This Week in Anime

Remember Magic High School Anime?

Chris
They say trends are cyclical, and it seems like we already can't go more than a few years before another attempt at a Harry Potter something-or-other tries to re-enter the pop culture zeitgeist. So maybe it was inevitable that anime would also reach back into the wizarding world.

And hey, I'm at least more inclined to check out new projects like these as opposed to anything Jowling Kowling Rowling has touched.

The ancient past of the mid-2010s, when the protagonists were overpowered, the uniforms were impractical, and the redheads were fiery.

Going back through those old Preview Guides helps get a sense of how these things were the overdone isekai of their day. The previous generation of ANN reviewers' grievances discussing series like Chivalry of a Failed Knight ring almost the same as our gripes about Am I Actually the Strongest? today.

Despite the more subdued ubiquity, what made this trend feel so noticeably inescapable was how whole character concepts and plot points would be cribbed between them. I was fascinated to discover that the opening scene between the two shows was already done over a year earlier by another show, Blade Dance of the Elementalers!

Also, the undressing girl is his best friend, who he thinks is a guy for reasons I don't remember because why on God's green Earth would anyone remember anything about Hundred?

It's a very odd instance of bygone tropes that follow up on my questions about anyone who picks a random isekai to watch as their first experience with the genre. Watch just one of these, like The Asterisk War, and it seems like a novel story with some cool aesthetics and neat magic fights if you're lucky. But then you throw on Failed Knight, Absolute Duo, and Elementalers, and you very quickly see how these would all begin to run together.

Honestly, my second favorite thing about Absolute Duo is the uniforms and the hilarious disparity in design flourishes between the guys' and girls'.

One was designed to catch otaku eyes on the cover of a light novel, and the other was an afterthought.

Hey, they tell you up-front in the title there that the guy's a bastard.

I know that Bastard Magical InstructorL was one of the last we got during the heyday. So maybe it's instructional that the way to kill off isekai will be to have a series with costume design so atrocious it's the only thing anyone remembers about it.

Even the powers that be organizing them can't help but lump them in with each other. That's my first favorite thing about Absolute Duo: It came up for me, otherwise completely unprompted and unconnected, when I searched for The Irregular at Magic High School on Crunchyroll.

It's fair to say that Mahouka is what Sword Art Online is for this particular genre for the VRMMO and isekai trends: Not necessarily the first, but absolutely the most foundationally visible and persistent. Despite the original hailing from a different era of trends, it's still getting follow-ups and spin-offs.

That makes for a small wonder that this all burned itself out before we hit 2020. Isekai can play it simple, safe, and repetitive too much of the time, but the frustration usually comes on account of how basic a lot of them are in their framework and fantasy. So many of these magic high school shows had to operate on recreating extremely specific beats. And like origin stories in superhero movies, you can only repeat things so many times before even the most dedicated audience grows tired of it.

Honestly, it's funny to think that while recent darling Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury was mostly pulling influence from Utena for its dueling high schoolers, that setup technically lands it around this bygone genre as well, especially given how many of these things went with a more technological style for their spellcasting.

That's another thing, of course, that even as magic schools as an independent genre took a backseat, they still were folded into current isekai iterations. Shows like Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! and The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist In Another World both feature magical academies in their stories in some way. Also, both were as memorable as something like Sky Wizards Academy.

The interesting thing about magic schools returning, somehow, is that the current slate seems less beholden to the rigid tropes that defined their forbearers. Of the two airing this season, Classroom For Heroes feels the closest to that old style, with its fire-empowered redhead princess and her tsundere reactions to our underestimatable overpowered main character.

It is also, pointedly, the one no one is talking about.

Looking at the group shots of characters, you see an absolute grab-bag of designs, like a gacha game pool weighed down by too many dissonant guest stars.

You think that'd be an easy choice, given that they're chasing past trends so far and so shamelessly that they even throw in a Rei Ayanami clone. In an anime in 2023!

The failure of Classroom For Heroes to have any impact might be the clearest indicator of how this style of magic school anime is irrelevant. Though it's not like innovation or a lack of imitation is the only other direction to go, given that the more successful magic school anime this season is a way more singular, wholesale riff on well-known existing material.

You joke, but Mashle stands out along with Reign of the Seven Spellblades for how they share a purpose. Mashle is more bitingly parodic about it, while Spellblades is drier with its satire. Still, both of them are borrowing this specific style of magic academy with the desire to take the piss out of Harry Potter.

Spellblades has places where it whiffs its opportunity for more barbed take-downs of Potter stuff. Like they let not-Hermione bring over her entire "advocating for the rights of magical creatures" plot, but then wrap it with a confrontation with a maybe-misguided "extremist" proponent of those rights before just pivoting away from it so we can instead focus on our main character dropping his big plot-twist reveal.

To be fair, said samurai girlfriend is pretty cool.

Oliver himself feels the most like an element of those 2010s magic school shows we talked about, being an overpowered lead with a dark secret following up on investigating a departed relative. But at least he innovates by walking in on the female lead naked and not having her get indignant with him.

Oh, right, there is also dueling! In this case, it also comes off as a component of some of the more effective commentary Spellblades has out for Potter. These wizards use a blade-based fighting style because they understand that sufficiently fast melee fighters would quickly dispatch spellcasters before they could get an incantation off. And the underground duels and the faculty's lax moderation of them speak to the same sort of point Mashle makes: that a wizarding world ruled by magical aptitude would be a corrupt, elitist hellscape.

To balance things out, they also have a wide-reaching and very supportive Student LGBTQ+ Alliance.

It's a bit that marks it far beyond the attitudes we might expect from its 2010 anime influences, even alongside all its other more typical, edgelord tendencies. Stuff like this and some solid setting commentary are why I mostly enjoy following Spellblades, even with some of its plot trail-offs and tendency to forget about characters who aren't Oliver.

For all that we talk about magic schools making their way back as components of isekai anime, it's telling that one of the better modern takes pulled it off just by moving its main character into a school after spending an entire first season developing her and its world.

Appropriately, this goes back to the oft-articulated point about how better isekai stories could be made: Tell a story that's good on its own, as opposed to straining to hit all the popularized signifiers of "isekai" or "magic school."

However, it is only a little funny that your favorite example of this setting still has a redhead as its female focal point. At least Chise gets advice to let her handle any would-be main character who might try to walk in on her changing.

This rise and fall and marginal re-rise also serve as a remedial lesson for whatever's the current top-of-the-trend heap. Nothing lasts forever, and My Unique Skill Makes Me OP may seem notable or entertaining to those enjoying the genre now. Still, it only takes a few years of burnout and drop-off before it feels as interchangeably forgotten as Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle.