and her comrades Kaoruko (blonde hair) and Sayo (turquoise hair) suffer the lasting effects of their lashing and vow revenge against the evil perpetrator.

They get the rematch they wanted, but it doesn’t go the way they want. Venalita lures them to an abandoned warehouse to fight low-level baddies. Then when Utena shows up, she creates monsters out of mannequins that once again restrain the magical girls.

This time, the mannequins tear away their sleeves and boots and start mercilessly tickling them. The display once again gets Utena’s juices flowing, and she joins in the ticklefest, once again giving in to her darker impulses.

When Sayo breaks free, Utena has to retreat. Back home, she continues to wrestle with the outrageous, previously unthinkable fact that she has tortured the magical girls she loves more than anything not once but twice now, and can’t even deny she enjoyed it.

As a bad guy, I’m sure it’s Venalita’s goal to hone Utena into a more confident villain by steadily flushing away her shame with more close encounters. The OP and ED also indicate she’ll be gaining two villainous comrades, so we’ll eventually see how a 3-on-3 battle will shake out.

Utena definitely engages in objectionable, villainous behavior. At the same time, there’s the question of whether this is who she was always meant to be. Before she met Venalita, she was a loner with no power. Now she’s about to gain friends and has gained lots of power. We’ll see if it ends up being worth it.

Hyakkano – 04 – Three Kisses

Hakari and Karane are introduced to Rentarou’s new girlfriend Shizuka and her unique mode of communication. Rentarou breaks the ice by noting one cute quirk that each of the girls have: Shizuka’s animated feet, Hakari’s finger nomming, and Karane’s hair twirling. Each comment turns each girl bright red, but are uniformly touched by how much he care for them.

There’s some friction when Shizuka learns that Rentarou has already kissed the other girls. When asked if she wants to, she states (though the app) that she’s not quite ready. Of course Rentarou is fine taking things slow while being upfront about only wanting to kiss her if and when she’s ready.

Lunch continues with Hakari and Karane competing to see who can stuff the most lunch into Rentarou’s maw, and they start bickering as usual. When Rentarou sees Shizuka being quiet in the corner, he devises a team-building plan: a game of Old Maid in which the winner of each round gets to tickle the loser.

As you’d expect, all three girls are on board with this plan. Rentarou tickles Karane first, resulting in a much steamier situation that he planned. When it’s the extremely ticklish Hakari’s turn, she has to cut the session short before she “ecsta-pees” (her term, not mine!).

Rentarou, looking forward to hearing Shizuka’s laugh, is instead surprised to find that she laughs silently, and has the app report her hearty laugher. And now that they’ve all been tickled, Hakari and Karane get real serious about beating Rentarou so they can tickle him.

But when Shizuka wins and merely gently pokes Rentarou with one finger, the exercise hits another bump. When Rentarou heads off to the bathroom, Karane calls Shizuka out for holding back on her tickling. Sensing she’s intimidated, Hakari has Shizuka’s back..

When Shizuka apologizes, then admits she was indeed holding back out of fear, Karane is upset…is she really that scary? But Shizuka isn’t scared of Karane, she’s scared of rocking the boat and causing Rentarou to compare them. In any such comparison, Shizuka wrongly believes she wouldn’t compare favorably, going on to descrube Hakari and Karane’s positive attributes.

In response to that, Hakari and Karane both make it clear that Shizuka is cute and has plenty of positive qualities herself. Hakari also makes clear that Rentarou loves them far more than they can imagine. Shizuka doens’t need to hold back, and she can call them by their first names, too.

It turns out Rentarou didn’t go to the bathroom. Instead, he saw the friction between the girls, knew that he shouldn’t be the referee, and stepped back, trusting his soulmates to work things out themselves. That’s precisely what happens, and Shizuka immediately takes her fellow girlfriends’ advise and expresses what she truly wants: to kiss Rentarou.

One he does, Shizuka ends up in a blissful daze, and then it’s Hakari’s turn to be upfront about what she wants, so she kisses Rentarou too. Karane is last as expected, but despite her tsundere-ness she doesn’t want a kiss any less than the other two. The buildup to each kiss is gorgeous in its execution, as Rentarou assures the other two that his love for them hasn’t paled in the slightest now that Shizuka is in the group.

Quite the contrary: Rentarou continues to consider all three to be the cutest girlfriends in the world. He also shows remarkable emotional intelligence for a horny high school kid, knowing that the girls would be better served sorting out their issues, as they did.

Karane was never mad at Shizuka for holding back, she was mad for her. No one should feel like they have to hold back what they truly want to say or do. I left this episode amazed by how well everything is going, how compelling this episode was despite never leaving the school rooftop, and super excited for the addition of yet another soulmate to the mix.