I’ll be honest--
I had no idea what Mashle was about or that it even existed before January 2023. That’s when season 2 of the anime was released and my FYP on TikTok became flooded with this really catchy song called Bling-Bang-Bang-Born. It was so infectious that I kept watching more and more videos of people performing a viral dance set to it. It didn’t take me too long to find out that the dance and song were both from the opening of season 2 of Mashle.
That’s when the show finally came across my radar. Thank you, Creepy Nuts!
Now here I am, almost two years later, just having finished binge watching the series. It took me a while, but I got here! As a Millenial of a certain age who grew up on Harry Potter as it was being published, I knew I had to dive head first into this anime about a boy at a Hogwarts-esque school with a silly bowl haircut. You don’t have to be a fan of any wizarding world to enjoy Mashle, but knowing Harry Potter as deeply as I do definitely did enhance the show for me. I picked up on and laughed at every reference and parodied Potter plotpoint, enjoying the fun being had at the tropes and cliches of the pop culture staple that defined my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
But what I did not expect was that Mashle also would reference iconic anime that have been a part of pop culture for just as long as the boy wizard. I went into the show with the knowledge that David Lodge voiced the Dumbledore-influenced headmaster (Mr. Wahlberg) in the English dub. But I soon found myself drawing comparisons to one another anime in which Lodge voices an older, sagely father figure: Naruto.
Mr. Wahlberg’s episodes-long confrontation with the villain of the series pokes fun at classic anime, even going so far as to have the narrator break the fourth wall to point out the drawn out nature of the battle. Many of the other fights in Mashle mirrored pivotal moments in Naruto, such as Rock Lee vs Gaara in the Chunin Exams and Kakashi vs Obito Uchiha in their final confrontation.
What made Mashle so much fun were these references to beloved staples of pop culture, as well as the over-the-top silliness of the self-aware anime. I wish I had stalled in watching even longer, because now I have to wait for season 3!