I Told You So

I done went and jinxed myself, really. I should know better than to actually post proper content - that'll just get the universe to bite me in the arse.
Not that it has ever done otherwise.
So well, a new season is upon us, and it's characterized by a lot of series with clever concepts that will almost all turn out to be shit. Trust my hideously bloated gallbladder.

Mahou Sensou
No, I'm not calling it "Magical Warfare". Why? Because I want to set fire to simulcasters all over the world. Preferably balefire.
So, Mahou Sensou is a rather typical series. Bland main character, generic tsundere love interest who's probably voiced by Kugimiya Rie or one of her half-dozen clones, cheesy plot and generally lackluster characterization. Yet it has one thing going for it - its raging fucking chuunibyou. It's an entertaining watch solely because it takes itself so bloody seriously and has all the trappings of a typical chuunibyou show - lame everyman protagonist, many attempts to be edgy, love interest, magical eyes, gratuitous fanservice, magic circles, gratuitous English spells, video game character knockoffs and -
Lemme just rest on that one for a moment. Look at Mui's brother and tell me that is not Jin Kisaragi. The female main character's brainwashed antagonist brother with a fringe, wielding a sword and having ice-based powers. Replace Mui with Noel and the knockoff is complete. What's worse is that the studio seems to be aware of this, since his hangaround thug is basically wielding Ragna's sword. Not only that, Mui's name can be parsed as a pun on Mu-13 (which can be read "mu-i-san").
Okay, now we can continue.
- some kind of excuse for characters to fight in ruined cities. That basically checks every bleeding box on the chuunibyou checklist, assuming there is such a thing. While this would normally turn any series into a steaming crock of drek, Mahou Sensou has its pure shamelessness going for it. It's rather akin to a retarded child making crayon drawings of its fantasy world on the bathroom walls - unaware that what it's doing seems unfathomably idiotic to the outside world, but still inspiring a sense of baffled wonder in the viewer. Mahou Sensou has its head buried so far up its own ass that it makes you stop laughing at the retardation and start marveling at the amazing feat of contortion that it is to ram your own head up your own DC-80 orifice and continue until a dimensional singularity occurs.
Sure, the characters are cheesy, the fanservice shamelessly pandering, the plot head-up-ass, the English dreadful, the powers toe-curlingly cliché and the mood as a whole incredibly pretentious in a middle-schooler way, but it's all kind of charming in the end. Mahou Sensou is positioned on that hair-thin line that separates "pitiful" from "entertainingly retarded", and the antics it pulls in its desperate attempts to seem mature and edgy are worth a few laughs. In addition, the series' complete lack of anything resembling shame about its content allows it to rely on weathered clichés that have become surprisingly fresh after a decade of no one using them seriously anymore.
75/100 - reduce this to a 30/100 if you aren't the type to laugh with retards instead of just laughing at them.