Mahou Shoujo Site of the End
Mahou Shoujo Site and Magical Girl Apocalypse are two different series, but they share a writer and it shows through in them having similar shapes and similar flaws, so I'm covering them together.
Apocalypse's beginning takes a minute to have a clear premise, but once it gets going it looks an awful lot like a fairly typical zombie apocalypse story, just with super-powerful murdermachines that resemble very dark versions of magical girl stereotypes being the initiator of events. That's actually a pretty nifty variation on zombie apocalypse stuff, especially with the magical girls each having a unique power; zombie apocalypse stories often struggle to keep the story going past the initial frenzy to escape, secure shelter, secure food, etc, because having an undifferentiated horde of identical zombies means that once you've reached the point where even a large number of zombies can't break into your shelter and you've got your basic needs sustainably handled there's no organic basis to change things. Having a magical girl stumble onto your compound and promptly open a wormhole to the other side of the fence is a good way to shake things up, and with each magical girl having different abilities you can shake things up in different ways. On top of that, the magical girls provide an avenue for explaining how the zombie apocalypse started that, among other things, allows for a useful endpoint. Kill all magical girls, and then it's just a matter of cleaning up the remaining zombies. Cool.
Site instead is a dark variation on traditional magical girl tropes -instead of a cute animal companion ready to answer your questions, there's an extremely unhelpful site. Instead of getting a rod, staff, gem, whatever, that then lets you hop into a colorful costume while gaining enhanced abilities, you get a 'stick' (Most of them are not stick-like at all) and it provides more or less one function that's unique to it, with the primary shared trait being that each use of the stick's effect shortens your life. Instead of being called upon to protect the world from the rapacious ills of the Bad Guys, your 'stick' just comes with some extremely basic instructions ("1: Point. 2: Click.") and you're free to use it as you like -oh, and you're probably in a situation where using it for murder is extremely tempting when you're given it. So that's an interesting system and could go all kinds of possible places.
These are both some pretty interesting premises.
Unfortunately, there's not really any storytelling happening.
Apocalypse spends a while with the audience unclear what's going on while people gruesomely die in droves. (Peppered with entirely gratuitous sexualization of female characters. Not exactly unusual for horror, admittedly, but Apocalypse is pretty bad even by that standard) It drags on too long, though eventually a direction ("Escape") comes along. Once that goal is achieved... oh, wait, it wasn't achieved, the escape wasn't an escape at all, and now the story is going back to killing people in droves. So it goes back to dragging. Then we get to The Mall.
The Mall is, at first glance, the stage in a zombie apocalypse where temporary shelter has been achieved; an opportunity for characters to rest, share information, and make plans on how to secure food, drinkable water, and either make the current shelter long-term secure or arrange to move to another shelter, as well as make plans for anything else they might think is necessary like weapons. In Apocalypse's case, it spends a period of time looking like that, and then we go back to people dying horribly in droves, with a slightly different, slightly expanded cast of apparently-core characters, though the story finally starts dropping hints as to what's going on with the magical girls.
People continue to die in droves. The plot continues to not move forward.
Eventually, time travel gets involved, because who doesn't love randomly throwing time travel into your story? (Me. I don't. I generally feel that if time travel isn't central to your story, it's a gigantic mistake to incorporate it. Apocalypse did not dissuade me from this opinion) Said time travel gets used to awkwardly drop a hint as to the origin of magical girls and also solidifies who our core cast is -which notably includes a completely horrible person who thereafter the story keeps arranging to be an important and effectual individual in spite of being a shameless pervert who is a complete moron. I'd find it mildly disconcerting if the story had a shameless pervert who happens to be genuinely talented at surviving in a magical girl-induced zombie apocalypse, and I'd have concerns about the motivation behind the decision, but I could work with it. The issue is he is seriously dumb, with the only reason things keep working out for him being blatant author fiat.
It was a pretty major part of why I dropped the series.
The other part was that the plot seriously just is not there. Once the time travel is done, we get Ominous People Saying Ominous Things, we get confirmation that the obvious source of magical girls is the source of them (But not an explanation for how, not before I reached the point of giving up), and still more people are dying horribly.
