31 October 2016: Magikal girls except dark is okay, but it's no magikal girls except brutally violent
And she never smiled again.
I think we were all expecting Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku to be this season's magikal girl bloodbath. Indeed, its opening scene features a girl surrounded by bloodied corpses. However, with Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku taking its sweet time getting to the fireworks factory, ViVid Strike! has effectively beaten it to the, uh, punch.
At least she isn't hanging off the edge of a coffin.
ViVid Stike! is a bit of a departure from most mahou shoujo fare due to how it has evolved into a mixed martial arts tournament show from its Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha roots, and Nanoha itself was already a bit of a departure from more traditional mahou shoujo standards. So really, events from episodes four and five should probably not surprise anyone, but even I was only half kidding when I ventured, "Who knew a show about mahou shoujo MMA could be so violent?"
Rinne didn't even bother putting on shoes before skipping town.
If you're a fan of revenge fantasies and little girls beating the Bejesus out of people who probably don't even believe in Bejesus, then ViVid Strike! is the show for you. I'm going to make a dubious leap and compare ViVid Strike! to Shakespeare by reminding y'all that revenge tragedies are an accepted staple of classic theater, so there ought to be a place in this world for mahou shoujo revenge anime. I.e., those cunts had it coming.
Hey, it's the underboob nun. (Underboob sold separately.)
These events might just be a one-off thing before ViVid Strike! settles into training montage doldrums and some sort of tournament which never completes, same as its Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha ViVid prequel, but episode five did springboard off episode four to give us the franchise's first (I'm pretty sure) attempted rape, so we might not be quite done with exploring how shitty some of these girls' lives can get.
Not Shirou also had it coming.
Bear in mind, though, that despite the brutality depicted so far, we're still quite a ways below the mark set by the original Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha anime. Yes, a lot of what I'm referring to happened off-screen (although still within earshot), but I'm going to go ahead and say that—as shitty as Rinne's life has been—Fate Testarossa shitty childhood is still way worse than anything Rinne has gone through. Well, based on what we know so far, anyway.
