THIS WEBSITE DOES NOT SAVE DRAFTS WTF

So I have a very loud mechanical keyboard because I put no thought into upgrading my old 2009 keyboard. Hey, everyone has mechanical keyboards and mine is literally 14 years old, so idk buy the first thing I see on Amazon! NOW MY TIPPITY TAPPERS ARE LOUD AF and I stopped typing my semi-yearly post in the deepest darkest of nights in fear of waking my family! WHAT IS THIS. It is all gone, all that information.

I now see why I had so many gibberishly-named text documents on my old HDD of Dreamwidth drafts, for precisely THIS REASON.

Anyways yes, it is indeed 2023. Well into 2023 in fact. I went over a full calendar year of posting nothing here. 2022 is as blank as my life. Now listen, I only returned (and remembered this blog existed) because of one lovely friend Aoi-dono, who somehow launched Negima back into my life in a form of supreme nostalgia since I avoided that shit like the plague after I was done with it. Fandoms with poor endings and bitter feelings really do not pop back up often, but wow was Negima music pretty fire, and the concerts with all the talented and lovely VAs really amazing and heartwarming. Rewatching a lot of that, and finding out that true ending of Negima was revealed in the poorly made sequel UQ! Holder was definitely revitalizing for me. I ended up skimming/rereading Negima itself too, and rewatching a few episodes. And even though that fanservice and those ages absolutely did not age well, the degree of nostalgia was still pretty high. I still love my favourites (Asakura and Sayo!) and remember how much I rambled about them on this blog.

For this reason I thought that a good yearly post would be a full on Negima review, now knowing the true ending and having like...idk 12 years of reflection? The manga ended that long ago? Jesus fucking Christ I am old. But yeah this manga is something aimed at an audience that I am not at all within. One big reason it clung to me (and Aoi-dono probably) is that there was an official yuri couple who existed not as the main plot, but not as a one-off background cameo kinda thing either.  They were important characters who happened to be in a relationship, sorta like Uranus and Neptune of Sailor Moon but appearing way earlier. This was especially refreshing in a harem series where most girls/characters are meant to be attracted to the main character, this being ten-year-old Negi Springfield, a wizard from Wales.

So yeah, that's already a million degrees of problematic. A ten-year-old boy and his 14-year-old students? Not only is that a power dynamic through teacher-student relations, the girls are about 4-5 years older than him that if they were well into their twenties is not a bad age-gap, but here with fanservice abound? Egads. This is why people say Anime is a mistake. It's very degenerate. But I was a similar age as the girls when I first got into Negima. I found the girls fighting and their abilites super badass and cool as a teenager. The fanservicey lovey dovey stuff I tried to ignore, which was easy since my favourite characters ended up being two who were either not at all in the running for the Negi sweepstakes or had such a remote chance of winning it isn't even worth mentioning, that being Asakura and Sayo. They were not at all as important as most characters because unless you were the main female lead, had a serious interest in Negi, or were the aforementioned yuri couple, your screentime and relevance to the plot would usually be nil. Still, I fell in love with the series once the semi-canon Anime aired and gave us its original backstory for Sayo, who NEVER got one in the main manga anyways. This is unlike every other iteration/adaptation of the manga, which made absolutely sure Sayo got her backstory episode in or at least a limelight episode.

I loved that all the adaptations seemed to value the class of 3A greatly, and put somewhat of a backseat for Negi. The opposite was the case with the manga, but the animations and such all seemed to be more interested in the harem-comedy aspect of the manga as opposed to its more shouneny nature later. However, I will say the shounen aspects were well-done and enjoyable, and it is a shame most of it was left on the wayside and never animated. My favourite arc, the Mahorafest had so much screentime and relevance for the girls but also included quite a lot of action and shounen. That mix was perfect but it was the one arc with no such attempt at animation at all (except a very short clip of the momentous final battle) when it would have been my favourite arc to see on screen. Previous arcs still were experimenting with the shounen and was heavily harem hijinks heavy while the Magical World devolved into full-on-shounen with the girls as support and accessories, and their only plot relevance reduced to the romance aspect more than anything else.

To elaborate, this manga was at its prime when it mixed the two genres equally. The big bad villain was one of the students and a portion of the class sided with her, so we had classmates duking it out while Negi fought the boss. It involved as many of the girls as possible through festival hijinks and even had them joining in on the final battle in the form of a masquerade to still keep magic a secret, as the existence of magic and its reveal was the primary conflict of the arc. The funny thing is my favourite characters probably had the least amount of screentime in this arc, but yet it was still my favourite of them all. (Though Sayo was introduced at the beginning of the arc so it did start Asakura and Sayo's friendship! Woo!)