That's really 99% of what Apocalypse is. People dying horribly in place of any kind of storytelling.
Site starts out a bit better-seeming. The mystery of the magical girl website that the series gets its name from is treated as a mystery worth poking at from quite early on, and we do slowly get the sense that Things Are Not As They Seem. Our initial character also has some obvious points to catapult her into some kind of story, as she's a victim of fairly harsh bullying at school and at home and now has a power that offers a gruesome solution to those problems. Does she just use her teleport-inducing gun -excuse me, 'stick'- to murder everyone involved? Or maybe she'll kill one person and try to intimidate the others into backing off. Is any solution she comes up with worth however much of her life it will literally cost her? Or maybe she could get a bit more creative -surely there are uses for a teleport-inducing gun that could, for example, help her make money and escape these ugly situations.
Unfortunately, the story doesn't really explore that storyline. She turns to her gun in desperation one time before she knows what it does, two of her bullies die as a result, and she's horrified and refuses to use it on the other bullies. The bullying continues, and in fact one girl is convinced she somehow killed them and so is probably going to kill her, at which point a girl whose 'stick' can stop time shows up and rescues her while also arranging for the bully to be slitting their own throat, and we seem to shift over to a plotline where the two magical girls are allied against a hunter of magical girls. And okay it kind of is an actual plotline, but it's handled fairly abruptly, it relies heavily on contrivance, and the completion of it basically establishes the whole thing as narratively a waste of time.
Without going too much into the details, this is pretty representative of what Site was still doing by the time I completely lost interest. Something like a plot seems to be getting established, only it's either interrupted/ignored or it technically fully plays out but it's short and once it's over with one is left wondering why the story bothered with any of it.
The one other bit worth talking about in Site is that, much like how Apocalypse has an idiot pervert who the story keeps contriving to have be nonsensically effective rather than horribly dead dozens of times over, Site has a nasty male character who hates everyone (That's not an exaggeration, by the way) and is convinced he's better than everyone. Naturally, he arbitrarily stumbles into the whole magical girl phenomenon, plots to steal magical girl sticks to use for his own purposes (It's worth noting that the idiot pervert in Apocalypse is the first character in that story to get a hold of and make use of the magical girl wands in that story, with this being part of how the story justifies making him relevant instead of dead), does so successfully, and proceeds to outwit all the core cast-at-the-time's magical girls and have them at his complete mercy through blatantly inconsistent mechanics arbitrarily favoring him, which only fails to result in all their deaths because a deus ex machina comes along and handles him. Said deus ex machina being another man who is using 'sticks' for his own reasons.
The sad thing is, this entire little arc is the first time the story is managing to really tell a story.
Site managed to string me along longer than Apocalypse just because it wasn't a constant gorefest and it kept having real stabs at a plot, but having Horrible Person Who Is An Idiot The Plot Favors Anyway again, particularly with him having to be defeated by another person in the same mold, just older, was the last straw for me. Part of the problem being that in both cases the horribleness of the individual in question doesn't actually tie into their successes -the idiot pervert in Apocalypse does not stumble into solutions other people fail to see because he's an idiot pervert, and Site's nasty male character's abusive and contemptuous internal monologue paired with a polite facade only partially hooks into his successes. I actually like it when a story explores having a terrible person end up doing good or being competent precisely due to their horrible traits -that's not what site or Apocalypse are doing, though. It's just author fiat.
It's really too bad both manga are so lacking on the actual storytelling level, because they really do have fairly interesting foundations that could have been used to tell really nifty stories, not to mention the visuals are generally pretty interesting.
Of course, part of the problem is that both Apocalypse and Site start out with a premise worth exploring ("What would you do if handed over a basically-untraceable magic power, where the only string is that you're shortening your life to use it?" and "Survivor horror with magical girl zombie things to complicate things") and then shove the premise aside in favor of introducing a mystery that's technically tied to stuff the premise is about but the introduction of said mystery directly pulls the story away from exploring the actual premise. And then takes forever to have any progress on those mysteries, hence the 'no story to really tell' issue.
