Magic Maker: How to Make Magic in Another World – Episode 1

Content Warning: Romanticized incest

What’s it about? Marie’s vowed to protect her little brother Shion ever since their parents brought him home, which also means helping him in his mysterious obsession with something called “magic.” What she doesn’t know is that Shion has been reincarnated from another world.

Now I know what you’re thinking, so let me offer you this: what if the carbon copy power fantasy isekai with ugly art also had incest in it?

No? Well, the metrics I’ve looked at for these shows mean somebody’s watching them. Someday I assume I’ll meet one by chance and beg them to consider our limited number of minutes on Earth. They simply shouldn’t be spent on something so limp and uncreative.

Actually, let me be fair. The decision to spend most of this first episode in Marie’s perspective, highlighting the extreme weirdness of most isekai protagonists’ behavior to the people around them, is at least somewhat novel. The script actually withholds the “isekai” part until the last minute of the episode, though it’s not hard to guess if you’ve watched seasonal anime in the last five years or read the provided summary. Still, it shows effort, which is more than I can otherwise say for a show that’s sleepwalking through its well-worn paces.

Why shouldn’t it, really? Most of the big names on staff are veterans of churn, be that the particular flavor of Narou isekai or horny fan service fests. They’ll finish this, collect their insufficient paychecks after too many backbreaking late nights, and move onto the next rent-paying job secure in the knowledge that even the people who watch all 12 episodes won’t be able to tell you a goddamn thing about this show two weeks after it finishes airing. Pay that rent, man.

To do my due diligence, even if Marie weren’t a feint of a protagonist before being shoved aside in favor of the One True Potato, she’s kind of a travesty. Everything she does in life, by her own admission, is for Shion. They’re always together, she takes up physical training that she “doesn’t dislike” in order to protect him, and she wants to marry him so that they’ll never have other people in their lives. She nominally has a friend, Rose, but immediately starts becoming hostile toward her when she has a positive interaction with Shion—this will, by the looks of the opening, be their main dynamic going into the future. I can’t be disappointed on her behalf because I can’t stretch myself to imagine her being conceived as anything more than a paper-thin fantasy and marketing tactic for even the briefest of seconds.

If you close your eyes and imagine the last time you watched one of these, you’ve got a pretty solid grasp on the visuals of Magic Maker. It utilizes that particularly irritating school of child character design that’s all bobble-head and poorly proportioned limbs, the kind that scream “a kid is just a teenager if I chop them off at the knee, right?” The dialogue is stilted and laden with exposition, and I am honestly not sure if the distinction between Shion and Marie’s hair colors is meant to be code for a future middle finger to the Westermarck Effect or if it’s just an astonishing lack of design cohesion. I’d believe either on this one.

There are so many other promising shows this season, do yourself a favor and don’t bother with this one.