Season two released in Summer 2014.
Prisma Illya, also known by its shortened name ‘Prillya’, is an anime you’ll inevitably run into whether or not you know anything about the Fate franchise. But you don’t need to know anything about the Fate series to figure out how this universe works. If you’ve ever seen a traditional mahou shoujo story before, Prillya follows similar guidelines, but with a Silver Link style parody spin on it. This is a pure non-canonical nonsense premise, and unlike the ‘real ‘Fate stories seen in light novel adaptations like Fate/Zero and Fate/Apocrypha, Prillya has some room to goof around and have fun with its characters. However, you shouldn’t expect any level of coherence when pairing up Silver Link’s off-the-rails standards of ‘parody’ with the grim environments of the Fate series.
It’s easy to rag on Silver Link’s more pander-y output, like C3 or OniAi. But with those shows, you’re usually left with the question “what did you expect?” whenever you feel let down after watching it. Prisma Illya, on the other hand, I can totally imagine something good coming from this concept. After all, this isn’t the first time Illya’s been involved in a parody-centric Fate spin-off. Remember Carnival Phantasm?? Sure, Prisma Illya might not have the pure comedy incentive by comparison, but it’s not hard to picture how you could slide that absurdism into this roster of characters.
For what it’s worth, Prillya starts off with that expected level of goofiness. Rin and Luvia’s rich-girl rivalry has taken to the skies, as the two (older) girls, both already magical girls, bicker over their mahou shoujo responsibilities. Then, as a result of their fighting, their sentient magical scepters decide to leave them in search of more competent magic girl candidates. What would soon become our protagonist’s scepter, named Ruby, crashes right into Illya’s bathroom, blasting a giant hole in the wall.
Ruby is the name of the thing in Illya’s hands.
Beyond this point, Silver Link delivers fine enough on the mahou shoujo promises. The character designs are cute, colorful, the magic battles are flashy, and have enough variety to not completely run dry by the end of the first two seasons. And from this angle, purely looking at its implementation of genre traditions, Prisma Illya suddenly doesn’t seem that bad. But I want to refuse the notion that the mahou shoujo genre is all about pretty colors and cute outfits. We’re missing one major ingredient that keeps other shows in this genre alive: the magic!
Generally, mahou shoujo anime are trying to instill a sense of wonder in their (usually younger female) audience. In the same way young boys want to replicate the epic ninja techniques seen in Naruto, these glittery shows are trying to give the girls something optimistic to fantasize about. And typically they have some reasonable intentions of teaching the viewer about friendship, or some other moral lesson of the day. Whenever you take this formula and sap that inspirational element out from the story, as seen in shows like Madoka Magica, you need another, equally strong element to replace it with. In Madoka’s case, the overwhelming drama is what makes it stand out in the genre. And Prisma Illya, being a parody of the genre itself, also needs to find its own strengths to substitute its lack of idealism.
This is where Prisma Illya’s ideas start to wear thin, and where the viewer’s patience gets tested. In search of any sense of direction or meaning, Silver Link doesn’t deliver much of its own flare in the first season aside from a helping of melodrama. Exciting, right??
I’m sure you’re all well aware of Prisma Illya’s lolicon reputation, the lewd promotional art, the kissing scenes, etc etc. You might think I’ve been avoiding mentioning it up to this point on purpose, but guess what? None of that shit happens until season TWO. Believe it or not, Silver Link was able to restrain themselves enough to put out a somewhat serious effort for their magic girl story for at least 10 episodes.
Iconic scene from the first season.
And it’s not like this first season would be any better with added fanservice, either. It does have SOME, albeit nothing more extreme than Silver Link’s usual business. But what this studio puts a majority of their focus into, they don’t know how to give much weight to it. The question being, what is the motivation behind Illya’s magical girl antics, anyways? She watches a mahou shoujo anime herself and decides that being a magical girl is fun! But whenever a threat shows up for Illya and her magic girl friend/rival, Miyu, to deal with, it’s not as if they’re saving the city from utter destruction of anything else of the sort. The only thing they gain from defeating these enemies (usually a Fate servant, such as Saber Alter), is a new magical ability they acquire in the form of a card. Anybody can take the card and use it for themselves, which leads to conflicts later down the line.
Prisma Illya tackles its “”dark themes”” far more convincingly than some previous male-demographic little-girl shows I’ve seen before (Lyrical Nanoha for example…), with most of the conflict stemming from Illya’s lack of experience within the mahou shoujo world. A girl named Miyu is her rival, someone who believes the business of battling magical foes should be taken completely seriously. Meanwhile, Illya fully believes in the magical fantasy aspect of the job, doing things haphazardly without fully taking into account the consequences of possible failure. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, with the two getting frustrated at each others’ approach to each battle.
But stretching this dynamic out for ten episodes doesn’t do the premise any favors. The Illya in this series is far more frail and less stubborn and less bratty compared to her Fate/Stay Night counterpart, essentially transforming her into a different character entirely. MIyu’s stone-faced personality doesn’t add much more to this mix, either. When the battles are finished, our main characters have little else to be bothered with other than going to school. And so, with all this put together, the first season of Prisma Illya is largely inoffensive, but also completely lacking in surprises.
