My Thoughts on "Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka"

Foreword:

This was originally written and posted on DeviantART on Sunday March 7, 2021. This might be the oldest journal that I’ve reposted on here so far, but I could be wrong about that. This is one of earlier reviews, this was before I started labeling them “My Thoughts on,” I still called them “First Impressions” back then, and this is when I still did ratings which I don’t do anymore. It’s definitely an older work, and it had a lot of mistakes that I tried to correct when reposting it for this blog, and just the way I wrote it is different from how I would do it now. But, I stand by what I said in this review, not that I’ve rewatched the show since I originally wrote this. 

This was an anime that I had discovered while I was at Best Buy at that time, and it looked interesting so I decided to buy it and watch it. This was around the time that I was really starting to get into anime. I had already watched Cowboy Bebop, I had already watched Outlaw Star, and I might have already watched Inuyasha. I say might have because I’m really not sure if I had watched Inuyasha before this or after this. Same goes for Samurai Champloo, my memory’s a bit fuzzy when I actually watched that.

So, I was at that point where I was more willing to buy any anime series that I saw at the store that caught my eye. Nowadays, I’m more selective about the things that I buy, and I haven’t bought an anime series or an anime movie in a long time. Mostly because there hasn’t been one that I’ve seen that I want to spend my money 💵 on. All of the anime shows that I do want to watch and buy on Blu-Ray 💿 are only available on Amazon and other online retailers like Blood C 🩸, Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, Texhnolyze, Wolf’s Rain 🐺, Burst Angel, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water 💦, Elfen Lied, Parasyte, Ghost in the Shell: Arise, FLCL, ID: Invaded, Ranma ½, Eureka Seven, and many others that I have written down on a list and vary wildly in availability. Some of the anime that I wrote down on my list of anime to watch and review are only available on VHS 📼 or on DVD 📀, which is not good for me. I don’t have a VHS player 📼 nor do I have a DVD player 📀. I mean, my PS4 can play DVDs 📀, but I’d rather watch these in HD, on Blu-Ray 💿. But not every anime is available on Blu-Ray 💿 or in HD, especially vintage anime from the 1980s and 1990s.

Normally I don’t watch magical girl anime ♀︎, I don’t watch Shōjo anime, but I was willing to make an exception with this anime. It was a different take on the magical girl genre ♀︎, mixing more sci-fi and military elements, portraying the magical girls ♀︎ as a military unit. I thought it sounded really interesting, and I was willing to give it a shot. Luckily, it was pretty good, and I really enjoyed it. It was really cool. My only real issues with it was that it was it didn’t really have an ending, none of the plot points that were introduced throughout the series were resolved by the final episode. It kind of just stops. That’s why I found the ending of the series to be pretty unsatisfying.

I didn’t know for sure if this show was based on a manga or not when I wrote this, but now I know that yes, it is based on a manga. It only has 14 volumes and it’s already over. It started in 2015 and ended in 2021. Same year I watched this anime coincidentally enough. I don’t know how much of the manga that the anime adapted and how faithfully it adapted it, but it feels like they only adapted half the story or like 60% of the story or even 70%. It just feels incomplete. This anime, more than any other anime based on a manga or any other preexisting material (like a video game or a light novel), feels like an advertisement to the manga. Like it feels like it was made solely to promote the manga and get people to read the manga. Like, “Hey, if you want to see the end of the story, go read the manga you lazy bums.”

I also had a problem with some of the plot points and some of the characters. Like, some of the characters were a bit unlikable, like the medic on the team, War Nurse (that’s her code name, not her actual name). She isn’t just the medic, she’s also the interrogator, where she interrogates the prisoners of war that they’ve captured from the enemy side. But, her methods are pretty questionable to say the least 🤨. Like, she straight tortures people, like she tortures all of the prisoners they have in captivity in order to try to get information out of them. It’s basically like the US 🇺🇸’s own torture program during the War on Terror, which likely what this character trait of War Nurse’s was inspired by.

The Babel Brigade is basically a terrorist organization, formed out of the remnants of the Disas army, the evil creatures from the other dimension that invaded our world, and laying the groundwork for the Disas’s return to Earth 🌏. War Nurse is friends with the main character, Asuka, but Asuka doesn’t know that she does this, that she tortures prisoners (which is a war crime BTW), in fact, none of the other Magical Five team members know that she does this. It does bother me that this is kept a secret, and that no one else knows about it, and no one calls her out on it since torturing POWs is not only morally wrong but is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention and the proper treatment of POWs. She just gets away with it, and I don’t like that. It maybe realistic that she gets away with it and doesn’t face any repercussions for doing it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

There’s also the character, Sayako, who is also a friend of Asuka. She met her in school. She has her memory erased by Asuka after she gets kidnapped and tortured by the bad guys, and she learns Asuka’s secret that she’s a magical girl ♀︎. It always bothered me that they erased her memory of that whole experience. I mean, yeah she ended hating them despite the fact that they saved her life, but it still feels kind of wrong and kind of cheap that they just erased her memory of the whole thing and just carried on as if nothing ever happened. It’s like the show was avoiding the consequences of a plot point, a situation they introduced that they had one of the characters go through.

I think it would’ve been better if they didn’t erase her memory, and actually had the characters actually deal with the consequences of what happened to her. Maybe, Asuka tries to reconcile with her, and reconnect with her, maybe Sayako forgives her for overreacting and blaming her for what happened to her and actually thanks her for saving her. Maybe they don’t make up, maybe their differences are irreconcilable, and the two are forced to part ways. That would’ve been way more interesting and emotional than just having her memory be erased and forgetting that anything bad happened to her, just so that Asuka could keep her friendship with her without any of the drama of her having PTSD and her hating her for lying about who she was and for what she is. It’s not like this keeps her away from magic or from the danger of the Babel Brigade because she’s present during the Okinawa attack in the last few episodes.

