Do you like boredom? Do you like agony? Do you fancy the sensation of feeling like your soul is being pruned from your lifeless, withered husk of a body? If so, then boy do I have the anime for you! It’s called: Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei. I repeat, Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei. In just 26 episodes, you’ll feel like you were quarantined in your room for a year as all life ceases to shine from your eyes! Call now at 1-800-XXX-XXXX or text “KILL ME” to this number!

What does one go about describing Mahouka? Is it bad decorum to just go “generic OP MC with lifeless harem, wish fulfillment bad” and call it a day? Perhaps, as wish fulfillment isn’t inherently a bad thing. People often come to entertainment mediums to escape, sometimes self-insert into fun stories with likable, memorable protagonists who are about as cool as the scenarios they tackle. They might identify with the characters or be so fascinated by the culture and worldbuilding on display that they wish they were there themselves. Harem shows and isekai are often born out of this idea, even the better ones such as Tenchi Muyo or That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. That begs the question: what about Mahouka, or Irregular at Magic High School, is so bad that it ends up becoming the antithesis of fun?

Well, obviously, your mileage may vary as sometimes people just wanna watch an overpowered badass do overpowered badass things while getting surrounded by beautiful girls. It’s a classic high school power fantasy. The problem with Mahouka is multi-layered but can best be described as “everything working in tandem to make the experience as lifeless as humanly possible”. A show doesn’t need to be deep or emotionally compelling to be entertaining, but it does need a soul. Mahouka does not have a soul. It is devoid of tension, bereft of spectacle, missing even a trace of genuine emotion or humanity. It’s not “just some generic LN high school battle anime”. Chivalry of a Failed Knight is what one would call “just some generic LN high school battle anime”, but it feels like people actually cared about presenting it in a fun, enticing way beyond just looking at the “otaku-pandering checklist”. Mahouka no Koukou Rettousei is just dead and broken. Fossils have more of a pulse than this show.

One does need to start somewhere in order to get into why, so let’s look at the protagonist. Tatsuya Shiba is a lobotomized God. He is about as infallible as protagonists can get. He’s every generic LN protagonist you can think of, but worse. The only “flaw” they decided to give him was that he can’t pass some stupid magic block aptitude test when he is literally invincible and perfect at just about everything otherwise. The dude’s a better hacker than Kirito from Sword Art Online. He knows just about every single combat system under the sun --we'll get to that-- and can pretty much cheese every fight he has with someone outside of a sparring match with his master. The man has nigh-instant regeneration powers, and it’s actually worse than it sounds because of reasons explained in the finale which further elevate OJesus-sama way past the point of Gary Stu status, which he had already achieved in the first half of the show. GodSuya is so good at magitech that not only has he been responsible for the bulk of his society’s and military’s technological and magical development under the pseudonym Taurus Silver since he was 7, but he’s able to look at scientists’ constant failed tests regarding flight magic, and both create and refine the system in an afternoon!

This happens offscreen, and isn’t even the most audacious thing about how holy or infallible he is. The second half of the show somehow one-ups this arguably twice, and it all borders on self-parody.

All of this would be at least somewhat palatable if GodSuya had a fun, vibrant personality to make the viewers root for him. Unfortunately, we live in a cruel, heartless world where all of his emotions except for love for his sister --which is a state of being, not an emotion-- have been sealed off. We don’t get to see what’s inside his head, either. He’s just this almost exclusively stoic badass who’s slightly off on jovial social cues. There’s no other way the audience gets to see his personality in action or really learn what makes him tick. There’s no internal struggle, there’s no interesting personality quirk, there’s just about nothing here. What you see is what you get, and there’s hardly much of a view to take in. When the only sense of flavor your protagonist has is “bitch better cover up” and “huh, my sister is in love with me, oh well, also she should really calm down” something has gone incredibly wrong. He honestly might be one of the worst characters...ever, straight-up.

Speaking of Miyuki, she’s just as insufferable for completely different reasons. She’s a pokemon, not a person. Half of her dialogue is just her screeching “onii-sama” because “I want to fuck my brother” is basically the only noteworthy thing about her aside from her looks and constant apologizing. She is so ungodly annoying, which makes it all the more deflating that she’s the only relevant character even remotely as capable as GodSuya since she effortlessly trounces all of her opponents as well. She also marks the start of his harem as early as the weird shoujo climax-esque first scene of the series premiere.

Other non-harem shows such as Irresponsible Captain Tylor and arguably Code Geass had harems for their main characters, but each girl who fell in love with their respective protagonists each had their own vibrant, distinct, well-defined, and explored personalities. This show does not; what a surprise. Mayumi, Erika, and even some random chick who hacks the school just to get GodSuya to notice him are also participants and while they have their own personality quirks and Erika has her own unrelated subplot, none of them are very likable, interesting, or anything other than bland and dull.

