May 14, 2025

A very mediocre magical girl

Catholic school student Meimi Haneoka is Saint Tail, the magician-themed phantom thief magical girl. Guided by the prayers heard by her best friend Seira, a nun, she steals back precious items that were dishonestly taken from their rightful owners. Sworn to capture her is her classmate and crush, Asuka Jr. This one's not deep; it's pretty clearly made on a formula without much thought put in to the nuts and bolts, and even the Catholic setting is nothing but an aesthetic. It's worthwhile as a comfortably predictable show to turn the brain off to, if you like magical girls and can keep your expectations low.

The language in this was more challenging than I was expecting for a shallow, formula-based shoujo anime. A significant portion of screen time each episode is devoted to explaining who the victim is that Saint Tail is helping, what they lost, how they lost it, and why it's precious to them; this exposition section tends to use denser language and less common vocabulary than the rest of the episode, with fewer visual clues to help understand. Even outside of those parts, the average sentence length of the dialogue felt a bit long for what the show is, and the characters do not always enunciate clearly, or they will slur their speech in a way that's hard to match with the subtitles. There are no dialectal or crazy idiosyncratic speech styles, though, and the formula guarantees that there's a high proportion of repeated language from one episode to the next.

I found the story and delivery pretty baffling and infuriating, until I realized that my expectations for a coherent narrative were too high. If you don't go in expecting any internal consistency in the "rules" of the show (is Saint Tail actually magical, or does she just use magic tricks? it changes every episode), if you aren't confused by important details being bullshitted away or simply ignored (what led to Meimi becoming Saint Tail? where did her transformation brooch come from? it's never explained), and if you aren't frustrated by characters regularly doing things that don't make any sense (didn't Asuka Jr already figure out that Meimi is Saint Tail several times now? yes, but he forgets again the next episode) -- then it's good for a low-brain-power watch, and the constant ass-pulls might become a source of humour instead of chagrin. I was able to appreciate that the show has its moments once I adjusted my expectations, but suspension of disbelief was pretty painful for the first several episodes before I understood what I was in for.

Gradings:3
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on March 14, 2025
on March 14, 2025