Magical Girl Site

Magical Girl Site (Japanese: 魔法少女サイト, Hepburn: Mahō Shōjo Saito) is a Japanese psychological horror magical girl manga series written and illustrated by Kentarō Satō. It is a spin-off/sequel to Magical Girl Apocalypse. It was serialized on Akita Shoten's Champion Tap! website from July 2013 to October 2017 and later in the shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Champion from October 2017 to August 2019, with its chapters collected in sixteen tankōbon volumes. The manga is licensed for English release in North America by Seven Seas Entertainment. An anime adaptation of the same name by production aired from April to June 2018.

Plot
Aya Asagiri is a 14 year bullied and withdrawn middle school student who gains the ability to become a magical girl through a mysterious website. She soon finds friends, who are also magical girls like herself, that provide her strength. Aya and her friends also face enemies. The magical girls soon discover that the very website that gave them their magic is planning a dark surprise that will threaten all of humankind. This ends in a climactic race for Aya because she must keep herself and her friends alive.

Why It's Misfortunate

 * 1) To get the cat out of the room for starters, this series is WAY too dark to be a dark magical girl series, It had a philosophical aspect. Aside that, it is also notable for being EXTREMELY mean-spirited and utterly soulless as the main protagonist Aya gets constantly abused by especially her older brother and the bullies for no reason to satisfy their sick amusement on her throughout the whole manga and it feels unnecessary as a spin-off of Magical Girl Apocalypse.
 * 2) *Aside from it, It feels really ashamed of the dark magical girl lore, and ends up becoming cruel and nasty to put the cat out of the room, while never getting a solid identity along with moral values, social norms and heroism and cares more about nonsensical chaos and resolutions. But sounds like it was written by someone who had seen too many serieses and horror genres about bullying, suffering, and abuse.
 * 3) **It uses shock value as nothing without intelligence and exists for filler. The author himself is not really trying to draw everyone in. Only just the gifted few who can see how unique a person is.
 * 4) ***It probably felt that the author had no experience writing characters and villains and was possibly made when he ran out of ideas, but was basically had been seen a lot of dark stories too much.
 * 5) **It even feels more like a "pseudo-revenge" story. But attempts to execute much about focusing on the themes of happiness, cruelty and sadness.
 * 6) **Rather than staring off as a regular dark magical girl series just like Puella Magi Madoka Magica. However, it turns out near the end of the manga, that the plot was some kind of pseudo-philosophical treaties about the nature of humanity and it's earth's race, which tries to be serious on how it treats humans for not understanding their emotions by taking their lives to themselves with no with and respect for it and often hurt one another and long then driven by hate and manipulation.
 * 7) **The manga itself rely on too many characters who get inferior character development and sometimes the characters or the villains (which are minors) are killed without any explanation to build with.
 * 8) ***As a result, It also tries to build up suspense or mystery, but it takes forever to do that and ruins the story as a result of endless padding with slow pacing, but of course, the series doesn't know which character is the focus on every single chapter, which barely even feels like a magical girl series.
 * 9) ***It also states that it treats people in a cruel yet callous regions of humanity so that the happy scenes can be happier. But, sadly, his writing is coming across less like it wants to make readers feel good and just cares about standing out by using shock tactics. Even then it is possible, that he has no knowledge with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, making the manga more like a soulless inspiration.
 * 10) *It even considers that either innocent unfortunate girls could turn into psychopaths or lose their happy lives.
 * 11) **For this manga that is about magical girls, it tries to have a magical girl who uses magic to fight evil-doers and save the day is just because terrible things are the worst for those doing.
 * 12) *The series is a confusing attempted mess of a manga artist to make himself seem like an artist to select few that sees his uniqueness and disturbing that makes readers not only dumb but at the same time make someone feel dirty.
 * 13) A very nonexistent yet messy story that is quite unnecessary and too dark to be mean-spirited revolving around the main protagonist, Aya Asagiri, being bullied at school and beaten by his sadistic brother, Kaname. In an attempt to take her own life, she instead discovers the Magical Girl Site that gives her "magical powers", which resulted in some deadly consequences.
 * 14) Since it's advertised as a spin off to Magical Girl Apocalypse, It barely has any connection with the author's first series until later chapters.
