The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2

Mash and his friends have successfully defeated Abel and driven off the mysterious dark magician pulling his strings. Yet that victory came at the cost of revealing Mash's total lack of magic. With rumors swirling, Mash finds himself the target of both the Divine Visionaries and Innocent Zero – a dark magic sect who wishes to claim him for their own mysterious ends. To survive these dual threats, Mash will need to steel his determination, eat plenty of cream puffs, and never skip leg day if he hopes to conquer the world of magic with his muscles.

Mashle: Magic and Muscles Season 2 is based on a manga of the same name by Hajime Kōmoto. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

First things first, let me say that getting Creepy Nuts for this new season's opening was the perfect choice. Their playful yet laid-back sound is an exact match for Mashle at its best, and I'm going to be humming "Bling-bang-bong-born" under my breath all day now.

As for the rest of this premiere, it's pretty much what you'd expect from Mashle if you've made it this far into the series. There are some decently funny jokes that perhaps get used a few too many times. There's a whole host of snooty new wizards with wacky designs to call Mash a piece of crap for the crime of not having a line on his face. There are a bunch of visual gags where Mash uses his absurd strength to force the entire world to operate on Looney Tunes physics. Mashle is nothing if not consistent, and if you were already charmed by the crazy personalities of the cast and Mash's deadpan delivery, then this will suit you just fine.

As somebody who's always enjoyed Mashle but never really loved it, the only real switch-up is how the tone and content of those snooty wizards has changed. Before now, every enemy Mash faced was a stuck-up teenager touting their strength, capped off with Abel's Nietzchian worldview. Now, Mash isn't dealing with arrogant kids trying to prove his power, but an authoritarian government trying to snuff out a threat to their hegemonic order. On a meta-level, it's darkly funny that Orter Madl is almost a dead ringer for that other scar-faced wizard, and he's the one spouting diatribes about violently maintaining a toxic and suppressive status quo. In-universe, it's still a biting statement about the nature of social hierarchies and the mentality of those that most devoutly enforce them. Combined with another character's speech about how all that ultimately matters is swaying the majority opinion, some blunt but engaging ideas are in play in the background here.

Not that I expect the show will do too much with that, besides having Mash eventually punch Parry Trotter in his bespectacled face, thus proving that with enough orange juice and squat thrusts, we can all overthrow authoritarian rule. Mashle is, first and foremost, an action-comedy, but if it can dip its toes into more complex themes than "smug dude gets decked in the schnoz," I certainly wouldn't complain. Either way, that OP isn't leaving my head anytime soon, so I'll still be back for more.

If there was any worry that getting a second season to continue all its increasing intersecting storylines might swerve Mashle into taking-itself-too-seriously territory, those fears are put to bed quickly in this premiere. Mash's magic-less secret is out and forms the backbone of this episode. But any real threat to the school life he's cultivated up to now is tempered by the show's continued overall irreverence and the fact that Mash himself only fully comprehends about 50% of what's going on at any given moment. He's still a very good boy, though.

There aren't so many direct, punch-line-based jokey-jokes in this premiere. Instead, the general goofy ambiance of the main characters' interactions, backed by the overall tonal irreverence and hip-hop background music beats, creates an amusing atmosphere. This is a show that can get away with the dead-simple gag of Abyss spilling his dramatic-motivation guts about him and his boyfriend reforming this wizarding world, only for Mash to blithely agree to assist with a quick "'kay" said through a mouthful of cream puff. It's an atmosphere that works by riffing how Harry Potter, and others like it, tend to be so damn self-important about their setting.

It's nice to see Finn more ingratiated as part of Mash's friend group after Dot and Lemon seemed to get on with our muscle-headed hero properly by the end of the last season. And Dot gets fully body-bandaged up to confirm that he's the Roronoa Zoro of this show, so that's good for a chuckle. Mash's ability to power through everything means the threat can't be taken all that seriously. In this episode, he barehand yanks a mana parasite out of someone and ties it into a balloon animal with his tongue. They know why we're here.

Mashle is still a shonen battle series at its heart, and shonen contractual obligations are where things drag for this episode. Bunches of new characters and the factions and sub-squads they're part of are thrown at the viewer. Between more Divine Visionaries, a magical security force, and Innocent Zero, a magic-world crime syndicate, it's frontloading threats that it doesn't need to since the main appeal will always be watching Mash flex through them. Also, the overt narration of what's on screen undercuts the anime's simple physical comedy. It all contributes to an episode that feels just a bit longer than it actually is before the end.

That was always par for the course with Mashle, though, so technically, the anime hasn't missed a beat in coming back. Its dry, irreverent approach to its genre probably isn't for everyone. But there's enough going on as its story escalates that it doesn't feel like it's still getting by on One Joke. There's still heart and some solid commentary on what it's doing. In this episode, Mash asks, "What if things didn't always have to be perfect?" That's a noble enough awareness of one's station. Not everything has to always be some calculated, clever, satirical take-down. Sometimes, it is enough to watch a nice dude hit things really, really hard.

Mashle is back with a new season and casually strolling with one banger of a new opening number as "Bling Bling Bang" is a certified bop, and proof that you can never really go wrong with Creepy Nuts. Where we last left Mash and friends, his lack of magic had just been exposed, putting him in danger of getting executed by the state, but you wouldn't know that from the beginning of the episode as the gang instead decides to throw a party to celebrate their victory over the Lang house, and even invite them over to bury the hatchet. It makes for some fun interactions, but given how high the stakes have been raised, it felt at least a little jarring for the show not to jump straight to addressing that, even if I do appreciate the show actively making fun of the fact.

Thankfully, it doesn't take too long for the ball to get rolling, and Mash finds himself in an inquiry into his lack of magic. Between all of Mash's comedic and superhuman feats, it can be pretty easy to forget he lives in a society where those like him are seen as an affront to nature and something to be exterminated. So it all ends up coming down to Mash deciding to defend his right to exist and declare that he'll find a way to sway the views of society at large. Of course, all that is easier said than done, as the Divine Visionaries are split between finding him exceptional and wanting to execute him. Speaking of which, given how much of this series' brand of humor has centered around parodying Harry Potter by having Mash beat up smug wizards every week, I appreciate taking the joke one step further by introducing Harry Copper-I mean "Orter Madl" a Harry Potter look-alike whose whole deal is being a cop with a fascist level of devotion to law and order (something that only gets funnier knowing HP's actual occupation when he becomes an adult) making him a good counterpoint for Mash. Having read the manga, this was the point in the series where I went from passively enjoying it to getting deeply invested, so I'm looking forward to the rest of this season's events. While there isn't too much going on with this opener, if the anime can nail the execution, we should all be in for a pretty good time in the coming weeks.