Tanahashi Mayuri is a lonely college student who, while she’s not an otaku, has fond memories of the shows her deceased, anime director father made. She ends up with his old computer one day and Tanahashi is excited to see all kinds of production material related to one of his titles, “Pretty Angel Nirvana,” and she wishes that she had someone like the main character Nirbrave as her friend. Suddenly, Pretty Angel Nirbrave herself pops out of the computer and Tanahashi finds herself with an unwanted roommate, a lot more living expenses, and a much more tiring lifestyle.
It’s easy to tell from the title alone that Unmagical Girl is going to be closer to a parody of magical girl series rather than a straight send-up. However, I was not expecting the series to be quite as meanspirited as it was. The story seems to derive gleeful joy from mocking just about everything in the series. The characters are, of course, picked apart, from Nirbrave’s weird, “as it was written in the script” quirks to the way the “real” people in the story are composed almost entirely out of cliches, and this includes many many digs at the in-story staff of “Pretty Angel Nirvana.”
But the story also seems to meanly tease real-world fans of magical girl series, the series comments on how people tend to forget about older franchises when newer ones come out, that they often have weird fanbases, etc. Frankly, Unmagical Girl doesn’t seem to have a single nice thing to say about either “Pretty Angel Nirvana” or the actual magical girl series it draws its inspiration from (including a bizarre comment in the author notes where they admit that the Precure franchise was the major inspiration for Unmagical Girl, but then say that Precure is not actually a magical girl series). The pettiness in each chapter becomes exhausting rather quickly.
It’s hard to convey this tone through single images, in that respect Unmagical Girl reminds me a bit of Neo Yokio. Both of those series come off as pretty amusing when a single screenshot or panel is shared out of context but, in context, that funny panel you saw on twitter where a character laments that they’re talking about politics with a magical girl just comes off as whiny. The story also becomes repetitive incredibly quickly, far more quickly I think than the creators intended. Honestly, that sums up the story succinctly: Ryuichi Yokoyama and Manmaru Kamitsuki think that they have a really cool, different story on their hands when it’s actually a rather unoriginal, petty, and frankly dull series.
In this day and age, the English-speaking manga reader has quite a few series at their disposal if they want to read a magical girl series that isn’t a straight send-up of the genre. Seven Seas alone is already publishing a handful of other, non-traditional magical girl stories and by the end of this first volume I was thinking that I’d much rather use my time to give one of those series a shot instead of continuing to slog through this one.