Since I mentioned it, this show has a lot of torture in it. I think I might have said this in the review itself, but there are oddly lot of torture scenes in this anime. I haven’t watched any dedicated reviews of this show, but I did see this one video that mentioned it and they described it as “torture porn,” and yeah, it kind of is. It almost verges on being fetishistic at times. I say this in the review, but the contraption that War Nurse straps the prisoners to when she starts torturing them and drugging them looked like something out of a BDSM dungeon. It looked like something Christian Grey would use. And if I’m remembering it correctly, War Nurse even wears a dominatrix outfit while she’s torturing these prisoners. When I saw that video point that out that this anime has a lot of torture, I was “Oh yeah, it does. That is kind of weird.”

And it wasn’t in a Zero Dark Thirty kind of way, where the torture was portrayed as painful, humiliating, and cruel and not all a pleasurable experience that you would never want to experience. The closest thing to that in this show is the scene in that one episode where Sayako’s father rips the guy ♂︎’s teeth 🦷 out while trying to get information out of him, and also get revenge on him for what he did to his daughter, which was a pretty brutal scene and a bit hard to watch. Though not as brutal or as hard to watch as the actual scene where Sayako is tortured by the Babel Brigade. She gets burned with some tongs heated upon a grill, then she gets waterboarded 💦, and then she gets one of her arms cut off. So yeah, she goes through some shit 😬😖. 

But other than that, a lot of the torture, especially the torture conducted by War Nurse, is portrayed as more fetishistically. It’s portrayed as more of a BDSM kind of torture that some people like and have a kink or a fetish for. Like, she parades around one of prisoners around on a leash and has her act like a dog 🦮, like she engages in puppy play 🐶 with this prisoner. Zero Dark Thirty also had a scene where a prisoner is put on a leash and forced to walk around on all fours like a dog 🦮, but again, this was done in more fetishistic way, like they were legit engaging in puppy play 🐶. That’s how it came across. And the worst part is that the prisoner in question is underage, or appears to be. Like, the girl ♀︎ she does this to is a loli. It’s so weird and comes across as icky 🤢.

Maybe, if the characters weren’t teenagers and were fully grown adults, it wouldn’t feel as wrong as it does. It really does come across as the writers and the animators’ thinly veiled fetishes seeping through to the work, to the product. Or maybe this isn’t any of their personal fetishes, but they incorporated more of those fetishes into the show in order to appeal to that sort of demographic that has those fetishes and likes seeing them in an anime. I don’t want you all to think that this is a “fetish anime” or anything, it’s really only in the torture scenes where it feels very fetishistic, and there are a lot of them (a lot more than there probably needed to be), but other than that, it’s a regular magical girl ♀︎/military anime.

Despite the issues I had with the anime, I still like it, I still like what it did, it still kicks ass. I especially liked the Somali cyborg boy 🇸🇴🦾♂︎, Giess, I thought he was a pretty cool and badass villain, and a pretty tragic villain at that. Even the Disas looked pretty cool, even if they are a bit silly in concept. It’s a ridiculous concept and premise, and yet it’s played so straight and that’s why I love it. I liked all of the military stuff, the action was great, the battle scenes were fantastic. It was great to see them incorporate magical girls and other magical creatures into our world and incorporating geopolitics.

I like it when movies or shows mix in fantasy or sci-fi elements in with real world settings or real world scenarios. That’s part of why I like District 9 and what makes that movie so great and so intriguing and thought provoking even to this day. They managed to create a magical girl anime ♀︎ that could appeal to boys or men ♂︎, since this is a more mature anime. It’s definitely not for kids 😅. And they did it by including that boys and men ♂︎ like. “Men ♂︎ like military stuff right? They like sci-fi. They like action. They like violence. They like blood 🩸 right?” That seems to be the mindset of the people who made this anime and the person who wrote the manga. And to be fair, it worked.

The only other magical girl anime that I’ve seen is Magical Girl Ore, which like a parody of the magical girl genre ♀︎, basically instead of the two leads turning into typical magical girls ♀︎ with dresses and wands, they turn into these super buff men 💪♂︎ with dresses and wands, and their mascot is not cute or cuddly, but is instead a yakuza boss. It’s kind of like a reverse Ranma ½. It’s a pretty funny show 😆, I really liked it, and even the creatures that the two magical girls ♀︎ fight, or should I say magical guys ♂︎ fight, look a bit like the Disas in this show.

Here you had two anime shows that took the magical girl genre ♀︎ and subverted it, turned it on its head. Only one’s a comedy and one’s an action war series. I do recommend you watch both series, but I will give a couple of caveats. First of all, Magical Girl Ore does not have an English dub as far as I know. There’s only the Japanese language version 🇯🇵 with English subtitles. So, if you watch it, you’ll have to watch it subbed. Second of all, while Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka is good, it does feel incomplete and the ending is a bit unsatisfying and unfulfilling, and might take away some of your enjoyment of it. 

