Onwards to the end!

Ep33: This episode opens with drama on the lacrosse team. One of them is all upset that she made a mistake, and it’s throwing off her game. Everyone’s concerned about that second part, but every time they mention it she thinks they’re saying they’re mad about her missing the shot.

Evil Lady is even more hilarious this time as she memory-cuckoos her way onto the other team.

Seems Porun doesn’t have to be around to give them their powerup. That’s something, I guess.

Ep34: Okay, now Evil Lady has hilariously vowed to kill them. Also today is the school tournament day, where all the girls discuss their wish to marry Sporty but she has eyes only for whatshisface.

Ep35: Birthday episode now. And now a popular boy has finally confessed love to Sporty! But it’s not her crush! He does seem a good fit for her, in that his idea of a date is collecting and then eating food.

Then chesnut monster.

What

Luckily not-boyfriend gets knocked out so they can transform, which evil guy implies was deliberate. Also, luckily Sporty has no spine when it comes to romance issues and begged her friend into following. And naturally he half wakes up and sees transformed-her, who he’ll now crush on, freeing Sporty from the need to turn him down. And then she meets her crush on the way back.

We end discovering that Sporty’s original plan was to make terrible lunches so he’d stop crushing on her. That, or she actually meant well and is just making excuses.

Ep36: Apparently there’s random zakenna servants doing non-evil stuff like sweeping. The guardian escapes, then gets captured again. This episode serves to illustrate why TVtropes’ stupid gender equality page is stupid. Even in a magic girl show, things default to male – we’ve got female main characters and they have a female social circle, but that’s all – the legendary hero OCM is male, the guardian is male, the elder who does most of the exposition is male, the queen barely appears but the prince has been monopolizing half the episodes, the bad guy groups only ever have one token girl, and even the random shadow monsters are male.

Ep37: They’re Romeo and Juliet. Also the humans-evil-things get funnier by the episode.

Ep38: This episode is about her little brother going to deliver a thing. She is a remarkably good sister!

Ep39: Her teacher gets married. Also, quilting. Also, further confusion about how much of reality gets retconned back when evil guys damage stuff and are then defeated.

Ep40: Sleepover! The other children have their mind blow by the sight of a shed, because they live in Japan.

They ask Science who she has a crush on, and she thinks of her nonhuman sorta boyfriend. Also, we’re reminded of how little sense it makes that Porun hangs out with Sporty when Science has more room and a dog to play with him. Science also uses science to realize she’s dreaming – her chemistry produces flower petals as an explosion, therefore dream.

Ep41: We learn Team Evil is in more imminent danger, as they’ll be consumed by the dark power too. Presumably they need to get a necklace with a magic stone just like the original Team Evil – this also explains why Teen Evil could hand his necklace over, the consuming thing takes a bit to kick in. They also finally figure out Porun was hiding it.

Also, their reality warping powers continue to be amazing, this time teleporting Sporty out of the lacrosse finals. It’s not just that no one noticed she disappeared – they actually hallucinate she’s there, and even do stuff like try to pass to her, then explain her failure to catch it as her fumbling the ball.

Ep42: What’s most important in life, the girls wonder? Love? Happiness? Friendship? Science comes over to Fullmetal Alchemist it up by listing water and then the various other components of the human body.

Then the villains purposefully split the two, having finally recognized their special attack requires holding hands. Then they taunt Sporty about how she can’t accomplish anything, and for some reason this works for a while. Then she succeeds and rescues Science, then has a breakdown about how scary it was to not have Science for backup. Science somehow manages to not reply pointing out she was watching her hands dissolve.

Ep43: This episode she accidentally promises someone to help them get with her crush. Meanwhile Team Evil has decided to double-cross their king. This seems pretty easy to do, given that if you just ignore him long enough he’ll destroy himself. Also, they’ve changed somehow in some way.

Ep44: Now she’s making the guy chocolates. Japan’s whole thing with chocolates is weird. Chocolate is stupid hard to deal with, that’s why you buy it instead.

Team Evil update: our world has chaos energy and they’ve been eating that, so that’s why they’re different, and also apparently the girls have been similarly getting power.

And huh, Science’s sorta boyfriend appears. I was wondering if they were going to somehow get the power to bring him back. Seems it’s maybe happening on its own. Will the end be transforming all the members of Team Evil into normal humans?