Ugh.
Apocalypse's beginning takes a minute to have a clear premise, but once it gets going it looks an awful lot like a fairly typical zombie apocalypse story, just with super-powerful murdermachines that resemble very dark versions of magical girl stereotypes being the initiator of events. That's actually a pretty nifty variation on zombie apocalypse stuff, especially with the magical girls each having a unique power; zombie apocalypse stories often struggle to keep the story going past the initial frenzy to escape, secure shelter, secure food, etc, because having an undifferentiated horde of identical zombies means that once you've reached the point where even a large number of zombies can't break into your shelter and you've got your basic needs sustainably handled there's no organic basis to change things. Having a magical girl stumble onto your compound and promptly open a wormhole to the other side of the fence is a good way to shake things up, and with each magical girl having different abilities you can shake things up in different ways. On top of that, the magical girls provide an avenue for explaining how the zombie apocalypse started that, among other things, allows for a useful endpoint. Kill all magical girls, and then it's just a matter of cleaning up the remaining zombies. Cool.
Site instead is a dark variation on traditional magical girl tropes -instead of a cute animal companion ready to answer your questions, there's an extremely unhelpful site. Instead of getting a rod, staff, gem, whatever, that then lets you hop into a colorful costume while gaining enhanced abilities, you get a 'stick' (Most of them are not stick-like at all) and it provides more or less one function that's unique to it, with the primary shared trait being that each use of the stick's effect shortens your life. Instead of being called upon to protect the world from the rapacious ills of the Bad Guys, your 'stick' just comes with some extremely basic instructions ("1: Point. 2: Click.") and you're free to use it as you like -oh, and you're probably in a situation where using it for murder is extremely tempting when you're given it. So that's an interesting system and could go all kinds of possible places.
These are both some pretty interesting premises.
Unfortunately, there's not really any storytelling happening.
Apocalypse spends a while with the audience unclear what's going on while people gruesomely die in droves. (Peppered with entirely gratuitous sexualization of female characters. Not exactly unusual for horror, admittedly, but Apocalypse is pretty bad even by that standard) It drags on too long, though eventually a direction ("Escape") comes along. Once that goal is achieved... oh, wait, it wasn't achieved, the escape wasn't an escape at all, and now the story is going back to killing people in droves. So it goes back to dragging. Then we get to The Mall.
The Mall is, at first glance, the stage in a zombie apocalypse where temporary shelter has been achieved; an opportunity for characters to rest, share information, and make plans on how to secure food, drinkable water, and either make the current shelter long-term secure or arrange to move to another shelter, as well as make plans for anything else they might think is necessary like weapons. In Apocalypse's case, it spends a period of time looking like that, and then we go back to people dying horribly in droves, with a slightly different, slightly expanded cast of apparently-core characters, though the story finally starts dropping hints as to what's going on with the magical girls.
People continue to die in droves. The plot continues to not move forward.
Eventually, time travel gets involved, because who doesn't love randomly throwing time travel into your story? (Me. I don't. I generally feel that if time travel isn't central to your story, it's a gigantic mistake to incorporate it. Apocalypse did not dissuade me from this opinion) Said time travel gets used to awkwardly drop a hint as to the origin of magical girls and also solidifies who our core cast is -which notably includes a completely horrible person who thereafter the story keeps arranging to be an important and effectual individual in spite of being a shameless pervert who is a complete moron. I'd find it mildly disconcerting if the story had a shameless pervert who happens to be genuinely talented at surviving in a magical girl-induced zombie apocalypse, and I'd have concerns about the motivation behind the decision, but I could work with it. The issue is he is seriously dumb, with the only reason things keep working out for him being blatant author fiat.
It was a pretty major part of why I dropped the series.
The other part was that the plot seriously just is not there. Once the time travel is done, we get Ominous People Saying Ominous Things, we get confirmation that the obvious source of magical girls is the source of them (But not an explanation for how, not before I reached the point of giving up), and still more people are dying horribly.