 * 15) The main characters along with supporting ones, despite being likeable are pretty weak characters or even try to sympathize with.
 * 16) *Aya Asagiri is a generic "cowardly, bullied, yet timid" main protagonist who has no reason for her classmates and brother to torment her and discovers the Magical Girl Site that grants her "magical powers". which gets her into deadly consequences. She doesn't even bother telling her parents or her teachers at all. She is also very weak and delusional but making her like that doesn't make her a good protagonist despite she was not that unheroic.
 * 17) *Nijimi "Nijimin" Anazawa is a pop star idol who throws tantrums towards those who would ruin her happy life.
 * 18) *Tusyuno Yatsumura, while not evil, had tortured her parents' killer instead of taking him to custody.
 * 19) *Sayuki Ringa is rather a weak swordfighter who has no mention that her father and head of their family clan was training her.
 * 20) *Asahi Takiguchi is a weak fighter who barely trains herself.
 * 21) Uncharismatic characterizations that takes it way too seriously to be loathsome, reckless, and murderous, making them as unconvincing to add the salt to the wound.
 * 22) The fight scenes are inconsistent, slow and outright poor. Only because again, the sticks will lose their lifespan, which is even more poorly executed.
 * 23) Some of those chapters are very formulaic and just intended to show how a person can defeat a powerful one.
 * 24) The "Magic Sticks" are used when there lifespan fades as more the sticks they used. Making this wasteful as possible.
 * 25) it has a lot of pointless filler like Aya and the girls going on a beach, while Kaname and Sarina continue to torture Aya for no reason which makes them more evil and twisted than the King and the Site Administrators.
 * 26) While the King and the Site Administrators are real antagonists, this series only focuses more on Kaname as the "actual" villain in the first half.
 * 27) Too many subplots that feels like the manga have no main narrative with way too many characters to focuse on like:
 * 28) Aya dealing with her bullies while their leader, Sarina wants revenge on her for their deaths.
 * 29) Kaname being emo about how he would torture Aya so much, hates humanity, pushed too hard by his strict father's studies, being "friends" with Keisuke Naoto with Nijimi being his "lover", tried to steal magic sticks.
 * 30) Kichiro investigating the magical girl incidents while finding her other adopted sister, Louise.
 * 31) Jiro wanting Kaname to keep up his studies to take him to Tokyo University.
 * 32) Besides the main characters, the other characters that are just uncharismatic for following reasons:
 * 33) *The minor characters are one dimensional cardboard cut outs despite they're in a psychological horror magical girl manga, this makes it worse for their abysmal moronic characterization. of course have any character development.
 * 34) **Aya's teachers are portrayed like terrible, completely, yet irresponsible morons who never pay any attention to Aya's bullying at class. They don't get fired for that.
 * 35) ***Like her male teacher being lazy and did nothing to stop Aya's problems with bullying and seems caring about getting his job done, since he doesn't care about about his students' mental lives.
 * 36) ***Also, Her reading teacher trying to tell Aya to make her voice louder during reading a book, but Sarina pokes her with a pen and tells the reading teacher that she should keep repeating the same thing just because her voice is soft ever since Aya transferred, very nervously or maybe just bullying her to the middle aged woman's unawareness.
 * 37) **Keisuke Naoto, A fan of Nijimin barely has any comic relief at all, who has no purpose with the story and thinks that Nijimi is her only idol that he cares. He befriends Kaname and then learns that Nijimi "was in love" with Kaname and then tries to kill him but ended up being mind controlled by Kaname, who forces him to kill himself. He is also rather pointless to the narrative and exists to probably add more male characters in a magical girl series.
 * 38) **Makoto Hinomoto, Aya's male classmate (who has good terms), is very useless and doesn't help Aya from her bullies and said he was too weak to fight them back, since he apologized to Aya for not having the courage to help her and thinks he's just a piece of trash just like them.
