thewiru's Blog

October 17th, 2025

Is the 20th most popular anime in a season "inoffensive"?

Anime Relations: Mikadono Sanshimai wa Angai, Choroi., Rock wa Lady no Tashinami deshite, Akujiki Reijou to Kyouketsu Koushaku

There's a certain irony over the term "inoffensive" in that the term itself IS offensive. You only ever see it used when referring to things that one would expect to be offensive (That being a compliment), therefore calling such things "failures".
One of such things happens to be art, which helps understand why the only time in history you had a country whose government was fully run by artists, it ended up being the Nazi regime.

Jokes aside, there is some merit in this: The term "inoffensive art" probably brings to mind one with high studio interference, one made to follow trends, be repetitive, try to appeal to everyone (And in doing so appealing deeply to no one). Food without taste, art that is forgettable. "Inoffensive" not because it was expected to offend someone, but because it declawed itself to avoid the risk that it might by accident — and by doing so, also declawed it's own potential.

I had this idea after writing my Is watching the 20th most popular anime of a season basically "living off-grid"? thread. First we should examine another possibility: What if them "not offending" anyone comes not from their content, but rather from simply not being in a "culture war context"?

First things first, what is a "culture war context"?
This is something I've been thinking ever since writing Accidental progressivism in anime?, and that I've reflecting much ever since. To simplify the concept, it's when a piece of art isn't made in order to please a certain group, but rather to displease another, and have the initial group be pleased in the displeasement of the other. Similar to how certain ants wont bring food to their nests in order to eat it, but rather to eat the fungi that grows out of it.
The example I like to use, and that also illustrates the "chicken-or-egg" logic that it follows, pertains to sexualization: Sex-negative feminists see female sexualization as a form of "humiliation ritual" and assume that men get off not the the sexualization, but to the humiliation. Therefore, they invent hogwash such as the "Hawkeye Initiative" which think that the "humiliation" is a core part of it and make "sexualized men" art whose purpose isn't to please a female audience that will flick their beans to it, but rather to "humiliate man back".
If you're on MAL, however, you likely know about the bishounen genre and know that it works outside such "culture war logic": People who make it and consume it don't do it "to offend men", but rather do it because they actively enjoy the thing itself.

A lot of western popular media has some level of "culture war logic" to it, and I do honestly think that some part of the people who complain about "politics in media" honestly (Not out of grift), are less complaining about politics and more complaining about "culture war logic" — it's very possible to a piece of media to be head-to-toe into "culture war logic", but have very little in terms of actual politics.

So is that it? Is there no drama surrounding those simply because they weren't made to "try to own" another group, but rather to please their own fanbases?
Yes and No, that leads us to out second possibility, because while that does explain a large part of it, nothing prevents such works of being interpreted as "attacks", and therefore treated as such. That means that we should analyze if such works even have something that could be misinterpreted as an attack, of if they're genetic engineered cats that never even grew claws to being with.

I just happened to have watched the 20th most popular season in the last three seasons, but as Akujiki Reijou to Kyouketsu Koushaku is still in it's early episodes, I'll refrain from talking about it, which leaves us with Rock wa Lady no Tashinami deshite and Mikadono Sanshimai wa Angai Choroi.

Regarding the former, I disagree that "it has no content": It's an anime about performativity.
Our protagonist "performs" being a high-class lady, but in the end we learn that there are only two types of "high-class ladies": Those who are that way due to being sheltered and, therefore, ignorant, and those who perform.
The encounter of our protagonist with Takayanagi Yayoi puts a whole spin in the phrase "Rap is like a mountain: It's mostly black, but it's white on top": Now "High-class ladies are mostly naturals, but performatives on top". Yayoi doesn't pearl-clutch over Lilisa's hobby, as much as she see's her as a child that still haven't grown to the adulthood to which she will have to perform being a trophy wife. At the top, people know that being a high-class lady is a lie: She knows she received her title due to her family's donation, the director knows it, but both also know to live the lie that it was for something else.
Lilisa performs being a "top-class high-class lady" — a copy of a copy, a lie of a lie — while Tina performs being a prince because "it's what's expected of her". Rock wa Lady is an anime that takes this feeling of "anger", of knowing that everything is a fiction to justify power relations, and turns this anger in the form of self-expression via rock music, but not ANY rock music, the type of rock music they play for themselves even if everyone else hates it, the opposite of how they live their lives as high-class ladies.

