REVIEW: ‘Mashle: Magic and Muscle,’ Episode 3 — “Mash Burnedead and the Baleful Bully”

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Having passed the entrance exam, if through means a bit unorthodox, Mash has officially taken his first step towards his goal. But there are more challenges ahead of the young man than test scores, as Mashle: Magic and Muscle Episode 3 showcases.

This week’s story opens with Mash once more having to use his incredible physical attributes to fake his way out of employing magic. How Mash manages to side-step around flying on a broom without magic is another triumphant comical moment that gets this episode started on a lighter note. This is useful, as from here, Mashle: Magic and Muscle Episode 3 does descend into some darker themes.

While his physical might does get him through another class, it also catches the eye of Lloyd Cavill. Lloyd is a bully allowed to run rampant through the school thanks to the fact that his father is a high-ranking member of the Bureau of Magic. If you have seen other anime set in school situations, you are probably familiar with Lloyd’s type. Destruction of property, physical violence, and gleeful willingness to use the faculty’s desire to stay on his dad’s good side to get students who displease him expelled are all in his well-used bag of tricks. A true waste of air if ever there was one.

As someone who isn’t used to dealing with manipulation and deceit, Mash is quickly taken into doing things for Lloyd that are completely unreasonable for reasons anyone more experienced with the world would instantly see as bull crap. While these moments are frustrating for the viewer to see, they are delivered with a light dose of humor through the visual presentation, keeping Mash’s initial circumstances from getting too heavy. But the situation does eventually escalate to a dark moment, and Llyod’s actions become worse until Mash comes across an altercation between him and his roommate Finn.

How Mashle: Magic and Muscle Episode 3 sees Mash handle the unfolding situation is complicated to dissect. On the one hand, his actions are entertaining and certainly feel like the way many of us who have been confronted by such behavior would like to respond to it. On the other hand, one could also argue that Mash’s responses to Lloyd and others in cahoots with him cross just a hard line in their own way. As his response also amounts to assault and threatening to murder someone. How one feels about Mahs’s actions and how they speak to his character will be for each to decide.

The most impressive part of this sequence and how it fits into the episode’s larger narrative is how smoothly it plays out with Mash’s character and the tone of the show. While there is a light sprinkling of humor through Mash’s misunderstandings of how the world works in the sequence, it never undercuts the seriousness of the moment. That the largely goofy show and lead character can adapt to a far more serious situation without it feeling completely jarring is a feat I wouldn’t have expected.

Mashle: Magic and Muscle Episode 3 delivers more of what viewers are quickly coming to expect from this mostly comedic anime while also expanding the narrative greatly. The complexity of what happens and how Mash’s actions can be interpreted speaks to a narrative quality I did not expect to see in this show when I first started watching it.

Mashle: Magic and Muscle Episode 3 is streaming on Crunchyroll.