Later on as it transitioned to the Magical World, the arc started very strong. I love the idea of the big bad absolutely destroying the whole team and scattering them across an unknown world, sort of like an isekai of sorts. It would have been fascinating to see how some of these girls, especially the mundane ones and extra especially the stowaways who snuck in would have fared in a more fantasy-like and rough world. Sadly a majority of the arc still focused on Negi, and only a chapter or two each was shown of what the others were doing and how they survived. I think that was a huge missed opportunity of interesting stories. It would have made an already incredibly long arc longer, but knowing how it all ended and how rushed the ending of the arc was, I don't think it mattered. Ako being helpless and ending up as the load for Akira and Natsumi, thus needing Negi to save them was disappointing. I didn't think they would have fared well, but it  would have been more interesting if literally anything else happened. Makie and Yuuna ended up in a similar situation without the slavery, so that was both disappointing and boring. This was integral considering Yuuna's backstory of both parents being mages, and the manga revealing her mother was killed in action for the same conflict of the main plot, so for her to be mostly offscreen being a waitress and for this revelation to come way later with no payoff was yet again wasted opportunity. Of all characters to need development in the Magical World, she was the one.

And even outside of character arcs and development, the story of how Haruna managed to obtain an airship would have been fun, even for a chapter. What was Ku Fei doing outside of standing on top of a rock? How did Asakura get to the city and use her presumable street-smarts to not fall into slavery and be recognized as a fugitive like all the others? Why did we put Asuna, Konoka, Setsuna, and Kaede in the same vicinity and just have them be Monster Hunters? How bloody boring is that? Especially for how plot relevant Asuna gets later in the arc, for her to have such a snoozeworthy start in the Magical World is another bundle of disappointment. We get some interesting chapters with Nodoka but her companions are super forgettable. The only character who gets an arc and a gaggle of interesting side characters is Yue, which is nice, but she was the only one. Anya could be removed from the entire story and nothing would change.

I initially did not carry these criticisms because some of my favourite characters like Chisame, Asakura, and Sayo were found first. Not only did I not need to wait eons for my favourites to return in the weekly chapters, but they got decent screentime. Asakura finally got her long overdue pactio, which has a suspiciously named artifact. (Corvus??? CORVUS??? Corvinus??? Listen if I see crows and journalism in the same panel I WONDER.) They also de-aged her like Chisame and Chachamaru, which was cute (MY ICON!!) until Akamatsu decided no age is free from fanservice, so that was weird. At least voodoo Sayo is cutesy and happy! But once her utilization was realised she was shipped off to do her duty and she and poor Chachamaru lost their screentime. Chisame though was quite the trooper and I was happy she was basically lead main female for the arc essentially. Still, was Negi's demon form and his struggle to control/master it... did he need to achieve that like three separate times??? It really felt like three separate times. It might have been two, but definitely felt like three. All that wasted time could have gone to these day in the limelight chapters where we can see things like Haruna's world-conquering beginnings and such.

Anyway the reason I bring up the girls becoming far more like support/accessories is that Negi becomes so powerful none of the girls can catch up, so they can only clean up mooks or fight far less powerful minions and such. Not only that, every enemy Negi faces and needs to overcome is a dude. They are either very manly dudes like Rakan, or essential big bad rival guys like Fate, or some random one-off who wants to fight Negi to TEST THEIR STRENGTH, who could very well just be a girl for diversity's sake, but god forbid any member of the female gender be able to fight and not have their clothes ripped off, or even that their defeat IS that their clothes is ripped off. I don't even think there was a tournament fighter that was a girl, and those characters weren't even important. The Magic World just felt so shonen with no girls whatsoever. Not only that, Fate also obtained his own harem of equally weak and unimportant devoted accessory girls. This viewpoint is especially extenuated when I found out about one of the love interests in the sequel, UQ! Holder.

Now I did not actually read most of UQ! Holder so take this with a grain of salt, but from what I read online of others and their opinions, there is a character named Kuromaru who does the Shimeiryuu stuff Setsuna does, but is from a different clan or whatever of demi-humans. These demi-humans determine their gender at some age (16? Idk sometime after puberty kinda age) so Kuromaru for most of the manga is genderless. They initially identified as a boy, and wanted to be a boy but because they developed feelings for the MC, who is a boy mind you, found it fitting to be a girl. But not only that, they thought they couldn't be equals with MC, like best buddies and fighters who can rival one another or something if they were a girl, so thus had to be a boy for that reason. This entire character could have been so interesting, but ended up feeling incredibly offensive to me. This means Akamatsu believes shonen fighting people must all be men, but if romantic feelings are involved they must all be women because god forbid there be a homosexual MLM relationship or a woman who is equal to men. It's a fantasy series for Christs' sake, like even if real life biologically women cannot keep up with men physically, in a world with dragons and magic and BS like that, that very reasonable fantasy should be possible! Now while I understand Kuromaru may have identified as heterosexual and that part of them fought against their desire to be male, I highly doubt there was that much nuance in UQ! Holder. My opinion of him really dropped after reading that, and seeing how poorly the fanservice aged, but again I did not actually read UQ! Holder (and feel SO little interest in doing so) so some of that might not be 100% accurate.