As far as traditional old school magical girl shows ♀︎ are concerned, I am maybe a bit open to Sailor Moon 🌙, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Ranma ½. I know Sailor Moon 🌙 is a magical girl show ♀︎, it is the magical girl show ♀︎, the quintessential one that really popularized the genre, and had all these imitators. But, I’m not sure about the other two. I’m sure Cardcaptor Sakura’s a magical girl show ♀︎, but I don’t know if Ranma ½ counts or not. It’s about a boy ♂︎ who turns into a girl ♀︎ with magic powers when he gets wet 💦, so that counts right? I don’t know if magical girl fans ♀︎ consider Ranma ½ apart of the genre. But if it is, then it’s one I’m willing to watch. At least Cardcaptor Sakura has a pretty nice ending theme. I bought it on iTunes, and I listen to it on occasion whenever I’m in the mood to listen to it. It always brings me joy whenever I listen to it 😊. 

Lastly, I want to touch a bit more on the election 🗳️, I know I wrote an entire dedicated post talking about the results of the election 🗳️. But that was more of my initial reactions after I saw the results come in and all of the key battleground states be called for Trump. Pennsylvania was the most devastating because that guaranteed that Harris had no path to the presidency. It was over for her once she lost Pennsylvania. And then she lost Michigan, and then she lost Wisconsin, and then she lost Arizona, and then she lost Nevada. It was a sweep all across the board.

Trump won in a virtual landslide, and that’s despite him winning pretty much the same amount of votes he won last time. He won 74,223,975 votes 🗳️ in 2020, and he won 74,250,053 votes 🗳️ in 2024. That’s the popular vote 🗳️. The popular vote 🗳️ for him really didn’t change all that much, it only went up by a little bit. Had Democrats actually got off their asses and went out to vote 🗳️, Harris would have won. Trump did gain some support, particularly amongst black and Latino men ♂︎, but it wasn’t a lot, the vast majority of black men ♂︎ and Latino men ♂︎ still did favor Harris, it’s just that none of them showed up to vote for her 🗳️. Harris, and the Democrats as a whole, lost more support than Trump had gained.

I mean, Kari Lake lost her bid for Arizona senator, despite that state voting for Trump. So, it’s not as if Republicans all of a sudden became more popular than they were before. Their support and popularity is almost virtually the same. It’s just the Democrats lost support amongst Democratic voters and Independents, they just didn’t turn out to vote in this election 🗳️. And as Jake Broe once said, when Democrats don’t show up to the polls, if there’s low voter turnout, then they lose. It’s simple as that. This was a devastating loss for the Democrats across the board, they lost presidency, they lost the Senate, and they seem on track to lose the House, though that race is still in place. There is still a chance the Dems can eke out a victory, claim a very slim majority, even if that is looking increasingly unlikely.

The Dems are still reeling from this defeat, doing a bit of soul searching, revaluation, a lot of finger pointing 🫵, and trying to adapt and come up with a new strategy now that they’re the opposition party. I’ve watched a lot of videos talking about the results of this election 🗳️ and talking about Trump’s victory and the ramifications of that, and all of them said that the Democrats made mistakes, they miscalculated, and there are reasons why they lost beyond just inflation and beyond just there being a lot of racist and sexist voters 🗳️ out there who didn’t want a black woman ♀︎ as president.

They lost to one of the most beatable Republican candidates you can think of, there has to be a bit of self-reflection and reevaluating to determine what you did wrong and how you can correct it going forward. If the Democrats ever wish to win the presidency ever again, they need to adapt, they need to reinvent themselves for the current era, just as they did after the 2000 Election 🗳️ between Bush and Gore and the 2004 Election 🗳️ between Bush and Kerry. This is not the Obama era anymore, and they can no longer run a campaign as if it still is the Obama era. This is the Trump era whether we like it or not (and most of us don’t), and you need to run a campaign that fits the Trump era. Which does mean, yes, embracing a little bit of populism or populist rhetoric 🤏, only for the Democrats, it’ll be left-wing populism and left-wing populist rhetoric. 

The Democrats also need to get over this idea that just because they put a woman candidate ♀︎ on the ticket that means women ♀︎ will vote for her. This election 🗳️ and the 2016 election 🗳️ have definitely proven that, in America 🇺🇸 at least, women ♀︎ (especially white women ♀︎) will not automatically vote for a candidate just because they’re a woman ♀︎. As Wanda Sykes said in a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, women ♀︎ are more than willing throw each other under the bus and tear each other apart for a variety of reasons, and will not always stand in solidarity with another woman ♀︎ simply on the basis of them being a woman ♀︎. They need to offer something more, something tangible to women voters ♀︎ beyond just they’re women ♀︎ and “women ♀︎ need stand together in this male dominated world ♂︎,” especially now that abortion has pretty much been taken off the table as a wedge issue that Democrats can use to easily cozy on into electoral victory. 

Maybe if the presidential election 🗳️ was held in 2022 when Roe v. Wade was overturned, they could have, but it wasn’t. It was held in 2024, and abortion rights were no longer seen by a lot of women ♀︎ as a big enough issue that they needed to vote for a certain candidate for president to protect it. I know as a man ♂︎, it’s not necessarily my place to say if those women ♀︎ were right or wrong for voting this way or not voting at all, but if I were a woman ♀︎, I wouldn’t want to risk losing that right or any other rights for that matter nationwide by sitting this one out, or voting for Trump, or voting for Jill Stein, or some other third party candidate. 

As for Trump himself, and we can expect from a second term of his, no body really knows what to expect. I don’t think the Republicans or Trump’s team really know they’re going to do because they didn’t expect to win. They thought, just as the majority of us did, that they were going to lose. But they didn’t, and now they have to actually govern instead of just complaining about everything just because the other side is doing it.