 * 39) *The worst offender with this series are the human villains who are forgettable, unconvincing to try to fit in the dark magical girl lore and act like these girls or men would want people to suffer horrible pain than those villains from Magical Girl Apocalypse who are supposed to be twisted and evil while these from Magical Girl Site are incredibly bland and cartoonish made worst by being cruelly evil for the case of mean-spiritedness and lifeless unlike the main villains, the King and her Site Administrators. Even so, they feel unnecessary to the story:
 * 40) **Kaname Asagiri is a generic "God Complex" villain who is somewhat of a rip off of Light Yagami from Death Note, Lelouch Vi Brittania, from Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, if both were horribly written and is by far one of the WORST characters in the whole series and the most insufferable. In this, he is a cruel, yet complexed 16 year old student who likes to have "good fun" torturing Aya in pain as a stress relief. Kaname only abuses Aya because their own father was also a domestic abuser just like him, who beats him up if he doesn't get perfect scores on his exams for his grades to take him to Tokyo University, seriously.
 * 41) ***He is portrayed irredeemable, unlikeable, unapologetic, and liar who often ripped off multiple other anime characters. He even has no reason to think of Aya as a nobody and a slave while having no reason for her to not have a lot of friends unlike Aya's bully, Sarina.
 * 42) ***He poorly represents what a 16 year-old teenager would act since he's seriously a victim of child abuse.
 * 43) ***Throughtout the series, Kaname constantly out of his way to use Aya as his stress relief and slave whenever he fails trying to torture her, but this would make be equally emo and monologues too much about his life being miserable and his father's grueling education, in which he was meant to be sympathetic, but he's not.
 * 44) ***Aside from abusing Aya, his plans shifted to something nonsensical when Kaname tricked his parents that he was walking outside by manipulating Nijimi into using her telepathic panties to command his own orders, steal magic sticks from Aya and the others and nothing else.
 * 45) *** As much as his goals are nonsensical, Kaname only cares about thinking that his abusive father is better off dead and prove he is not a pushover.
 * 46) **Aya's father, Jiro, is like a greedy, disciplining homeschool teacher which makes Uncle Ben from the Spider-Man comics look irresponsible but with "great studying comes great expectations" that only cares about his son's education and wants him to study hard. If his son doesn't succeed, his father would hit him as a disappointment.
 * 47) ***His abuse and beatings was the source for Kaname's sadistic nature forcing him to be a selfish cruel person who thinks humans are wasted, God as his "savior', lacking no friends, and no respect to Aya or her friends. Just like his son, Mr Asagiri lacks any evil or cruelty that Kaname had become. When he only cares much Kaname's academic performance, his irritating monologue shows him that he was a racist who thinks he and his son are superior of their education as keeping up to college is just a "fulfilling dream", making his statements way out of character.
 * 48) ****This was also revealed that he was assumed to have failed at Tokyo University, which is well-reasonable at least, but still remorseless as he is. Also after being traumatized from his failure, he was shown to have murdered his wife's second child by punching the stomach rather than taking her to the hospital.
 * 49) *****Speaking about the idea of failing in college/university, this concept considers that if they fail these people would take out his/her anger on others, wait what!?
 * 50) ***Throughout the series, He ignores and neglects Aya, proving that he didn't care about her for some reasons. When Kaname left to lure Aya and her friends into stealing magic sticks to keep him out of trouble, Jiro lost hope and thinks that his son was trying to get away from him, but when Kaname was found, he tried to punish him for leaving him and forces his son to go back to his room to study for his education.
 * 51) **** It even states that Jiro was not Aya's biological father, and tried to disown her until he was interrupted by Site Admin Juni, who was previously commanded by Jiro using Nijimi's panties, proving that he is a very unsympathetic idiot.
 * 52) **Sarina Shizukume, Aya's bully, is a female rip off of Bakugou Katsuki who often bullies Aya every day at school for no reason.
 * 53) ***She does things like hurting Aya with dodgeballs, using darts to break her phone, vandalizing her class seat (with bugs) and desk, school locker and shoes, throwing her lunches to the ground, drowning her face to the toilet, murdering a cat, sending an older student to assault Aya, scaring Aya with a box cutter, telling Nijimi about where Rina Shioi is, and tried to kill Aya and her other classmate, Tsuyuno Yatsumura.
 * 54) The art ranges from hideousness and utterly disgusting agony with shock value in every chapter that just makes the readers sick to their stomachs and sickens to read, offensively. For example, There are lots of over the top gore, even the villains' faces are hideous, and then every girls gets written like harmless punching bags which is such an insult to injury.
