Common Name: My-Hime
Alternative Name: Mai-Hime, My Princess, Princess Mai
Score: 6/10, 2/5
Length: 26 Episodes
Genre: Action, Drama, Romance, Comedy, Magical Girls, Mecha, Grimdark, Yuri
Summary: Recently enrolled in the prestigious Fuuka Academy, Tokiha Mai and her sickly brother Takumi are expecting great things from their new life, but got more then they bargained for. Unbeknownst to Mai, Fuuka is regularly under attack by strange monsters known as Orphans. To fight these Orphans, the school has enrolled 13 girls with the potential to become HiMes, girls with the ability to summon a powerful being called a Child to fight the Orphans. As it soon turns out, however, the Orphans aren't the only threat Mai and the other HiMes need to worry about. Worse still, it turns out that summoning and fighting Orphans with a Child can come at a greater cost to the HiMe and those they hold dear.
Review: In my experience, there are usually three ways a person can forget something. First, the memory of the thing will just naturally fade with time until even small reminders can't summon sudden recollection. Second, the person undergoes some form of trauma, physical or emotional, that makes them incapable of recalling those memories. Third, the person deliberately burns all thought of something out of their mind with such force and desperation, typically through burying it under a pile of other memories so deep that not even a necrotic reminder can escape. My-Hime was wiped from my mind for the longest time mainly because I had employed that third method, in case you couldn't tell. So, here I am, staring at a desiccated memory corpse I hardly recognize as a show I disliked.
Is that supposed to be one of those Orphans they fight? Why is she floating on prayer bead rings?
Wasn't her power that she could summon some sick-ass dragon with a giant dagger in its face?
All very important questions I can't even begin to answer.
What I do recall three very specific things about this show, however. First, Mai-Hime basically amounted to being the grimdark magical girl anime until Madoka Magica appeared and stole all that ill-got thunder--not that anyone cared about that subgenre in the early 2000's. The main premise behind the show was the general, destiny-guided magical girls fight the monsters who are terrorizing humanity because of reasons. However, here most magical girl contracts end up having a drawback for just the magical girls, Mai-Hime made the civilian factor all the more important by tying the magical girls' powers to certain people they cared for deeply. Now, rather than just being weak at the drop of the hat and motivated to fight for little reason other than the good of humanity, the girls have good reason to fight and keep civilian involvement to a minimum.
All of this needs to happen while the girls also try to lead...relatively normal lives too though.
With that premise alone, the show actually sounds pretty cool right? Like, it'd make for an interesting twist on what the magical girl genre has become today, particularly because the magical girls in this show look and act more like shounen action heroes than the usual kira-kira bullshit. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but the second thing I vividly remember about this show makes it all stupid as balls. To cut straight to the chase, while the show makes the magical girls into kickass summoner action heroes, it also turns them into goddamn psychopaths who, for some idiotic reason, feel the need to kill each other. If I recall correctly, the idea was that if a HiMe killed another HiMe they and their Child would grow stronger. This gaining of strength then allowed the HiMe to better protect the civilian they're bonded to and made it more likely for them to survive the big, final battle with the mysterious and powerful leader of the Orphans, the Obsidian Prince. So, without further ado, the grimdark gets shoved up to 11 while the HiMe stop fighting the actual threat and start playing deadly mind games with one another out of some selfish desire to be the last one standing.
I get the impression those guns don't shoot confetti or gummy bears or anything nice.
And then we get to the coup de grace for this show's ability to be enjoyed--the romance aspect. Again, to be frank, I don't remember much, but what I do remember wasn't all that great. There's a lot of he wants her but she wants someone else who just so happens to be into another girl kind of teen love quadrangle nonsense going on, to be sure. That's kinda to be expected, though, since the My-Hime series was originally an ecchi harem manga, a la The Testament of Sister New Devil, Strike the Blood, or A Certain Magical Index. So, on the one hand, I'm kinda glad the series didn't go in that direction. On the other, I'm pretty sure I could have lived without the lesbian rape sequence late into the series. What I could have lived without even more, though, was the romanticization of that scene that occurred after the fact, turning their killing one another into some poetic garbage of rape being an expression of love. Trust me, when I say I'm still triggered by this. So much so, in fact, that I've been holding back the urge to stomp this memory corpse into an even deeper hole than the one I dug it out of throughout this entire review.
Even if the whole ordeal is presented as unhealthy, I want to know who thought adding
this to the series was a good idea. They're going in the pit with the memory corpse.
Now, no matter how cool the ending of this show got, and I do have some vague recollection of some Eureka Seven kind of badassery in the end, nothing's going to change that last big issue for me. That just isn't tolerable on any level for me. To be clear, though, that isn't the show's only problem. It's just the thing that drove me to bury any memory of this show in a grave I never expected to visit again. Now, perhaps the series finally got it right with that spin-off, My-Otome, but I was, by no means, inclined to find out after I finished this one. So, I guess I can suggest watching that rather than this mess of a show. Since I got nothing else to say really, I'm going to put these memories back in the ground where they belong.