The only thing everyone knows for sure (if they aren’t a Trump cultist) is that it’s going to be bad. We don’t know how bad, we just know it’s going to be bad. When you have people like Steve Bannon, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Don Jr., RFK Jr., and Elon Musk in charge, you know that things are going to get bad. We could see either a full or partial implementation of Project 2025, which the Republicans and the Far-Right have admitted to that it was their plan all along.

All that talk of theirs that it wasn’t Trump’s plan and it had nothing to do with him was bullshit. They were lying as they always. And now that they’ve won, they’ve taken the mask completely off, and are being honest that Project 2025 was made for a second Trump presidency, that it is their plan. They’ve also gone mask off when it comes to their racism and misogyny.

Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and yet the Far-Right and bigots all over the Internet 🛜 and in the real world have been emboldened and now being as racist and sexist as they can now their guy ♂︎’s going to be in charge again. They’re open about their racism and sexism, they aren’t afraid anymore, they aren’t hiding it, it’s out there in the open now, and woman ♀︎ and black people are facing the worst of it right now. It’s only going to get worse once Trump is in office, and it’s going to target even more marginalized groups, LGBT 🏳️‍🌈, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, you name it. We’ll all be in trouble once that man ♂︎ is back in office.

The hope seems to be now that Trump will be so old, senile, and decrepit that he won’t have the energy or the drive to do the worst that promised to do, and he’ll just do nothing and just golf ⛳️ all the time 🏌️‍♂️ just like he did in his first term. A hope that is based solely on the notion that Trump only ran for president again so he could stay out of jail. Well, he accomplished that, so what reason would he have to deliver on those promises he made while on the campaign trail?

Yes, Trump is an old man ♂︎ who is cognitively in decline, is lazy and narcissistic, and doesn’t care that much about governing and getting things done, that is a possibility that he’ll just be a mostly do nothing president who will golf ⛳️ all day, while all the corrupt idiots he put in charge of everything just use their new positions to enrich themselves 🤑. Yes, that’s really bad, but it is still arguably the best case scenario. But, I don’t want us to succumb to wishful thinking that Trump won’t do his worst, that he won’t do at least some of what he promised because he’s too old and too incoherent. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place

The worst case scenario of course is that he goes full dictator like he promised, and implements all of parts of Project 2025. Including the porn ban 🔞, which would be bad for me because I watch porn 🔞. I mean, if Trump bans porn 🔞 he’ll anger a lot of men ♂︎ 😡, including his own constituents. It is mostly men who watch porn 🔞 after all. Not to say there aren’t women ♀︎ who watch porn 🔞, but is mostly a guy thing ♂︎. And Trump would tick a lot of men ♂︎ off 🤬 if he banned porn 🔞 nationwide.

This includes incels, who can’t get a woman ♀︎ to save their lives and can only jerk off to porn 🔞 to satisfy their urges. MGTOW too, but they aren’t exactly in market for women ♀︎, they’ve voluntarily removed themselves from the dating pool. But they still desire women ♀︎ on a sexual level (a purely sexual level), and instead of having sex with women ♀︎, a lot of either use sex toys (including fully blown sex dolls) or jerk off to porn 🔞.

Think about this, one of the first things that the North Korean soldiers 🇰🇵 who were sent to Ukraine 🇺🇦 did once they had access to the Internet 🛜 for the first time in their lives was watch porn 🔞. Some of them even developed porn addictions 🔞 that’s how much they liked it and wanted it once they had access to it. Hey, you don’t have to deal with women if they’re behind a screen. You could probably still access those sites in the event of a nationwide ban with the help of VPNs, but I don’t have the money 💵 to afford paying for one every month and for every year, and if even I did, I would prefer not to and just have porn 🔞 be legal. It’s better for everyone if it is, trust me. 

Oh, and Grindr, that’s an app that Republicans like to use 😏. Grindr usage went up during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As it does during every Republican National Convention. What are all these closeted gay Republicans ⚣ going to do if and when the Trump administration bans Grindr because it “promotes” homosexuality ⚣?

More pressing, the worst thing would be if Trump implemented the mass deportation, use of the military on protesters 🪧, and invasion of Mexico 🇲🇽 parts of Project 2025. No body really talked about the plans in Project 2025 to launch an invasion or engage in some military action against Mexico 🇲🇽, they kind of just snuck it in there hoping no body would notice or care to mention it. The only person who did was Sarcasmitron, and that’s only because he focuses on foreign policy and geopolitics. Not even CSIS bothered to mention that part of the plan even though their specialty is foreign policy. Obviously, an invasion of Mexico 🇲🇽 would be a mistake, it would be a complete disaster that would completely blow up in America 🇺🇸’s face, especially when America 🇺🇸 has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose from invading Mexico 🇲🇽.

But it is something that I could see Trump doing. If he has unchecked power, and if he is the dictator we all fear he will become, then he could easily implement that part of Project 2025, and invade Mexico 🇲🇽, and he’d do it on a whim. All would take is for Trump to feel slighted by Mexico 🇲🇽 or feel like he could only accomplish something he wants by using military force against Mexico 🇲🇽, or just randomly one day feel like invading Mexico 🇲🇽, and just do it, with very little standing in his way. And his reasons and justifications for doing so would just as nonsensical as Putin’s were for invading Ukraine 🇺🇦. And you know that if Trump were to do this, his cult would be so brainwashed 🧠 that they’d be able to accept it and rationalize it in their heads and support it, despite their best efforts at trying present Trump as an “anti-war president.” Trump is not anti-war, he never was, and he never will be.