 * 55) After chapter 55, the first chapter in the Weekly Shonen Champion magazine issue is actually before the events of the first half to put salt to the wound, which is a slow beginning as it focuses on a different character named Kayo Komura, a rehash of Aya Asagiri. Unlike her, her father, a police detective, was arrested for killing those 3 teenage men (who also murdered Kayo's sister, Airi). Thus, becoming a laughingstock at school. It gets worst as her mother, Sachiko was hospitalized. This takes forever until 20 chapters in order to go back to where chapter 55 left off.
 * 56) *Even though moving to Weekly Shonen Champion still continues consisting of unnecessary filler scenes and padding.
 * 57) False Advertising:
 * 58) *The 6th volume's cover shows Aya's team and Kosame's team about to fight in their main clothes. But in the manga, Nijimi, Asahi, Kiyoharu, and Mikari are in their casual normal clothes, while Aya, Tsuyuno, Rina, Sayuki, and Kosame wear blue kimonos. Speaking of Nijimi holding a broken apple does not have it at all.
 * 59) *Jiro in the cover of volume 13, was thought to have covered his face in gray-white with blue lips as he smiles, and it doesn't happen at all.
 * 60) The new characters from chapter 56 do help improved the series for following reasons:
 * 61) *Mellisa Maina Matsuhiro is a more dreadful rehash of Aya's bully, Sarina. She is a young loan shark who uses her classmate, Kayo, to give her money due to his father being a murderer and is much more evil than her.
 * 62) Surprisingly returning characters from Magical Girl Apocalypse, Tsukune Fukumoto, police officer Rintaro Akuta, and Kaede Sayano do not team up or encounter with the magical girls at the climax of the manga.
 * 63) A pointless cameo of former US president Donald Trump that feels forced for filler.
 * 64) A lot of idiot moves:
 * 65) Sayuki slashes Go, as hard as she can. however, Go later uses shards from her mouth to slash down her left eye and left arm.
 * 66) Jiro, using Nijimi's panties, commands Juni to stop, but dies from lifespan just because he was trying to control his son to study along with keeping his wife and daughter out of trouble.
 * 67) *Even Jiro urinating to his butt bleeding is unintentionally hilarious and cringe-worthy for his death.
 * 68) Rina runs from one of the site admins, Juhachi, as it disintegrates her left leg while she was protecting her mother.
 * 69) Asahi should have just attack the Site Admin, Ni or else. instead, she just took her frends to a safe place rather than attacking the site admins and now dies from lifespan for that.
 * 70) Aya shooting Site Admin, Juroku by teleporting her to another place instead of turning her back into a human.
 * 71) Kaname uses a teddy bear magic stick to target the King, but it's no use because he was already been sodomized and lost his manhood at the hands of Detective Kichiro Misumi.
 * 72) The final battle with the King and the remaining Site Admins was rushed and anti-climatic because again, the magic sticks can make people lose lifespan when they use them.
 * 73) A very rushed ending as it comes off as even more insulting is that we DON'T get to see how Aya prevent her misfortune when she tried to keep the cat, Mya safe, along with defeating the King.
 * 74) *But now Aya doesn't get to see or find her biological mother who is now alive, when she decides to stay with the Asagiri family for the better (when Kaname no longer abuses her to endure his abusive father's grueling training for gifted students).
 * 75) *This part was trying to convinced that she and Ichi rebuilt earth and rewrote people's memories to be good people, making the plots-holes forgotten and never continued to resolve.
 * 76) **This statement feels like it's trying to convince that turning people with negative influences would make them happy instead of forcing others to get over with it and learn their mistakes.
 * 77) *Nana being bought back to life and becoming the earth's new god means that she (as Hyoka) would still retain her misfortune and will not turn back into a human whatsoever.
 * 78) The Seven Seas Entertainment translation has unnecessary swearing that's tries too hard to be mature and dirty compared to other unofficial fan translations. But also, it will get you on your last nerve when reading the text. Aside from the swearing of dialogues, it suffers from painful ones that are either poorly executed and tries too much to be seriously mature and edgy.
 * 79) It had anime adaptation of the same name, which despite being faithful to the source material. BUUUT, it instead tries to add too much filler and there are scenes that weren't in the manga and some that did omit some to tone down the adaptation. Making this adaption nonexistent and didn't need to be a anime despite what the manga looks, since it's probably to capitalize the dark magical girl genre.