In addition to being bland, some of these characters are unreasonably douchey. Erika’s a dick to her brother for the sake of her subplot, while Hanzo, a member of the student council, really hates GodSuya. Anyone who disagrees with GodSuya is inherently wrong, but in this case, he’s wrong because he’s a bigoted asshole “bloom” aka an upper-class “I have better magic stats” guy while GodSuya is a “weed”, someone who sucked at the block pushing test. That is the general hierarchy of the school and the only real attempt at any thematic confrontation in the anime, or rather, the first arc since that largely goes away by the second half. This is what defines Hanzo for a large chunk of the series and while he does improve, he’s still barely even a character. There’s a large ensemble cast but almost none of the characters matter or have anything interesting to say about them. They’re just sorta...there, at best, with almost no relevance outside of specific moments in the first and third arcs, such as Kirihara. The cast is just that devoid of life, and as a result, there is almost no sense of chemistry in the show. When the best thing that can be said is “hey, some of them are cute and have maybe a few slightly chuckle-worthy interactions” like Kyouko, there’s a real problem here.

You probably don’t even know who half of these people are, even if you’ve seen the show. Be honest.

It doesn’t help that the plots are about as weak as the one-dimensional villains instigating them. Some manipulator who turns out to be a little bitch once GodSuya reaches him, plants the seeds for the proletariat “weeds” to lobby up to make demands of and attempt to uphieve the hierarchy established and cruelly enforced by the bourgeoisie “blooms”, only for them to be painted as the bad guys on blanket terms because they were a little too rough and some terrorists ruined everything. Corporate guys do corporate money-grubbing things in the 2nd arc, and it’s up to Tatsuya to assassinate them following a “battle of the schools” tournament before the military gets involved and things get really crazy in the city for the third arc that makes up the last 4 episodes. There is no sense of transition between these two arcs. Ignoring the appalling implications of the first arc, these storylines barely even mean anything and are just an excuse for characters to endlessly babble about the convoluted magitech and combat systems at their disposal as GodSuya and his sister endlessly make quick work of anyone who opposes them.

Actually, we need to dive a bit deeper into those implications and the worldbuilding of the show because it is frankly RWBY levels of bad, possibly even worse. The first arc is basically how magically adept “blooms” discriminate against “weeds”, and how the school and its student council barely do anything to combat this outside of sending out people to deal with brawls despite the fact that it is in direct violation of school rules. Naturally, “weeds” are fed up with this and try to challenge the system. This is why, even outside of how some of them got utterly punked by some manipulator trying to tear the school apart by inciting a class war, they’re the bad guys who get assisted by terrorists. GodSuya may be a weed, but he is the exception rather than the rule. Blooms disrespecting weeds is wrong, but they need to learn their fucking place and not try to incite a revolution. Class traitor GodSuya over here is the one who the blooms need to treat with respect because he is a powerful and respectable individual who is secretly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined, while the structure can remain the same if blooms aren’t as blatantly dickish to weeds.

Kinda fucked ain’t it? Well, guess what: this might as well work in Mahouka’s world because this conflict is almost never brought up again outside of when people need a reason to be objectively wrong and bad by giving OJesus-sama grief. Nothing is fundamentally changed outside of us not needing to see that kind of systemic conflict since it no longer matters.

What will always matter, though, is the sheer number of combat systems the show never shuts up about. Episode 1 shoves 5 combat systems down our throats with basically no breathing room to explain any of them. There are 3 hand-to-hand fighting styles they don’t really go into explaining and so they’re essentially interchangeable. There’s regular magitech that come in the forms of both the run-of-the-mill school level CAD stuff and highly dangerous non-military magic,, military magitech, regular military equipment for its own kind of combat, and giant robots. Good luck figuring out how a lot of these work for a while, especially when everything except for regular military equipment and giant robots are thrown in during the 2nd half to turn 5 systems into 7. Obviously, magic systems are going to be intricate and complex a lot of the time, and whenever super cool and highly specific techniques are thrown into the mix, they’ll often still fall under the umbrella of a primary combat system that require an explanation the first time before they just become standard usage. Look at most shounens like Naruto, Fairy Tail, etc. Even RWBY, which eventually has a lot thrown at you with almost none of it making any sense or being consistent, at least allows you to really get to know a lot of the basic mechanics before it starts breaking them or introducing new ones.

Mahouka does not do any of this. You don’t have room to breathe in the first episode, and a lot of the more broad explanations of the mechanics come later. This hurts worse than you think, and that’s not just because there’s so much you need to keep up with at once lest you just tune all of it out altogether. It’s also because they KNOW this is too much to process, and will spend every single solitary episode sitting you down for lengthy exposition dumps of what just happened, how each magitech device such as CADs are supposed to work, and what each and every technique does and how they work. This is all done in excruciating detail, and can take anywhere from 2 to what feels like 10 minutes. Pacing is utterly glacial as a result, as more time is spent talking about and breaking down the fight scenes than actually showing us the fights! By the second half, the act of watching a cavalcade of cardboard cutouts freeze up and suffocate the viewer with exposition dump after exposition dump with each and every episode, without fail, becomes nothing short of maddening! This right here, more than the nightmarish protagonist, more than the repugnant messaging and implications, more than the broken and inconsistent worldbuilding and narrative writing, is what makes this anime an absolute nightmare to watch! It isn’t just outrageous to the point of inducing anger or being offensive, it’s simultaneously boring enough to drain one’s life force until they wonder if they’re even conscious before they start screaming in existential terror!

