Magical Sempai 4-Episode Test (SFW)
Personally, I found this to be absolutely hilarious and worthy of a posting to r/animenocontext. The subsequent episodes have maintained a continual bout of humor over Sempai and her inability to perform magic tricks successfully, at least in front of people. While again, the ecchi factor comes into play, we end up actually having a bit of a story continue down the line as Sempai realizes that Assistant-kun still has yet to sign up for the Magic Club.
As we follow Sempai dragging Assistant-kun to the teacher’s lounge/communal office to submit his forms, we see her freak out at the sight of one in particular. You can see above its a rather close Big Sister who loves her little sis (Magical Sempai) a tad too much. Funny enough, turns out being an airhead runs in the family as Assistant-kun finds out, still managing to not get wrangled into the Magic Club formally.
When Sempai tries to go about the capture/requisitioning/obtaining of new assistants (read:BIRDS), I couldn’t help but die laughing at this entire bit. For some reason her tenacity to want to succeed in magic was just so endearing and entertaining to me. I couldn’t figure it out before but then it hit me. In addition to reminding me of a mix of Anna from Shimoneta and Hotaru from Dagashi Kashi, she has the foolish confidence and adorable failure habits of Aqua from Konosuba. These adorable moments that make you pity her just clicked for me since I never really pitied Anna nor Hotaru as they were at least useful. Sempai hit that stride and kept on running down that path, leading me to a fun realization as I stopped laughing for a minute on my bed watching this show. Sempai is a pretty damn unique blend of a character, and that really made me pretty optimistic towards continuing to watch the show through the rest of the season.
Turns out, on the note of Aqua, that “Party Tricks” spell she does is actually “Wazuma.” As described above, its one of many types of traditional Japanese magic tricks. Sempai of course fails at all of them. Sempai goes on trying to get past her stage fright with about as much success as you could imagine. Later in the episode Sempai tries to also flex on Assistant-kun by being a hard ass, which he returns in kind but doesn’t have the heart to point out her panties were visible through her unzipped skirt during her performance to him. Pretty sure the jokes about being able to see “everything” were better delivered in Japanese opposed to English in this case but I got the gist of it and let it slide.
Finally, it comes down to the month long anniversary of Assistant-kun “joining” the Magic Club. His reaction is about the same as mine would be as shown above, decrying her annoying demeanor on something fairly minor. After once again announcing he hadn’t signed on, she tries to get him to join and her application for the Magic Club to become a real thing is denied by the teachers due to lack of members. Assistant-kun tries to join other clubs only to be stalked by Sempai at each of them, eventually leading her to show off her insane sprinting abilities. Finally, we have Sempai actually doing magic, but with no one around. Turns out, Assistant-kun joined up with the chemistry club next door, but was only allowed to join in name, so he’ll still be hanging around Sempai, much to her delight.
And so I can say with absolute certainty that Magical Sempai has hit a great stride for me and earned its passing grade with flying colors for this failure of a magician. I know a couple people on the last post and online were talking about the longevity and sustainability of this and I figure if they keep this pace for another 8 episodes it’ll be something I fondly reference and quote every now and then like Aho-Girl but not something that stays like Konosuba or Gintama. Let me know what you think and if this show has earned its place in your watch queue and passed your 3-episode test!