The story doesn't come out of anywhere: In fact, it draws parallels to Japan in it's post-war decades where things such as arranged-marriages and similar traditions were starting to decline, all the while you had counter-culture movements from female groups about fighting back against such antiquated expectations pressed upon them, and from those came things that ranged from bubbly calligraphy to female biker-gangs.
Plot-wise it is probably seen as "inoffensive" in the west due to relating to a very Japanese development of things that was different from our own. In the visual department, much offensiveness could come from the fact that we're constantly using lesbian BDSM imagery... but, honestly, at this day and age those things just offend the most pear-clutching at all, and the issue with that is that they're also getting offended over 500 different things, so you can't expect them to give you attention unless you reach the biggest numbers.

Something closer to home would've been Mikadono Sanshimai wa Angai Choroi, a large part of it being based on the concept of gender: Both in a meta way for it being a romance series for boys, but in a western context it likely wouldn't have been interpreted that way (See How would you explain "Romance for a male audience" to a western (Mostly American) audience?), and also by directly addressing it.
We have a girly male protagonist whose talents (Which aren't recognized as such by the world) are all relating to being a house-husband, and two of the girl love-interests whose conflicts are about gender — both coming from opposite ends, but arriving at the same conclusion: Niko's being one of being forced into the box of a "tomboy" and not being able to express her girly side due to what is expected of her, and ultimately solving that by understanding that humans are complicated and that you don't need to fall into such strict boxes. Kazuki, meanwhile, being a natural "prince" character that starts doubting her value as a girl when she doesn't feel competent to express girlishness even when expected of her (Which is also ultimately solved by understanding that humans are complicated and that you don't need to fall into such strict boxes).

Well, that feels like it could draw some controversy... so why didn't it?
I'm a fan of some (Though not all) arguments presented in a video called All Art Is (Not) Political: Why Conservatives Are Bad at Criticism and Getting Over Children's Media, which makes the point that in "attention economics", it makes less sense to attack stronger versions of an argument in more niche media, and instead go for the watered down versions in blockbusters, which naturally bring more attention and views, at the cost of depth of discussion.
Simply put, the person that goes out of their way to watch anime beyond it's most surface-level names is already, by definition, distancing themselves from the planes were discourse and drama and economically incentivized to exists. They're distancing themselves from both the eggs and the chickens.
Anime isn't mainstream, it isn't near things such as video-games or Hollywood movies in that regard, so it's only expected that it is nowhere near the level of drama that such places have.
It's not that they're the 20th most popular anime of the season because they have no discourse/drama (Kaifuku Jutsushi no Yarinaoshi was barely the top 10 of it's season, but when comparing it's stats to the 9th and 11th placements, it simply exchanged it's "Plan to Watch" numbers to "Dropped" ones) , but rather that they have no discourse/drama BECAUSE they're the 20th most popular anime in a season (A niche within a niche within a niche).

September 14th, 2025

On the Tourist Question

Anime Relations: Sousou no Frieren

I have am ambivalent relationship with the term "Tourist".
In one hand it has become a buzzword to mostly RW culture warriors (Some who are likely tourists themselves) as a form of Neo-McCarthyism, which in turn make a lot of discussions very hard to have lest you wanna get accused of being one...
...and in the other hand, it's such an useful term that describes a certain phenomena that I always end up "deriving it" by accident.

