Another fun anime from the currently-airing season you might have missed is Machikao Mazoku, aka The Demon Girl Next Door, a “cute demon girl doing cute things” slice-of-life based on a 4-koma manga series. It’s the story of an impoverished high school girl nicknamed Shamiko who becomes a demon girl one morning and is tasked with defeating a certain magical girl in her neighborhood named Momo. It turns out that our skinfang heroine is somewhat weak and pathetic — quite similar to another demon girl named Satania — and she ends up accepting all kinds of help from Momo instead, eventually becoming friends with her sworn enemy. It subverts the magical girl genre nicely, and is a lot of fun to watch.
Whenever I start a new series, I do several things. First, I check to see whether the show will have standard-length episodes or be one of the new wave of short anime series, which will affect how I perceive the show as a whole. Then I head over to Pixiv or Tumblr to check how much fanart has been made for the show, which is useful to see what kind of buzz the series is generating among fans. Will it have comparatively little fanart, like Aria of the Crimson Ammo, or will the fanart and memes explode out of my browser, like Yuru Camp or Kemono Friends did? More importantly, what kind of “rule 34” art will I find? I learned quickly that Shamiko and Momo have become lesbian lovers in the minds of the fandom for this show, which I’m certainly down with, being a card-carrying “yuri shipper” myself. And Momo is a really nice seme to Shamiko’s uke.
One source of the humor of Machikado Mazoku is the extreme poverty of poor Shamiko, something that’s part of the curse on her family. In one scene she’s described as a “Bomby Girl,” which is a reference to a popular reality TV show that tasks girls with surviving on the equivalent of $100 for a whole month. Each episode follows the girls as they plan the cheapest meals possible, using inexpensive ingredients like tofu and mung bean sprouts, which can be had for under ¥100, and reports on how she did at the end of the month. When Shamiko borrows ¥500 from Momo, she has to pay the money back in ¥50 increments because she’s so poor.
Should you watch be watching Machikado Mazoku? If you like relaxing shows slice-of-life shows about cute girls doing cute things, then yes!
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