Another big fear on the foreign policy front is that Trump will abandon Ukraine 🇺🇦 and abandon Taiwan 🇹🇼, and give Putin and Xi everything that they want. Which would be bad, and would be the absolute worst case scenario for those countries. And yes, I did call Taiwan 🇹🇼 a country…sue me. I have seen a lot of Ukraine supporters 🇺🇦 try to rationalize this, and be hopeful and optimistic that Trump won’t just abandon Ukraine 🇺🇦 and had it over to Russia 🇷🇺.

They say that because Trump is transactional and only does things that benefit him personally that he could be flattered and charmed into maintaining support for Ukraine 🇺🇦. Jake Broe suggested that Putin may do something that Trump doesn’t like, and Trump may decide to just turn against him, and keep supporting Ukraine 🇺🇦 and perhaps be even more aggressive about it than Biden was. That just seems like wishful thinking to me, and even Jake himself admitted that was unlikely.

Given his approach to the Taliban, and Putin, in the past, I think it’s much more likely that Trump will just abandon Ukraine 🇺🇦, screw over Ukraine 🇺🇦, and give Putin everything he wants, including the territory he annexed back in late 2022 and having all sanctions be lifted. I mean, this is the same guy ♂︎ who not only abandoned the Afghan government 🇦🇫 in favor of the Taliban, but also abandoned the Kurds during the Syrian Civil War 🇸🇾 and let the Turks 🇹🇷 and their Syrian puppets have their way with them, it’s perfectly within his playbook. This is something Trump would do. Plus, he’s going to have Elon Musk and JD Vance in his ear 👂 influencing his policy and approach to Ukraine 🇺🇦, and neither of them want Ukraine 🇺🇦 to win.

I do still stand by my statements in my previous post that I think Ukraine 🇺🇦 would probably still keep fighting regardless if Trump decided to pull funding and aid, or if he made a deal with Russia 🇷🇺 that had terms that the Ukrainians 🇺🇦 couldn’t accept. Especially if they had the help of the Europeans 🇪🇺, if the European Union 🇪🇺 actually got off its ass and prioritized its own security instead delegating everything to the United States 🇺🇸 and always expecting the US 🇺🇸 to swoop in like Superman to save their asses. Macron gave a speech in European Parliament 🇪🇺 or in French Parliament 🇫🇷, talking about how Europe 🇪🇺 needs to focus on its own security now that US support 🇺🇸 is no longer guaranteed. He also probably means supporting Ukraine 🇺🇦 as well, and making sure that Russia 🇷🇺 doesn’t win the war and threaten the rest of Europe.

As for Taiwan 🇹🇼, it’s a bit more ambiguous and less clear cut. I mean, US policy towards Taiwan 🇹🇼 is based on “strategic ambiguity,” but Trump’s approach or attitude towards Taiwan 🇹🇼 is ambiguous in and of itself. It could really go of two ways. One, he abandons Taiwan 🇹🇼 and doesn’t come to their defense if China 🇨🇳 decides to invade, which it would do if they were emboldened by a Trump enabled Russian victory 🇷🇺 in Ukraine 🇺🇦. Or two, he does decide to stand by his anti-China stance 🇨🇳, and come to Taiwan 🇹🇼’s defense if China 🇨🇳 invades. In which case, we’re in a world war. I mean, we could still get World War III in the first scenario, especially if China 🇨🇳 used Taiwan 🇹🇼 as a base to attack US military bases 🇺🇸 in Okinawa and in the Philippines 🇵🇭. But, we definitely would in the second scenario.

I would prefer it if we didn’t have a war and China 🇨🇳 didn’t invade, but if it does, I hope that it it’s the second scenario because I don’t want us to abandon Taiwan 🇹🇼 and leave it to its fate. I don’t want China 🇨🇳 to have Taiwan 🇹🇼 because it wouldn’t just be bad for the Taiwanese 🇹🇼 who would lose their democracy, but it would bad for everyone including us, the United States 🇺🇸. I would rather us be on the right side of history and fight to protect Taiwan 🇹🇼’s freedom and independence, rather than just standing by and watching as China 🇨🇳 destroys the last vestige of democracy within the Sinosphere.

Taiwan 🇹🇼 is the only place in East Asia where Chinese people had true democracy. Remember, Taiwan 🇹🇼 used to be on the mainland until the communists ☭ took over, forced that government onto the island 🏝️. And it just barely got a democracy in 1996, it’s a pretty young democracy. And I don’t want to see it be extinguished by a regime such as the one in Beijing. We already lost Hong Kong 🇭🇰, we already lost Tibet, I already lost Xinjiang, in fact we lost both Tibet and Xinjiang decades ago, back in the mid 20th century, in the 1940: and 1950s. I don’t want Taiwan 🇹🇼 to be next.

But, if China 🇨🇳 invades and Trump is still in office, it would all depend if he thought defending Taiwan 🇹🇼 was worth it or not, if he thought it benefited him to do so. Would value his newfound admiration and friendship with Xi or would he stick to his guns about being anti-China 🇨🇳, and defend Taiwan 🇹🇼 militarily if the time came? It’s hard to say, but given how much he likes dictators and how much he wants to be a dictator, I think it’s more likely he’ll take Xi’s position and let him have what he wants, especially if Xi bribes him with gifts and money 💵, gives his daughter, Ivanka or his son-in-law, Jared Kirschner some favorable business deals or some property in China 🇨🇳. If that’s the case, then Taiwan 🇹🇼 is screwed.

One thing’s for sure though, the Palestinians 🇵🇸 are screwed. If you think things are bad for Palestinians 🇵🇸 now, well, let me tell ya, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse. Benjamin Netanyahu has favored Trump for as long as he’s been in the race, and now that he’s been elected, Netanyahu will have carte blanch to do whatever he wants in Gaza and the West Bank. He will be dealing with a US president 🇺🇸 who doesn’t care at all about human rights, and doesn’t care about there being a Palestinian state 🇵🇸, and will pretty much let him do as he pleases.