For those out of the loop, "tourist" means the same as "poser", but with some extra nuance. It comes from an analogy with certain types of gentrification: Just like literal tourists expressing their complaints about the places they're visiting and demanding changes, even though they've mostly only experienced a small and very shallow part of that place, and wouldn't be negatively affected by such changes, compared to the native people's of that land.

A small problem with that analogy is that it leads some (Specifically some of the aforementioned culture warriors) to take it a bit literally and say that certain (Usually pretty dumb) criticisms are "attacks on Japanese culture".
I think it's very important for me to clarify here: "Otaku culture" isn't the same thing as "Japanese culture". Otaku culture is a sub-culture which you could say, at many times, was at odds with Japanese culture. You may take this as a "negative" (I personally take it as a positive), but my point is that the "nationalistic" approach to this is wrong: Tezuka didn't support counter-cultural movements to oppose the US government, but to oppose the Japanese one. Likewise, it wasn't American PTA's Nagai Go was fighting against, but Japanese ones.

But why did it come to popularity in the later years? I feel that to explain that one must first talk about the western community in the late-90's and early 2000's:
You could say that anime was "mainstream" back there, with people watching on TV, though many not even knowing it was anime. There would also be other community, those who would rent/buy OVA's that would come with the option of watching it with the original audio, and later people who would just straight up pirate anime on the internet.
By doing so, not only they would HAVE to watch anime subbed, but they would be exposed to watch the Japanese fan community was actually liking and watching, instead of only what was filtered to the western market.
Such "filter removal" had it's consequences: You had the "manime vs moe" wars, which the former side was apparently surprised that what was on Toonami wasn't representative of what Japanese otaku liked, and eventually lost.
You also had the popular in the popular at the time discourse of "Anime used to be better", which was usually them comparing cherrypicked anime from a 10 year period and comparing to the unfiltered list of the current year anime.

The point is: Those communities became divides, having no contact with one another, and with time the "TV community" died in terms of relevance.
I won't say that the age which preceded this was perfect, but if to say "I am A" is the same as saying "I am not not-A", you could say that the community developed a certain identity around the denial of certain groups and types of people that they disliked, behaviors they disliked, and would find in anime and it's community a "natural fortress" that "filtered people in" and "would make certain people not want to get in". Hence why to this day you see the prevalence of the term "gatekeeping", even though it doesn't mean anything other than a buzzword nowadays.

As I wrote in Is "being an otaku" more about the mentality, watching a lot of anime rather coming as a consequence of that?, there was a certain process of "assimilation" in there: You would get into the community, would find certain things "weird" at first, but with time would see that those "are actually pretty fine".
I don't know why that happened, just that it happened, like someone who does something without knowing the science behind it... which makes it very hard to "replicate at will" when you need it, and that became part of the problem:
The fact of of whether or not you had normalized certain things (The most used examples usually being being OK with anime having incest, loli, shota, fanservice, etc) as an in-group/out-group signaler. The so-called "gatekeeping" would work in the ways of essentially saying "Hey, that's what this community is, so you're either OK with it, or you go make your on", and it just so happened that people who didn't want to make an effort of being a bit more open-minded and/or sincere wouldn't want to make the bigger effort of building their own communities.

This started to change with what people called "the COVID era" (Though realistically it had already started a couple years prior) where people WOULD create those communities, not out of effort, but out of sheer numbers.
Anime stopped being something "you would have to travel to the mountains to learn with the monks living there" and became "extensions of what people were already doing": You wouldn't have people going to anime groups and then making a MAL account, you would have people who already watched TV/Streaming series and had an IMDB account simply use that same account for the anime they watched Dubbed on Netflix.

