Is the "Madoka Treatment" All Played Out?

Fall 2020’s Talentless Nana starts out in much the same way as any anime about a school for young people with superpowers – there’s a shy kid named Nanao who’s constantly bullied for supposedly being powerless, but when a new transfer student named Nana helps him out with her ability to read minds, he proves himself in front of the others by revealing that he can cancel out other people’s abilities. Then... Nana pushes him off a cliff and he dies. It turns out that she’s actually the talentless one – a normal human (with exceptional deductive skills) who’s been sent to the school to covertly take out each student before they can unwittingly wreak havoc on the world with their unnatural powers.

This is obviously a dark deconstruction of the plot of My Hero Academia, addressing what might actually happen if superpowered humans existed in normal society (MHA does devote significant time to this issue, but not in the same Minority Report-esque way). The popularity of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica has paved the way for these kinds of edgy script-flipping tales to be greenlit in recent years, including instant classics like The Rising of the Shield Hero and the manga Bokura no Hentai, but also shallow imitators like Day Break Illusion and (possibly) Talentless Nana. So is the “Madoka treatment” all played out by now, or is there still more to be gained from putting idealistic genres through the lens of grim realism? Let’s take a closer look and draw our own conclusions.