Or in other words, it’s fucking BORING
Don’t worry bros, CHLOE will surely fix this.
So what does the second season, Prisma Illya 2wei (that’s pronounced zwei with a z because Illya’s name is GERMAN), try to do to spice things up? With the power of science, they’ve managed to create a new entity entirely… Illya TWO. Also known as Chloe von Einzbern, she is Illya’s tan-skinned alter-ego, spawned from a freak magic spell accident. And now, our main duo of magic girls has grown into a trio. Though this time around, the focus has shifted away from the first season’s formula of aimless card gathering.
Silver Link’s vision for the Prisma Illya series pivoted HARD in season two. Although the first season of the show had jokes about Illya’s perverted tendencies, Chloe is straight up the horniest character to ever appear across the entire Nasuverse. Which says a lot about 2wei’s intended demographic considering she’s presumably ten years old?? There’s no getting around the idea that 2wei was written and promoted with a lolicon audience in mind. And to see something so brazenly shoved out onto the TV audience, this can only drag in the truly degenerate, as well as bemused, curious onlookers.
However, as evident from the first season, this is not the kind of anime to reward curiosity. If you’re the kind of person who ‘discovered’ this show by stumbling on it in a 4chan webm thread, or some similar image hosting website, guess what! You’ve already seen the worst parts of it! For those not in the know, Silver Link decided it would be best for the audience if they included scenes where Chloe forcibly makes out with Miyu, animated with utmost attention to detail. This only happens once within the 10 episodes of 2wei, though they throw in a bonus kissing scene into the OVA for good measure.
The two viewing audiences of this series summed up in one picture.
You might be wondering what kind of context is even required for something so jarring to happen in a show that has been, up to this point, reasonably tame. This all stems from the design of Chloe’s existence. Being accidentally created from some strange alter-ego spell, Chloe’s mana is being constantly used up just to keep herself from fading into nothingness. The act of replenishing mana varies depending on what Fate story you’re reading, but whoever came up with Chloe decided she gets the unique ability of getting her mana back by KISSING people. The skill is literally titled ‘Kissing Freak’ in Fate/Grand Order, and Chloe is, to my knowledge, the only character in the Nasuverse with this ability. Or in other words, she literally has to kiss people or she will DIE.
Or in other other words, Chloe is a loli succubus. Fantastic. She gets more mana from Miyu and Illya (lol incest!) specifically because they’re magic girls, you get the idea. Silver Link realized at this point that they’d probably be going TOO far if Chloe had to do this sort of mana replenishing in every episode, so instead, Chloe’s dumb kissing antics are usually played for laughs. In one of the episodes, Chloe is running around school kissing random students, and Illya is the one getting in trouble for it because everybody, for whatever silly reason, seems to think Chloe and Illya are the same person.
All this perverted nonsense makes the show funnier to recall in retrospect, though the entertainment value hardly changes whether you were to remove all this fanservice stuff or not. Like it or not, Chloe has to carry these ten episodes on her shoulders. All of the important plot points revolve around her troubled, paradoxical existence. What this translates to is more melodrama, but without the ultra flashy mahou shoujo battles. At least, not until the last few episodes, anyways. But honestly, I’d rather see Prisma Illya trying to establish its own identity instead of trying to loosely hang onto the genre’s traditions. Even if that ‘identity’ happens to be a Silver Link flavored melodrama lolicon fest. You can’t deny that it stands out.
But damn, why does Chloe have to be the only character out of the three with any sense of personality? I mean damn, even the side characters seem more interesting than Illya and Miyu half the time. Rin, Luvia, Leysritt… I really like Leysritt’s Prisma Illya design, but she doesn’t get much screen time.
There’s still two more seasons of this I haven’t watched, but I can’t imagine wasting more of my time on this series instead of, you know, anything else!!! I HATE that I’ve reviewed this show like three times now and I can’t think of a show that I want to never talk about more than this one. Prisma Illya is a series that bores me to TEARS. At best, it’s reaction image meme fodder. And at worst, you feel like a dumbass lolicon just for watching the damn thing in the first place.
And for what? I sat through 8 hours of mid just so I can see if anything fun happens?
What makes this even more frustrating is that I actually didn’t come into this show just so I could review the dumb loli kissing anime. The way I discovered this series wasn’t through its goofy fanservice, but because I played through the Prisma Illya event in Fate/Grand Order back in 2018. That was my first introduction to characters like Miyu and Chloe. And believe me, Chloe is a hell of a lot more entertaining in her Fate/Grand Order form than she is in her 2wei anime form. I distinctly remember the feeling after watching 2wei, thinking “Oh.. I guess I don’t like Chloe that much anymore…”
And any anime that is capable of deflating my interest in its characters after watching it is one that is worth avoiding. Fate bros, I think it’s time to give this crown to the secondaries for not wasting their god forsaken time on this.
Now go take a shower you fuckin FREAK
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