People essentially felt that their "handcrafted communities" were being diluted in a sea of "superficiality": You wouldn't have those people eventually going deeper into the medium, they lacked the curiosity. They would usually watch certain popular, usually battle-shounen anime for maybe 1-2 years and then dip to another trend.
It was a sort of recreation of that 90's/2000's period, but worse, for while in that first one you would have people with no relation to anime and
hardcore fans, you now had a strange, third group. For that group, anime was "a trend", "an aesthetic", not something they really consumed or got deeper into. It's the "90's filter" TikTok that doesn't look like any 90's anime, it was a dollhouse for some people, with dolls for you to play however you wanted, and if the origin and/or message of those dolls conflicted your play, then you complained.
It wasn't that "the anime community expanded", but rather that other communities started to adopt certain surface aesthetics of anime as their own, and with that merged those with their own previous problems. For them, it didn't matter that a large part of anime and otaku culture came from fetishistic pornography, counter-cultural movement and weirdos with niche interests: If such things put their "social status" in danger, then it should be cut, not caring for the people who built such community over years and that would still be there after they dipped out after two years.

This mostly talked about the more normie and certain left-ish tourism. There's also the right-wing one... which is again an example of "other communities started to adopt certain surface aesthetics of anime as their own, and with that merged those with their own previous problems": Mostly people who already made similar culture war content for movies, series and video-games, a lot of those who """got into anime""" through (Mostly chinese or korean) mobile gacha games and absolutely atrocious posts about Sousou no Frieren.
I don't have much to talk about them, because very few actually get relevant in it for the reason that anime channels in general don't get very big, so it makes way more sense to just have a culture war channel that sometimes posts some anime-adjacent-related culture war stuff.
Usually the ones who get more relevancy were the ones who were previously anime-focused channels which over time pivoted more and more to culture war content: It usually gives more views, so even if they don't consciously notice, they're conditioned into wanting to make more of that and less of simply anime. It's easier to make, and culture war gives a bigger "emotional high". Though for this later group I don't think it would make sense to call them "tourists", as much as I'm not the biggest fan of them.

There's not much to be made about the tourism problem, but there are certain things: Make yourself present, make yourself shine, make yourself be heard.
Just go to places where a lot of tourists are and start sharing higher-level content, start demanding a higher-level there: Post about anime that normies usually don't talk about, post about older ones, not trying to "boast", but acting like it's most normal thing in the world (Because in a good anime community, it should be) in a way that will peer pressure some into wanting to go deeper. Correct people when they're wrong, post exclusively about subs, seiyuu, post fanservice, post loli, post shota, post incest, post eroge, but NOT in a "performative way", not in a "Reddit way", and not "because I ask you to": Do it naturally, do it because you like those things, show the love of an otaku for what they love. Do it side-by-side with other anime posts, because it's all part of the same big thing.

June 21st, 2025

Back-up of my preliminary reviews of Spring 2025

Anime Relations: Teogonia, Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru

June 20th, 2025

Back-up of my Gravion review

Anime Relations: Choujuushin Gravion

Decided to delete it, since it's not only below my standards of quality, watching season 2 disproved many of the assumptions I spent the first paragraphs talking about.

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There's a gap of one year between Gravion ending and it's sequel, Gravion Zwei, being released: Were it a bit shorter, I would be sure that both seasons were planned from the start, and were it a bit longer, I would be sure that they weren't. One year leans slightly more on the latter, though.
Why is this important? In a world where Gravion flopped and didn't receive a second season, this review would be a lot more negative, it would be a review of an incomplete anime which, while somewhat solid, didn't do much at all, a mass of unfulfilled potential.
Luckily, we aren't in such world, therefore Gravion can analyzed as a season of set-up to a second half that will eventually expand on the number of characters and explains it's mysteries.
It can be complained that it leaves WAY TOO MUCH stuff for Zwei to explain to the point that we don't even know our villain in season 1... but if it works, then it works.

Gravion starts VERY strongly with an energetic episode one, whose footage will be used to be the anime's OP. That episode could easily be classified as an "ideal episode", as it somewhat manages to feel like an episode which would normally be at either the middle of a season or a season finale. Were the whole anime at that level of quality, this would've been an easy 9/10.

