Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okaasan wa Suki Desuka

Posted by Choya on August 16, 2019 August 16, 2019 First Impressions / Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okaasan wa Suki Desuka

「なんという美少女… いや母さんじゃなくて. その格好で近寄るなやめろ.」 (Nan to Iu Bishoujo… Iya Kaasan ja Nakute. Sono Kakkou de Chikayoru na Yamero.)
“What a Beautiful Girl… Wait, Not You, Mom. Don’t Get Near Me in That Outfit, Stop!”

Continuing off from the last episode, we’re still at the academy where Masato, Mamako, and their party find themselves at odds with a possessive mother. But whereas Mamako’s intervention was able to put a temporary stop to Medhimama’s interference into their studies, they have yet to tackle the elephant in the room that is Medhi’s mental state slowly deteriorating from her mother’s overbearing, competitive, and abusive nature.

Tonally, it is an unusual arc in that we’re constantly alternating between family drama and ecchi/school-life hijinks. For the latter, we get it in this episode in two forms: a cooking class and a swimming class. The cooking class is actually a cute scene in that it shows our party succeeding by their own merits, having them all trudge forward with the encouragement of Mamako’s beneficial soup. The swimming scenes are similarly light-hearted for the most part with Wise lamenting another magic-blocking spell inflicted on her and a tentacle scene with Mamako that borders somewhere between tongue-in-cheek and unsettling (and with the light bar of censorship, it’ll be even more socially frowned upon on the Bluray). Porta is the secret MVP of the episode with how adorable she is when she’s successfully using her magecraft to craft healing takoyaki from a massive octopus tentacle. For brief moments, even Medhimama becomes likable when she shows up in a sailor uniform and a provocative swimsuit. Yes, it is very shallow to see the good in somebody’s existence based on how they look in a swimsuit, but with Medhimama, there isn’t as much going for her on the personality spectrum.

In this case, it’s her personality that brings out the episode’s darker scenes where her obsession with making her daughter #1 takes a more sinister turn. As with Wise’s mom, she automatically throws her chances of being easily redeemable out the window when she tells her daughter that she’s worthless if she doesn’t meet her expectations. With the amount of pressure and weight that her mother puts on her shoulders, naturally, Medhi would be resentful of all of this. But in this episode, this resentment reaches its fever pitch as her distaste for her mother’s ways hits its all-time high when her mother slaps her for losing against Masato. At first, she runs away, but when Masato and Mamako follow her, the mood shifts even further away from light-hearted as Medhi kicks a wall with her bare feet, expressing her desire to kill her mother as her pupils dilate into scribbled spirals. Admittedly, it is pretty jarring to go from this scene to the bubbly chibi ED. At the same time, I can’t help but admire a show like this where it isn’t ashamed to play around with setting the scene for tonal shifts, tinkering around with both ecchi comfort food and deeply depressing cautionary tales about how families fall apart when a parent starts to get abusive or neglectful. It’s messy, but in its messiness, it remains unique in blending the most generic isekai tropes with the full embrace of the positive and negative that can come from all of the older characters being attractive moms. It could’ve honestly just been a series that gawked at MILFs and end it at that, but Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okaasan wa Suki Desuka goes the extra mile by having something more to say about familial bonds and how they can be reinforced or broken from how a mother and child see one another.