Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya 2wei! First Impressions--Drowning in Real Time

Come for the magical girls, stay for the... Actually, there's not much else to stay for.

The first season of Prisma Illya left me torn. I enjoyed the magical girl parts of the show, particularly the way it created a new magic system with frequent nods back to the larger Fate universe and the fantastic battle scenes in the later parts of the season. However, its doujin roots were very obvious, which is to say, despite being an elementary school girl Illya was frequently put in otaku fantasy situations, including (but not limited to) yet another instance of the naked bathroom scene cliche and also developed a maid fetish seemingly out of nowhere. In the show's defense though, the rest of the season was enjoyable enough that I wanted to watch the second season in the hope that it wouldn't rely so heavily on the otaku pandering and play to its strengths as a magical girl spinoff instead.

...Or not.

What I got was nearly fifteen minutes of exactly what I'd been hoping that this sequel would avoid. And this isn't just a case of "anime cliches" either; the show makes it very clear that it wants you to view these vaguely lesbian underage girls as sex objects. What kind of kid encourages her friends to wear string bikinis? And who eats ice cream like that? The entire sequence made my skin crawl, and I almost bailed out right then and there.


The good news is the second half is much better. The bad news is, that's not exactly a high hurdle to cross. It works well enough as setup for this season (Rin and Luvia reappear, ley lines need to be fixed by magic, more Archer Illya) but isn't much to write home about otherwise. That said, hearing Rin and Luvia drowning in the background while Illya and Miyu perform their magical girl transformation in real time was easily the best part of the episode.

Overall though, the first episode of the second season doesn't convince me that things will be different from the first, which isn't exactly a good thing here. Once again there are some great ideas and cool animation sequences that are an interesting take on the magical girl genre, but you have to wade through some skeevy stuff to get to that point. Right now, I'm not sure if I want to do that again for multiple episodes. Maybe it would've been better if this series had stayed a doujin.

Images from Crunchyroll.com.