There’s no point in bringing up dead and unearned emotional climaxes. There’s no point in detailing how some students can do magic on their own despite the show establishing you need the use of CADs to do it. Some CADs can be gauntlet things, while others can be magic guns, which makes it really weird that they can be used in duels where “no weapons are allowed” like in the second episode. They’re more minor issues compared to the sheer level of indigestibility the pacing, character writing, and exposition dumps all have. That said, these issues could still bug you whenever they come up...assuming you can pay attention to any of these without your eyes glazing over as they beg for mercy.

Yeah, the show looks like shit, too. The artwork isn’t the problem here. The art style is fairly plain for LN adaptations, and it at least has some intricate detail regarding people’s hair. The animation, while being passable at best during the action scenes, isn’t the big issue, either. It would still be a relatively lukewarm production on its own merits, but what utterly tanks it is how blinding everything is. The uniforms are probably the tackiest, gaudiest pieces of clothing ever, with the peppermint greens and whites being so bright that they hurt to look at. Moreover, the lighting in the show is some of the most oversaturated one may have the misfortune of coming across. The backgrounds and environments are as plain as they can get while being irritably blurry to boot, so they heavily clash with and do not justify such blinding lighting. Sure, it makes the magic look more “magical”, shiny, and flashy, but they’re still eye-searing.

At least in No Game No Life --another 2014 MADHOUSE show--, the colors are generally vibrant, varied, and saturated enough for the lighting to feel at home, even if that show is visually very busy and another example of an anime where you might need to squint at while watching. Here, it makes no sense. We’re forced to shield our eyes because the director, Manabu Ono, really lights ultra bright colors. Just look at shows he’s made since this one such as both seasons of The Asterisk War or Sword Art Online: Alicization. His aesthetic is bright and sunny, with eye-popping colors. As blinding as The Asterisk War can be, and even though the colors in SAO Alicization are a bit much, they at least make more sense regarding their aesthetics than this show does! It’s an aesthetic mismatch that utterly kills to look at.

The show isn’t just a visual nightmare either. This form of sensory torture is also an auditory endurance test. To be fair, this is not the fault of the OPs or EDs. The OPs are both actually quite good. The first one, “Rising Hope” by LiSA is a quality J-rock banger with more personality than the rest of the show could ever hope to muster, even if it does cut off weirdly. OP 2, “Grilletto” by GARNiDELIA, is even better and grander, even if the climactic breakdown at the end is very ill-fitting for the show itself and the lifeless still image of the main siblings sleeping on grass together.

The real kicker here is the OST. Taku Iwasaki is not a bad composer by any means. His work on Akame ga Kill and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are proof enough of that, and apparently there are still decent pieces here. Good luck finding them however with how badly the OST for this show is implemented. Half of the tracks are extremely ill-fitting for the myriad of exposition dumps, in particular. Incredibly pleasant, almost peppy music during dumps, and weirdly dramatic music during the scenes get played a lot, too, when we’re just being briefed on whatever magic is going on this time in a certain fight scene or what have you. The flavor of techno he went with is also very gaudy here, and it plays constantly. However, the worst has to be this one track that plays during several scenes in the second arc where characters are just standing and talking. There’s this one incredibly high-pitched beeping noise that plays over a very dull, otherwise barely audible background track. It’s such an obnoxious sound in its own right, especially when it goes through a cycle every 3-4 seconds that never changes. However, when combined with how agonizingly dull the scenes it gets played in are, and for how many episodes this plays, that particular beeping sequence becomes a form of mental and auditory torture that has been embedded into my memory, and it can still be heard while this very paragraph is being typed. It’s a fucking trauma! Do you see how one can be led to absolute madness when viewing this piece of shit?!

Let’s be clear, here. You are absolutely allowed to like this show. Absolutely no one has the power, let alone the right to directly take that away from you. Overpowered protagonists in power fantasy scenarios resonate with teenagers for a reason, and escapism is perfectly fine. If you like this show, then it might be the equivalent of a water park or amusement park for you. Sure, you have to do a lot of standing and waiting around, and that can be incredibly boring unless you’re into that sort of thing and like to process everything. However, the rides, or in this case, GodSuya no-selling people and being perfect, is what tends to leave the biggest impression. Sure, I’d never self-insert into this since it’s not even like the characters would be fun to interact with. However, some people just wanna be a cool guy surrounded by cute and pretty girls as he gets proven right all the time as everyone grows to care about him. That’s ok.

It’s just that one would hope there was some semblance of a soul to go along with that fantasy. Neither that, nor any semblance of decent writing is present in Mahouka, and that’s why it’s so much worse than most other seemingly generic or broken LN adaptations and school battle harem shows can be. The show has nary a hint of humanity, and in its place lies a mix of soul-sucking boredom and headache-inducing rage. Very few shows embody both of those extremes, even on an audiovisual level, so at least there’s that to help this show stand out. Whether that's something to be proud of...now that's something to think about.