This will likely mean that Gaza and the West Bank will both be annexed and ethnically cleansed of all Palestinians 🇵🇸, and allow Israeli settlers 🇮🇱 to move in and turn Gaza into beach front property (one big country club) like Jared Kirschner wants. We could be in a situation where our future president enables two genocides to occur at the same time: a genocide of the Ukrainians 🇺🇦 and a genocide of the Palestinians 🇵🇸. Two for the price of one, the worst of both worlds.

While most people have compared Trump to Hitler because of the fascism stuff, and the praise for Hitler, one person did compare him to another warmongering German, Kaiser Wilhelm II. The person who made that comparison was none other than Sarcasmitron. He argued that Trump’s approach to foreign policy is much more similar to Wilhelm II than to Hitler. They’re both angry and impulsive buffoons, who don’t listen to reason, who don’t listen to their top diplomats, and just go by their gut feeling or try to do their own harebrained schemes that always end up in failure.

He made this comparison to prove a point that Trump does not have the temperament or the intelligence and common sense to avoid a global war. And like a lot of people, that comparison surprised me, but it does make a lot of sense. Putin is more similar to Hitler than Trump is. And Putin and Trump are both unpredictable, irrational, and impulsive men ♂︎ who make foreign policy decisions on a whim and most of them will involve violence. The geopolitical situation for the next four years will be like having Hitler and Wilhelm II in power at the same time. As you can imagine, that’s a recipe for disaster 😬.

Speaking of recipes for disaster, the mass deportation proposal. A lot of people are saying now that Trump may not go through with this proposal given the large scale of it, and the logistical nightmare it would be. I mean, Trump’s biggest promise and biggest selling point in 2016 was him building a wall along the southern border. But, once he became president, he never fulfilled that promise, he never built that wall.

You might say that it was because of Democratic opposition in the Senate and House, but still, Trump didn’t build the wall like he said and he didn’t make Mexico 🇲🇽 pay for it. In 2024, Trump didn’t talked about the wall at all, and instead promised a mass deportation of all “illegal” immigrants in this country. I say “illegal” in quotes because this mass deportation policy won’t just target illegal immigrants, but it will target legal ones too. They won’t make that distinction, and we shouldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt that they will.

My biggest fear about the mass deportation thing as a Native American, as a Puebloan living in New Mexico, if it is put into effect (if Trump makes good on that campaign promise), is that because a lot of us around her have Spanish last names, that we may get lumped in with Latinos and get deported all the same. It wouldn’t be the first time that white people assumed that we were Mexicans 🇲🇽 based solely on our last names, trust me 🙄.

I hope that doesn’t happen, for my family’s sake, but I won’t be surprised if it does. Living on a reservation in a blue state may not protect us for long under a second Trump presidency that is more unrestrained than the last. But only time will tell. Please don’t deport us, we aren’t Mexicans 🇲🇽, we are US citizens 🇺🇸, not that you should be deporting them anyway if they’re here legally, if they are US citizens 🇺🇸.

I will say this about Trump, obviously we should hope for the best that he won’t do too much damage to the country, but we shouldn’t be at all shocked or surprised if and when he does anything bad, anything egregious. Because during his first term, every time Trump would do something bad or unprecedented, everyone was all shocked and surprised 😮, like “Oh my God, I can’t believe he did this thing that was outrageous, unprecedented, and dangerous 😱.” We shouldn’t be doing that again this time around.

We know he is, we know what he’s capable of, and what he’s willing to do, and we should be expecting it. Even if we don’t exactly what bad things he’ll do and to what extent, but we do know that it will be bad. We should be prepared for it, and know how to respond instead of being unprepared and acting all surprised 😮 when it happens. Remember, he’ll have no guardrails, there will be no adults in the room this time around. It’ll just be crazy people in charge. Crazy and stupid people. 

I will also say that I will not allow myself to be gaslit into liking Trump again. I was pretty anti-Trump in 2016, I was unhappy with him winning. But then I started watching a bunch of right-wing media on YouTube that completely reshaped my opinion about Trump and I became more pro-Trump. My support for Trump began to waver during 2020 as the pandemic 😷🦠 was happening. It kind of ebbed and flowed, where my support for him was going down as the pandemic 😷🦠 started.

But then it went up as the George Floyd protests 🪧 happened and I listening to all this misinformation and disinformation and right-wing propaganda trying to discredit George Floyd and discredit Black Lives Matter ✊🏾✊🏿✊🏽. I was fooled by it, I am willing to admit it. Then my support for Trump again after I saw the Republican National Convention. But then my support wavered again as I getting different information about the protests 🪧 on social media and I was influenced by people in my circle on the Internet 🛜, and it decreased after the debate between him and Biden. I didn’t end up voting for Biden though, I voted for Jo Jorgensen, who was the Libertarian Party’s candidate that year.

My support for him decreased even further after the election 🗳️ when he lost, but still claimed victory and tried to overturn the results. And it completely cratered after January 6. I’ve hated Trump from that point on, and I never went back. And now that he’s been elected again 🗳️, I will not allow myself to be fooled into liking him again. I don’t that will happen because I stopped watching all right-wing or anti-woke media on YouTube after the January 6 insurrection happened, and I don’t plan on watching it ever again.