 * 80) Five words: The infamous spin off/prequel.
 * 81) The series has a horrible message for males and females such as studying with perfection for grades is the right thing for their future or thinking that everyone in this world is bunch of self-righteous, yet brainless fools that don't deserve to live, for example.
 * 82) The motto of Magical Girl Site is "how misfortunate, how misfortunate, And so, I will grant you a magical power" (or "oh wretched thing, so full of woe to you, poor soul, It's magic i bestow" in the Seven Seas Entertainment version), which means you are a poor person that is useless and treated like a harmless punching bag. Even so, it's message is rather hypocritical and attempts to think people are either cruel or even remorseless towards their victims.
 * 83) In final volume's letter page, the author of the manga thinks that it's trying to focused on unfortunate girls trying to earn their happiness, and thinks that the series is the finale that started with Magical Girl Apocalypse, not helping that he will most likely not make a follow-up to Magical Girl Site, whatsoever.
 * 84) It can be considered the nail to the coffin for the author's newcomer career as an artist since 2012 until he launched a new manga in 2021 about the zombie apocalypse titled Punishment And Immortality, which is unrelated to the author's previous works or has any connection with Magical Girl Site whatsoever.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) While the concept is fine, but could have been executed better to its writing, pacing, themes, and originality.
 * 2) It didn't even need to feature or rely on Magical Girl transformations at all aside from Rina using a camera magic stick to take a picture of Sarina's sister, Saki, so that she can copy her body.
 * 3) Since it has something to do with connections from Magical Girl Apocalypse, it didn't have to rehash the same elements and plot of the aformentioned Apocalypse.
 * 4) Aya actually doesn't act as malicious or unheroic at all, and does have a good heart, as she does get more character development. Also, she then becomes a brave girl in later chapters.
 * 5) Likeable characters like Aya, Yatsumura, Rina, Kiyoharu, Kosame, Asahi, and Sayuki.
 * 6) Of course, Yatsumura wasn't supposed to be a rip off of Homura Akemi from Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
 * 7) Speaking of Detective Kichiro Misumi, he is the only good male character who does not act as cruel than Kaname ever was.
 * 8) *They even had Makoto Hinomoto, who is nicer to Aya.
 * 9) The reason why he tortured her sister due to his father pressuring him to keep up his studies and be accepted Tokyo University was well-explained for Kaname and could have deserved better if he keeps thinking too much about how his life is trash because of his father.
 * 10) *Even for Kaname's father who was assumed to have failed at college and led him to pressure and beat his son to study hard was reasonable, and proved that he was not that evil than his son.
 * 11) Kaname does gets some comeuppance when Kichiro kidnap him and tortured him, despite being absolutely pointless.
 * 12) Unlike Aya murdering her bullies, Kayo does not do that and unintentionally frames Mellisa for thinking Kayo and Sakura committed suicide because of her so that she will no longer harm her and her friend, Takuma.
 * 13) Some of the light hearted and funny moments are here.
 * 14) Aya's mother is a nice parent who would never harm Aya or Kaname like this. But, she is aware of her husband being a domestic abuser.
 * 15) The King and the Site Administrators are solid intimidating main antagonists with an understandable motivation to destroy Earth and replace it with a new world in their image.
 * 16) As opposed to Aya who wasn't Kaname's biological sister, it was revealed that Yatsumura was her real sister and his father was actually Makoto Hinomoto, taking on the form of her classmate. This explains why the Asagiri family did not care about her when she was adopted.
 * 17) The artwork is good and cute, except for the writing.
 * 18) Sarina does redeem herself from realizing all the bullying she did to Aya in later chapters and does help her and the magical girls fight the King and the Site Admins.
 * 19) Suprisingly happy ending: In the last remaining chapters, Aya do prevent her loves ones from misfortune. She then uses Ichi to sacrifice himself and finally destroying the King so that her friends (especially Yatsumura, Nijimi, Rina, Sarina, Kayo, and Kosame Amagai's team) will be alive and safe from any destruction.
 * 20) It is an epitome how NOT to make a dark magical girl series and any other edgy series.
 * 21) Despite this, the series had a potential to be horror dark magical girl series if it was handled better and making much sense.