Gravion follows a "monster of the week" formula but, perhaps due to being twelve episodes long, never feels repetitive at that, and would rather make a fight shorter than sacrifice character moments.
It's characters follow archetypes, which while that would seem like a problem for a lot of people... it's otaku-oriented media, OF COURSE the characters follow archetypes:
Toga is a "Max Jenus" archetype (Coincidentally, Max Jenus original voice really sounds like Fukuyama Jun's, who voices him. Though his original seiyuu was Hayami Show, who voices Sandman here).
Eiji is a hot-heated hero with attitude.
Eina is a moe dojikko meganekko maid.
Luna is a pettanko tsundere.
Mizuki is the mature, sexy one.
Leele is the hardest to put in a box... perhaps a dandere?

All of that is to say that Gravion is an anime that isn't there to reinvent the wheel, but rather something for "wheel aficionados" that "know which types of wheels they like": It's a Masami Obari anime, so there will be ecchi and high-actions robots.
It will have a "Char clone", it will follow the "Main Bridge" trope popularized by Yamato (Though here it is closer to Macross). Speaking of Macross, it was a great idea to not make Eiji the "center of all", rather making Toga take that function (Once again, Max Jenus in Macross) while Eiji takes the function of "an outsider" (Both literally and metaphorically) in order to introduce us to that futuristic setting.

Perhaps an issue with it would be that season 2 makes it clear how limited the scope of season 1 was, and some episodes do have some rather inconsistent art/animation... but honestly? Who cares, you have fucking JAM Project playing.

My inspirational anime hero

Anime Relations: Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha

Comment originally posted on Your inspirational anime hero?
Since there's no good/consistent way to find previous posts of yours on MAL, this was one I thought worth of being backed-up.

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Takamachi Nanoha is my image of an ideal hero, right next to Tachibana Hibiki.

Both have the aspect of always trying to talk things out and hear what the other side has to say before resorting to violence.
Granted, Nanoha is better written in that regard, where villains are given a plausible reason to deny her help at first instead of being like Senki Zesshou Symphogear G where it's just "IDK, you give me some hypocritical vibes or something".

Nanoha is a character which doesn't like to use violence, she suffers upon having to do so, that's why she only does it when she feels that the violence will help the person she's using violence against, this comes ever since her childhood where she fought Suzuka to help her learn empathy, or also the whole plot of the first season, where initially she's collecting the Jewel Seeds to help Yuuno, but then starts doing it out of a sense of duty and responsibility to help others, since she has the power to do so. Eventually, her fights with Fate have nothing to do with them, being rather a way to teach Fate that she can rely on and trust other people, that Nanoha is strong enough to help her.

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Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha: Detonation also brings the angle that much of Nanoha's self-sacrifice comes from a bit of self-hate, which is a bit ironic: Her whole relationship with Fate in season 1 was to teach her to not keep self-sacrificing looking for the approval and validation of others, that this will eventually just hurt the people that actually love you... yet, Nanoha does the same, and it's just in the meantime between Detonation and Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS that she learns her lesson, with StrikerS being the season where she teaches all that to the next generation so it doesn't commit the same mistakes (That one episode with Teana being the prime example).

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I consider "good writing" the fact that Nanoha does so by preventing us redeemable villains that are mostly only there by being victims of their own circumstances.

April 23rd, 2025

Why MahoAko Succeeded

Anime Relations: Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete, Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete 2nd Season

Introduction

"Two years" is a special number: It's the time I learned, years ago, that it takes from an anime to begin being produced from zero and them finally reaching television.
Is this number correct? I don't have the slightest idea (Maybe it was two and a half?), but experience has showed me that it is indeed around this time.
There are exceptions, though: There are certain anime whose success is somewhat guaranteed, so the pre-production of future seasons is already advanced. I'm not talking about split-cour seasons here, but rather of things such as Tensei shitara Slime Datta Ken and Shingeki no Kyojin, whose seasons after the first one seem to work in a similar way as American TV series.