If I watch any political content on YouTube, it’ll be left-wing media or media from the wider pro-democracy movement, which I did watch on and off during this election cycle 🗳️. I was hoping that I could stop watching political content for a while if Harris had won instead because then I would’ve been more content that things were going to be okay. But now, because she lost and he won, I feel the need to keep watching political content on a somewhat regular basis for the foreseeable future. I feel the need to be informed, and be engaged in case things really south in this country, if things go as sideways as we’re anticipating.

—

(This is the poster for Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.)

 

It's been the long time since I've done one of these, but I wouldn't exactly call it a written review because I don't consider myself a critic, and I don't really like the whole movie reviewing genre on YouTube or anywhere else online. This is just a short first impressions of what I thought of the anime series, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka (or Asuka Magical Girl Spec-Ops). To put it simply, I liked it for the most part. It's a pretty creative take on the magical girl genre ♀︎ which I admittedly haven't really watched that much. 

Basically it mixes the whole idea of a magical girl ♀︎ with war like actual war with artillery, aircraft, tanks, and infantry as well political intrigue. But, it's with magical fantasy creatures, a lot of which look cute and cuddly on the outside but are actually deadly monsters. It even tackles the struggles that soldiers of war go through after a war is over, mainly PTSD and trying to adjust to normal civilian life, but again like with everything else, it's done with magical girls; it also mostly focuses on the main protagonist, Asuka's struggle and not really on any of the other magical girls ♀︎ in the Magical Five who are mostly just supporting characters.

The way I personally interpreted the show is that the "Great War" that the magical girls ♀︎ led by Asuka (or "Rapture" as she's called) fought in against the Disas (monstrous creatures from a magical dimension that look deceptively like stuffed animals)  is like World War II, a great global struggle between good and evil. While the modern conflict that they're dealing with throughout most of the show is like the War on Terror since they keep mentioning terrorists, terrorism, counter-terrorism, insurgents, mercenaries, assassins, and civil wars, and whole conflict is very morally ambiguous. They even include the whole enhanced interrogation (or more accurately torture) thing from the War on Terror with the character War Nurse (I don't remember her actual name, just her call sign) who specializes in torture interrogation or just plain ol' torture of captured magical girl terrorists ♀︎.

The best thing I can say about this show is that the action battle scenes are top notch. They're pretty explosive, bloody 🩸, and brutal, and they do really feel like battle scenes from an actual war movie than a typical action anime. Probably the best battle scenes in the whole show are in the last few episodes when the Babel Brigade (the terrorist organization that's the main antagonist of this series) try to attack this JSDF military base 🇯🇵 on Okinawa hosting this highly decorated and respected Spirit World general for a conference between the human world and the Spirit World; the Spirit World is not the same magical dimension that the Disas are from, it's a different dimension with other magical beings including these fairies or elves that created the magical girls ♀︎. 

I especially like the scenes involving Giess, a former Somali child soldier 🇸🇴 turned giant magical killer cyborg 🦾 and his magical girl ♀︎ companion, Chisato, they're both badass fighters and I really like their characters. Part of me kind of wishes that they survived and made out without being captured even though they were the bad guys because they're both complex bad guys with very tragic backstories and understandable motivations. 

I really feel bad for Chisato in particular because not only did she suffer all her life at the hands of her abusive father after she lost her leg in a car accident that also killed her mother, but she lost the only companion she probably ever had after her accident (who also kind of lied and had a direct hand in her accident to make her a magical girl ♀︎), and she ended up getting captured and tortured and never had a satisfying resolution; no body who she can actually love and trust, and no body who loves or trusts her back.

Speaking of which, that's probably my biggest issue with this show is that it ended very anti-climatically, and with a lot of things left unresolved. The show's only 12 episodes long, and it's clear that at the pace they were going to tell this really sprawling, complex story, there was no way that they could've finished it in 12 episodes, it needed at least 15 or 20; or hell, go the full 28. But, because the studio behind this show only mandated 12 episodes, the show ends very abruptly. 

I don't know if there's a second season or an OVA planned, but the Blu-Ray 💿 that I had said that it was the "Complete Series," so I'm guessing probably not. This is it, this is all of the anime that we're getting, and I have a feeling that the manga continues the story from where the anime left off, and it resolves everything; which just makes the anime seem like one gigantic advertisement for that manga rather than a show with a complete story that stands on its own.

One of the things that was unresolved was that the villains (Giess and Chisato) actually succeeded in their mission in the end despite getting killed (in Giess's case) and getting captured (in Chisato's case), and the magical item they were sent to retrieve in now in the hands of Babel Brigade, and it's masked leader, Brigadier who is probably most likely Francine (the supposedly dead member of the Magical Five who Asuka replaced as the leader of the squad during the "Great War" and constantly mourns over); spoiler alert ⚠️ I guess, but it is pretty obvious who Brigadier actually is like they couldn't have made it any more obvious and predictable if they tried. And they hint that they need one more magical item before they can start another war between the Disas and the human world. But, since the show just cuts off at the 12th episode, we don't know if Babel Brigade gets the last magical item (whatever it is) or not, or if another war starts.

Another thing that I felt was kind of unresolved was War Nurse and her whole torture thing. It's pretty obvious from the first torture scene with her, that War Nurse is pretty fucked in the head. She strips the two magical girls ♀︎ they captured down to their underwear, including an underage one (I think, they're all technically underage since they're all teenagers but this one is like a little kid like a preteen kid), strings them up against a wall or straps them to a weird BDSM device, and she tortures them by injecting them with all sorts of magical drugs including one that gives the victim pleasure and pain at the same time to maximize their suffering. She even turns the first one (the underage one) into a dog (not literally a dog, but she acts like a dog kind of Jet Li's character, Danny in the movie, Unleashed) with a leash and everything in some sort of warped way of pacifying her, and threatens to drug her as punishment for disobeying her, and puts a choker on Chisato (who is the second magical girl prisoner ♀︎ in War Nurse's grasp) that will literally shock her if she even thinks about trying to escape or betray the Magical Five.