Although I will say the character did end up as basically a tomboyish girl after that, so maybe it was best of both worlds? She still fell far behind MC combat-wise and can't be described as equals in the fighting sense though, so who knows.

Another example is the reveal and development of Negi's mother. Mothers are a big deal in Negima (and Anime in general, honestly) because they DO NOT EXIST. They either are never mentioned or die in the backstory/beginning of the story. Fathers in Negima include Negi's, Konoka's, and Yuuna;s, which is still  very little but at least they exist in some capacity. Negi's mother, Arika was revealed to be super important to the political and royal sphere of the Magical World, but the moment she met Negi's father, any power she wielded became irrelevant and she was just there to be head over heels for super cool shounen guy and be the baby momma. What had happened to her and why she isn't present in the story now is never mentioned or revealed, not even in the ending shown in the sequel. Trash.

So yeah revisiting Negima did not really raise my opinion of the manga, probably the opposite. The rushed ending notwithstanding (I am not even going to go into that, it was just rushed and bad, the defeat of the big bad utterly skipped, whatevs) and really at the time the biggest injustice was that a chapter teased a Sayo pactio along with others, which suggested finally touching on her backstory potentially, but every other character teased got the pactio and she didn't. And then the story suddenly wrapped up so there was nothing there whatsoever even though they teased it. Manga notes in some earlier chapters revealed she had died to some series of murders during World War II, but that was never touched upon. The first Anime gave a completely different backstory and every other adaptation did not touch Sayo's backstory. An absolute shame. I guess I should just be happy she shot some gatling guns or whatever and was piloting a robot body like a mecha. Wow cool.

An even bigger slap in the face was revealing Sayo still being in that same 3-A c lassroom in UQ! Holder like 80 years after. The epilogue of Negima had her escape her school shackles and travel with Asakura, but somehow she went back to the school and never resolved whatever was tethering her soul to  this earth? I would imagine Asakura might have dug up some sort of backstory eventually, being the sleuth and reporter she is. It's incredibly disappointing that nothing changed, Negi didn't help her either, she never presumably figured out why she died, and she's now been stuck in that spot for a whopping 140 years. Jesus Christ, FREE THAT GHOST! FREE HER!!!

The finale piece to this puzzle was the ending Negima would have got being revealed in UQ! Holder. Sure there was oodles of action where Negi fought bravely and had Asuna's broken and ancient magic-cancelling powers to defeat the Lifemaker, but there was also the answer of who he ended up with. The alternate timeline UQ! Holder is set in was deeply unfulfilling, since characters long-dead somehow showed up for the epilogue like Konoka or Chisame, and Negi somehow had babies ever after with everyone. (Even Asuna who should be in a plot-induced sleep atm) But the ending revealed for Negima itself, without the alternate future of UQ! Holder had Negi confess to... spoilers! Chisame of all people! And this was both unexpected and expected. Expected because Chisame (like Asuna) is similar to the main heroine of Akamatsu's earlier work, Love Hina, but unexpected because Chisame was never part of the main pactio'd or fighter girl cast until well into the Mahorafest arc, and then not actually becoming truly important until the Magical World. She showed no interest in Negi until that final arc too.

But even then, Chisame rejected him because of all the aforementioned very problematic reasons. Though he means well and is a really cool guy, he's still ten, is her (now former I guess) teacher and her a student, and she just isn't ready for such commitment as well, hoping if he still likes her many years down the road when any other girl could catch his eye, he could try again. That's finally a sensible response to all this harem nonsense, and her maturity is probably why Negi liked her best anyways. She never had ulterior motives to give him advice or be by his side. She even asked why he tried so hard to find his dad when he was having a great peaceful life just being a teacher at their school. Everyone else would just support him and his decisions completely and never challenge him or give him another viewpoint of what he is doing , and I think Negi respected that. I was happy Chisame won, it both made sense, and I like her character too!

I also like that the many  fans of the other girls in the running were supremely salty about this ending because I have been on that other side a thousand times, and even if I wasn't super invested in whoever won the harem still feel good about it at least just this once. I cannot believe Negima did what MLP, RWBY, etc. didn't do. That's mindbogglingly amazing.

In conclusion, did not age well, sequel is even worse, but original ending was kinda okay! Still no closure for favourite characters. Asakura's technically dead I guess. WELP. That is about all from me.

As for my current fandom interests as this is primarily a fandom blog, I have switched up to more unscripted fandoms like DnD or music fandoms, or live content like streams because storytelling can be so unreliable in quality. Might as well let random chance and improv dictate it instead! About the only new fandom that isn't part of that criteria I found was the Pokemon Manga, Pokemon Special. Blue is best girl! And Black and White is the best arc. GO AGENCYSHIPPING!!!

That is all.