That's really 99% of what Apocalypse is. People dying horribly in place of any kind of storytelling.
Site starts out a bit better-seeming. The mystery of the magical girl website that the series gets its name from is treated as a mystery worth poking at from quite early on, and we do slowly get the sense that Things Are Not As They Seem. Our initial character also has some obvious points to catapult her into some kind of story, as she's a victim of fairly harsh bullying at school and at home and now has a power that offers a gruesome solution to those problems. Does she just use her teleport-inducing gun -excuse me, 'stick'- to murder everyone involved? Or maybe she'll kill one person and try to intimidate the others into backing off. Is any solution she comes up with worth however much of her life it will literally cost her? Or maybe she could get a bit more creative -surely there are uses for a teleport-inducing gun that could, for example, help her make money and escape these ugly situations.
Unfortunately, the story doesn't really explore that storyline. She turns to her gun in desperation one time before she knows what it does, two of her bullies die as a result, and she's horrified and refuses to use it on the other bullies. The bullying continues, and in fact one girl is convinced she somehow killed them and so is probably going to kill her, at which point a girl whose 'stick' can stop time shows up and rescues her while also arranging for the bully to be slitting their own throat, and we seem to shift over to a plotline where the two magical girls are allied against a hunter of magical girls. And okay it kind of is an actual plotline, but it's handled fairly abruptly, it relies heavily on contrivance, and the completion of it basically establishes the whole thing as narratively a waste of time.
Without going too much into the details, this is pretty representative of what Site was still doing by the time I completely lost interest. Something like a plot seems to be getting established, only it's either interrupted/ignored or it technically fully plays out but it's short and once it's over with one is left wondering why the story bothered with any of it.
The one other bit worth talking about in Site is that, much like how Apocalypse has an idiot pervert who the story keeps contriving to have be nonsensically effective rather than horribly dead dozens of times over, Site has a nasty male character who hates everyone (That's not an exaggeration, by the way) and is convinced he's better than everyone. Naturally, he arbitrarily stumbles into the whole magical girl phenomenon, plots to steal magical girl sticks to use for his own purposes (It's worth noting that the idiot pervert in Apocalypse is the first character in that story to get a hold of and make use of the magical girl wands in that story, with this being part of how the story justifies making him relevant instead of dead), does so successfully, and proceeds to outwit all the core cast-at-the-time's magical girls and have them at his complete mercy through blatantly inconsistent mechanics arbitrarily favoring him, which only fails to result in all their deaths because a deus ex machina comes along and handles him. Said deus ex machina being another man who is using 'sticks' for his own reasons.
The sad thing is, this entire little arc is the first time the story is managing to really tell a story.
Site managed to string me along longer than Apocalypse just because it wasn't a constant gorefest and it kept having real stabs at a plot, but having Horrible Person Who Is An Idiot The Plot Favors Anyway again, particularly with him having to be defeated by another person in the same mold, just older, was the last straw for me. Part of the problem being that in both cases the horribleness of the individual in question doesn't actually tie into their successes -the idiot pervert in Apocalypse does not stumble into solutions other people fail to see because he's an idiot pervert, and Site's nasty male character's abusive and contemptuous internal monologue paired with a polite facade only partially hooks into his successes. I actually like it when a story explores having a terrible person end up doing good or being competent precisely due to their horrible traits -that's not what site or Apocalypse are doing, though. It's just author fiat.
It's really too bad both manga are so lacking on the actual storytelling level, because they really do have fairly interesting foundations that could have been used to tell really nifty stories, not to mention the visuals are generally pretty interesting.
Of course, part of the problem is that both Apocalypse and Site start out with a premise worth exploring ("What would you do if handed over a basically-untraceable magic power, where the only string is that you're shortening your life to use it?" and "Survivor horror with magical girl zombie things to complicate things") and then shove the premise aside in favor of introducing a mystery that's technically tied to stuff the premise is about but the introduction of said mystery directly pulls the story away from exploring the actual premise. And then takes forever to have any progress on those mysteries, hence the 'no story to really tell' issue.
Ugh.
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