A Certain Magical Index

Contract: Challenge Contract

Progress: 1 season (24/24)

Score: 1/10

Contractor: Deleira

Intro:

I suspected something like this was going to happen. This type of anime is already very outside my preferred genres and after the first three episodes I found myself sighing and mentally preparing myself for a full 24 episode series.

But I got through it. And honestly? Yeah, still didn’t like it. I have a good amount of thoughts about it but honestly, I kinda just could not care. But let’s see what I can do….

Overall Thoughts:

First, I did not realize this show would be an anthology of stories with no overall plot. Granted, I don’t watch many LN adapted anime so maybe this is typical but the “monster of the arc” structure with zero progression of the overall story was really unexpected to me. Also Dear Puritan CHRIST did nothing happen in this anime. People really TALKED about things happening, though. Lots of standing and talking, sitting and blabbing, bathing and yapping. My favorite was when Kanzaki spent 15 minutes in episode 4 talking and then called Touma on the phone in episode 5 to yap another five minutes. She really REALLY needed to gossip, I guess.

Pros (Somehow):

I have two Pros for this series:

1. I can see that a world exists here and there’s a lot of ideas thrown in. The world indeed does exist and it’s interesting in that it has a lot of aspects to it. The aspects themselves were not very interesting and really were just very, very stupid. So you have to turn your brain off and say “okay, sure”.

2. The soundtrack is legitimately weird and interesting? In fact, it’s the only interesting part of this entire show. My favorites were the algorithm sort track, the Hell’s Kitchen stinger track, and that one track from the 1996 point-and-click adventure game Ripper.

Algorithm Sort: https://youtu.be/KM2FzqAwzJQ?si=JWrc2mjbWi66pm5p 

https://youtu.be/kPRA0W1kECg?si=LjBSGXjtplcSxUsb 

Hell’s Kitchen Stinger: https://youtu.be/ij68QpvJGwc?si=YrxRvW8yxv_vt-5s 

https://youtu.be/dinyOvO2EEo?si=rUC_PNte180qnYGT 

Ripper: https://youtu.be/eCOJgPvB6rg?si=OvQGGFlPrJVM3k1Y&t=45 

https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx8-Se-Inbb5CGtD9wbrZkiDpaAzf2stdy?si=6PQB6Sxz2-rXYZV2 

The English Puritan Church:

Ok, so now let’s talk about the English Puritan Church. I really cannot figure out WHY the English Puritan Church was specifically chosen, as all the cool aesthetic religion/mythology shit (nuns, saints, which are Catholic, Germanic runes, and the fucking JEWISH FOKELORE OF THE GOLEM) are specifically NOT Puritan stuff. The Puritans in fact hated all that Catholic stuff because they were like a weird extreme shut-in cult that fled to the US and then faded out in a couple hundred years. The only reason I could think that they chose Puritans is because the word is from “pure” and they really wanted to push the purity angle with our loli lead. There are plenty of other stupid things they came up with but I just could not let go of this one. So remarkably dumb.

Characters:

So speaking of characters. The characters’ personalities are 80% their design. And the designs are hit and miss.

Anime Namesake Index has shockingly little to do with the entire series. She’s boring and she was there have her clothes ripped off in the first 10 minutes. Next.

[Begone, loli]

Harry Stiyls is just Axel from Kingdom Hearts. There is so little extra characterization of Stiyl that I automatically just assume his personality is Axel’s. I honestly think he’s my favorite character because of this. I like his earrings, that’s hot.

[He probably smells like tobacco and a boy’s locker room]

Kanzaki is hot but she’s got a bad case of yapping. In a show of yappers, she is actually the worst one. This bitch did nothing but talk about how cool her sword is, make a few wind attacks go out, and Y A P. Funnily enough, I ended up watching episode 4 (her big battle yap episode) twice because the first time I thought I had missed something because I was watching at work. Turns out, I hadn’t and she really does just stand and talk for 15 minutes.

[Kanzaki doing what she does best: standing around]

Touma really is just that self-insert character. His entire personality is that he’s a Nice Guy. He also has the unlucky things but literally none of the things he says are luck based are that. He didn’t do his homework until the last day of summer “oh, man, how unlucky”. He threw trash on the floor and then stepped and tripped on it “I’m just so unlucky”. Like, no, bro you’re just a lazy slob loser. He’s also Super Unlucky for having every new female character fall in love with him. He also is really good at punching, which wasn’t established why but I assume it’s so that as the self-insert the person watching can go “wow, I would totally punch big and strong like Touma”.

[Can Touma muster up his own personality in 24 episodes? No.]

Misaka has a character- she’s a tsundere. That’s about it, though. She’s got a lot of clones and one loli clone just in case there weren’t enough lolis for you in this show. I’m sure she’s a lot more interesting in the spin-off. I wish she didn’t have to have a crush on the main character but Shounen Plot Demands Harem.

[She wears shorts so that panty shots can be a plot point]

Accelerator has the most character in the series. The character is a chuuni middle schooler in the gifted program and you know what that’s fine. I legit knew kids like these in middle school. His Japanese voice actor did well portraying this. Though, I have a question- If he can accelerate everything, why does he care to run everywhere and not just like… stand and accelerate forward? Get a cool hoverboard thing going or something.

[You’re ok, Accelerator, you can stay]

AW HELL I FORGOT MY FAVORITE CHARACTER: FROG DOCTOR. <3 He welcomes you home at the end of very arc. What a nice frog doctor

Final Thoughts:

I keep hearing A Certain Scientific Railgun is much better. Maybe it is. Did watching Index make me want to watch Railgun? No, absolutely not. I struggle to see how a world this stupid can create much more than what I have already experienced. But who knows? If Railgun has less standing and talking and more action I can see it being fun. It is low on my overachiever goals, though.

Why are there wind turbines in the middle of the city??? Reversing wind turbines doesn’t create wind??