I bring this number because if Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete 2nd Season is aired in either 2026 or early 2027 in the latest, the number has been proved correct, because it's quite likely that it will go through the normal pre-production cycle because it's producers had absolutely no idea it would have made as much success, so highlighting a second season after you sold higher Blu-Ray numbers than fucking Sousou no Frieren is a no-brainer.

Many people must be asking themselves: How, and why did that happen? Unlike Frieren, MahoAko still sits at the 14th place in popularity in it's own season and 11th in score. Does this mean that MAL is a bad way to measure how relevant an anime actually is? Well, yes, but I assume you didn't come here for me to tell you obvious things.
I come here first and foremost as a fan of it to talk about three main points which I feel where responsible for it's success: It's cultural significance, it's ecchi qualities and it's non-ecchi qualities.

It's Cultural Significance

There's a famous Twitter artist which mostly does comedic anime art named Khyle (@khyleri), his bio used to say "Just a normal artist from 10 years ago".
I still think about that bio: What it essentially says it's that everything he draws, for as weird and offensive some people might think, it's essentially what was normal a decade ago, and "a decade ago", in historical terms, is yesterday. Hence, the offense is more in the eye of the beholder rather in the art (Or the artist) itself.
In that sense, MahoAko is "Just a normal anime from 15 years ago".

One of the things that brought mine (And I assume everyone else's) attention to it was it's sense of "shock", on how it was doing things you wouldn't assume an anime nowadays would do, it broke our metrics of "expected": When I watched those clips from the first and second episodes, I just knew that I had to watch it, I was compelled to.
Though it enters my "Trifecta of Shock" together with Ishuzoku Reviewers (Whose existence I nicknamed "Existing despite the universe seemingly not wanting to, in to spite such universe not wanting to") and Heion Sedai no Idaten-tachi (Which is technically the most offensive of the three, almost handcrafted to shock and offend — which makes me to joke that when Oshii Mamoru wanted to make Vlad Love he likely accidentally went to the wrong room and did that instead). Yet, despite that, they are not REALLY made to offend as ends in themselves (OK, maybe Idaten is, just a little bit), they're not there as tools of some sort of culture war, they're there out of love, because they thought someone would really like that, just like anime from 15 years ago was just there out of love and the though someone might like them, and not a culture war.

MahoAko, therefore, is just doing the normal of the Golden Age of Ecchi, this begs us the reflection of why everything else ISN'T doing the normal of 15 years ago. Anime IS weird, it has to, it ought to, being weird is it's normal, no one would be here on MAL if normie programming was enough for us. MahoAko was there "to hold the line", to prevent the proliferation of some weird form of inverse purity-spiraling. If the objective art is to shock — not as an end on itself, but to shake society, bring some questions, bring reflections — then it is not as exaggeration to claim MahoAko as the most artistic anime of the decade: I often comment on how difficult it seems to bring any waves of cultural change to America because the "waves" never form, things just fizzling out after a single small change — The mainstream success of the Flintstones, the Jetsons or the Simpsons never led to a wave of teenage or adult animation in the west, nor did it brought a paradigm shift in that subject, it only did a small change in the form of "OK, animation is for children, EXCEPT if it's a sitcom", and that was it. It's successors might have gone further in the "adulting" of the format, but they all just stuck to the sitcom format, never challenging the most fundamental aspect of it.
Why did I get into this apparent digression? Because it's the same with their view of anime: "OK, OK, we accept your weird action series, BUT NO FURTHER THAN THAT, OK? ARE YOU LISTENING? HEY, STOP, COME BACK HERE, COME BACK HE-".
MahoAko "brought the rats out of their holes", it showed us who's into anime and who's a coward only interest in assumed "clout gains" by appropriating the aesthetic (And yes, I'm mainly talking about the people on TVTropes, screw TVTropes), and it did it all that without gaining a following of racist tourists like Frieren did.