Ep45: They’ve got super important solo parts for the song, and it doesn’t occur to them that they’ve constantly getting grabbed and should avoid being lynchpins to anything.

Then when it’s time for the competition, they see Team Evil and head off after them, rather than sticking like glue to their group and hoping the attack will do the usual knock-everyone-out-first thing so they can beat the bad guys and then do the competition. Luckily their friends continue to be absurdly forgiving about their constant disappearing acts.

Ep46: The bad guys figure out you just have to repeat what the guardian said that one time and it’ll reverse the spell. They monologue and gloat about how smart this is, but just as the villains never attack during the transformation sequence, apparently the heroes can’t attack during a good monologue.

Speaking of which, later, they transform when they see the stones activate, and despite being alone still give their stock villain intimidation speech.

Ep47: Back with Team Evil, we pan across a bunch of framed pictures of them, because apparently that was what they were doing when not attacking middle schoolers.

Anyway, what they’re doing will destroy the worlds as a side effect, and the light queen can protect things but might die. Still no explanation for the parrot.

Okay, so now the end of the show is one superpowered guy opposing another superpowered guy while a third superpowered guy rescues the heroes. This is not really what I expected for a magical girl show.

Ep48: So apparently Teen Evil was fine this whole time and just wandering around in no-man’s-land. That’s terribly anticlimactic. Then they’re shocked when focusing on beating the guys holding the stones leads to the other guy getting the power afterward.

Ep49: Okay so now they’re fighting the dark king, again. Way too much Porun, in both screentime and importance. At least he doesn’t actually take the villain out, he’s just the sole reason the girls manage to do it.

Then upon victory, the OCMs say they’ve decided to stay with the girls, which for some reason means being unconscious and functionally dead. Also Teen Evil has maybe turned into a regular human and used the insinuate power to get a family, which includes erasing his memories, maybe?

Holy shit, this is a terrible, terrible ending.

Final thoughts:

This was really cute and had enough out-there elements to keep me occupied.

The obligatory cute mascots were really annoying and a clumsy mix of adult and pet. Still, the girls are great and despite my referring to them by their primary hobby their characterization was the main thing of the series and well done.

So it’s weird there’s been this whole light/dark thing and then the magical girls are themselves called White and Black yet purely light aligned. Also weird is the dark=evil thing since the dark denizens seemed astoundingly non-evil, down to the little dark-fragments running off shouting their apologies. The more intelligent ones seemed motivated by loyalty and personal survival (which kind of got messed up by the fact apparently they can survive just fine by just wandering off).

Similarly, what was with the whole balance business? The dark king kept saying he’d die if they didn’t get him the stones, so he can’t be an eternal thing, and while the first time they blew him up it caused more darkness to sprout, the second time seems like it worked fine.

I like a lot of the ideas but wish there was more depth to them – the way the Pretty Cure transformation seems to be a matter of getting partly taken over by some legendary avatar only appears to explain why they’re shouting attacks and stuff. And the reality warping and the way stuff resets back when the bad guys are beaten.

Plus, what was up with the second batch of bad guys? Why did they start off as people with established lives? What was up with their ability to jam themselves into human groups and what did it mean for their personalities and outlook? Why did the female one act so differently in human form?

Way too many boys who were way too important, way too much time spent on a particularly annoying one growing into his sue powers. Having the powerup necessary for winning fights need to be given each and every time really undermined the two girls, too. We start off so well – girls, who are friends with more girls, adult women around to look up to, etc, and then slowly things tilt toward boys.

I also wish the girls had shown a bit more consideration for the dark team – it was going that way with the first group, but then they didn’t care in the least for the second. And I would’ve liked to see them return by the girls actually doing something to accomplish it, rather than one character showing back up because eh, he was already there. It’s not like he was actually needed to do anything plotwise – he flies them away, they say no wait bring us back, he shoots the enemy once to no effect, then happy ending. Getting the power of creation and then making the dead dark folk into their human forms before giving it back seems so much more satisfying.

Horrible, horrible ending that managed to be worse than the normal horrible NOW YOU’RE NORMAL AND THERE’S NO MORE MAGIC KAY? because at least those don’t usually end in your magical guides effectively suiciding so you can keep their corpse as a memento. Maybe it’s fixed in the second season.