I know, these are both villains who killed some people or tried to kill people, but this is not okay. The way War Nurse treats the two prisoners is even more fucked up than the way Asuka's friend, Sayako's father treated the piece of shit terrorist guy from the beginning of the show. At least, all he did there was torture the guy ♂︎ and rip out his teeth, War Nurse straight up brainwashed one of her prisoners and threatens to drug them with magical drugs that make them suffer even more; if any real-life country implemented interrogation tactics like these, there would be outrage (and rightfully so), even though aren't "as violent" as the ones done by Sayako's police officer father. It can't really go on like this, Asuka's eventually going to have to find out what War Nurse does when she's not around and she'll have to answer for it. 

Or maybe Chisato can find a way to escape or is rescued by Babel Brigade, and is able to get her revenge on War Nurse since it's clear that does not like the way she's being treated by her and is not entirely giving into her pacification efforts. But, none of that  could happen since the show just cut off and ended abruptly. I understand that the writers wanted to make War Nurse a morally ambiguous character (perhaps even an amoral character), but the way she tortures and brainwashes the magical girl POWs (or tries to), and never answers for it and kind of pretends to be the soft-spoken kind, gentle one (who's just a little obsessed with Asuka) makes it very difficult for me to really like her or care about her as a secondary protagonist.

And the last thing that I thought was unresolved was the whole erasing Sayako's memory thing. Earlier on in the show, one Asuka's human friends, Sayako is abducted by Babel Brigade and is horrifically tortured including having hot tongs (heated on a hot grill) burnt into her flesh (like it cooks into a small chunk of her belly), being waterboarded essentially by this water spirit thing, and having her left arm cut off by the sadistic Babel Brigade magical girl ♀︎, Abigail's magical scissors. 

As you would expect, Sayako is deeply traumatized by this whole experience (despite having her burn wound healed and severed arm reattached by War Nurse) to point where she even fears and hates magical girls ♀︎. To spare her long-term emotional pain and prevent long-term hatred/resentment towards magical girls ♀︎, Asuka, War Nurse, and Sayako's own father decide to erase her memory of the event, so she ends up back to the way she was before she was kidnapped by Abigail. 

But, I kind of feel like that was too quick of a fix, you can't just erase Sayako's memory, regress her back to what she was before the event and expect everything would be okay from there. As fucked up as it sounds, I think it would be better for her to remember the event and to grow and change into a better person from that event. I mean, who's to say Sayako would've still hated magical girls ♀︎ even a few weeks after her horrible experience? Maybe, once she knew that Asuka and War Nurse were magical girls ♀︎, maybe she would've grown to appreciate them and not take her anger and sadness out on them. I hope that they were leading to something with her like maybe Abigail runs into her again, and maybe to get revenge on her, she restores her memory of the event or she tortures her horrifically again to traumatize her again for humiliating her in front of her queen, Brigadier.

If they didn't, and they kept her with her having her memory erased, then I wouldn't really like that. You had this opportunity to tell a character arc about trauma, resentment, and learning to overcome and grow from it, and you squandered it by having her memory erased and not really growing at all. But, I guess, it does make sense for this world and the lore that's been established.  Why let people who had traumatic experiences suffer from PTSD when you can just erase their memory of the event entirely? But, that's not really how I would personally do it if I was writing it. 

To me, memory erasure in a story is just a quick fix, it's something that the characters do to protect their identity or maintain the secret about the work they do or  protect one of their loved ones from a bad memory, that doesn't really work out in the end. Usually, the person's memory comes back somehow, they remember everything that happened, and the other characters' efforts to erase their memory were futile. You might think that's cliché, and maybe it is, but I think that's way better storytelling and it sends a more poignant and positive message that there is no easy fix to PTSD or emotional pain from a tragic or horrific event and that all you can do is just learn from it, grow, and move on. Instead of—in the words of Alfred Pennyworth—"trying to outsmart the truth."

But, the besides the abrupt ending and unresolved plot and character threads, I did really enjoy the show. It was a very interesting take on the magical girl genre ♀︎, a very dark take that doesn't get so dark and gritty that it teeters on parody and ridiculousness. It does have moments of levity, and it is self aware of how inherently fantastical and silly the concept is despite how straight it plays it. And I really liked all of the battle scenes, and almost all of the characters except for War Nurse and maybe Sayako. War Nurse is just too crazy and horrible for me really to like and care about her, and Sayako (before the kidnapping and after the memory erasure) is kind of annoying, but she isn't too bad, she can be kind of fun in certain moments. 

My favorite character, is the American magical girl 🇺🇸♀︎, Mila Cyrus (kind of like Miley Cyrus I presume), she's the most charismatic, cool, and badass of the group (though the Russian magical girl 🇷🇺♀︎ is pretty badass too), she's definitely not as mopey as Asuka and she's not as crazy or weird as War Nurse. Which I suppose makes sense considering that she's American 🇺🇸, and the creators probably made her like that based on stereotypes and the way Americans 🇺🇸 are perceived by Japanese people 🇯🇵. I don't really like giving ratings anymore, at least in my written works, but if I were to rate this show, I'd give it an 8 out of 10; two points are taken off for the abrupt ending and unfinished storyline.