It's Ecchi Qualities

Why does ecchi exists? Why not go straight for hentai instead? There are probably a couple economic explanations for this, but I rather focus on the explanation that ecchi can be sexier than hentai by embodying the spirit of it better than hentai can. It is often told that hentai (And JAV fetishism in general) comes as a way of compensating for it's visual censorship by bringing the appeal elsewhere. In that way, isn't Ecchi the logical next step by foregoing the visual stimulation of explicit sex completely and having to focus even more in the fetish aspect of it? At least, that's what good ecchi was supposed to be.

The reality is that a lot of modern ecchi sucks. I say "modern", but it's been going like that for maybe a decade if not a bit more. For the modern the abstract idea of boobs and a butt (Usually badly drawn) seems to be enough, and I just can't stand that: I complained in the past how you used to have ecchi with characters that indeed seemed to be made of flesh and bones, muscle and sinew, a bit of fat where it mattered... but not today, and that "today" must be from at least early 2018 when I commented that while the uninformed opinion was that things like Killing Bites, with it's drawn abs and back muscles, where ubiquitous, they were really a rarity at the time (And, sadly, still are).

MahoAko isn't "state-of-the-art" in that visual aspect, but it's already above average (Hey, we can see the concavities in Utena's butt), but more than compensates for that in the "conceptual level" with it's fetish material, which brings us to our last subject.

It's Non-Ecchi Qualities

For an ecchi series, it's quite surprising how much of the art of it online is of the characters being either casual or lovey-dovey. MahoAko is an ecchi, but it isn't JUST an ecchi, with it's fanservice scenes often telling us something about our characters, one of my favorite examples being the (Anime original) scene of Kiwi being visited by Venalita when she's about post a photo of her naked online, or her tearing up after an "after-care" with Utena. All those scenes serve to further explore her personality and relationship with others, as someone who's in need to validation and becomes madly in love with the first person she thought brought her a form or true love.
MahoAko is FULL of such things, every character is interesting in their own way and form their own dynamics: Magenta pairs well with Korisu as the former is THE mahou shoujo ideal while the latter is just a kid that doesn't do anything she does out of any sense of malice, but rather of just wanting to play. Sulfur and Kiwi pair well as the former accepts the cynicism of having to play a character to maintain a nice image while the latter, being a villain, has the freedom to just express her (Arguably similar) personality — the "good side" is very exclusive, but the "evil side" has room for all!.
Finally, Azure pairs well with Utena as the former can't have the same cynicism as Sulfur to accept the farce of playing a character (MahoAko really works with the Idol Culture roots of mahou shoujo, after all), yet at the same time can't deal well with the fact that she's an imperfect hero with her own vices (Well, fetishes, in this case), while Utena, with the form of Magia Baiser, uses her own vices as her strength. Honestly, it's easier for me to just quote a thread I made about it at the time:



Though MahoAko currently sits at a 10/10 at the time of writing this blog post, it wasn't always like this: I either initially gave it an 8 or a 9, but with time had to give it a 10/10 after noticing that "Damn, it does have layers to it, huh?". There are also things such as the anime expanding certain things on the manga, having background characters well drawn and with character designs that could've easily have been part of the secondary cast (Shout-out to The Lady at the Fruit and Vegetable Store) (And believe me, that kind of thing is rare in anime), having good and interesting character designs in general or simply having good voice-acting.
All of them were already accounted for in that eight or nine, what brought the ten, what made me realize such layers was... a Twitter post of a scene in the later episodes where Utena, untransformed, spreads Magia Azure's genitalia. My mind "activated" and started reflecting in the implications of the character dynamics in that scene in a way that is closer to poetry than an essay — Once more, it's simpler for me to just quote myself:



Considering that Selector Infected WIXOSS is my favorite anime, giving it a 10/10 was almost automatic after that.

Conclusion

Uhh, watch MahoAko, it's good, I like it quite a lot.