UQ Holder

That last paragraph is what I was thinking as well. It sounds like "strongest in the world" in a setting where people can go "which world, we've got at least two."

or some new face whose claim to fame is knocking off Fate on the side and thus bumping up the power bar again.

I frankly can't see Akamatsu NOT doing this. It's obvious he wants to build the UQ mythos up to a 'bigger, greater' level compared to Negima's; situations that would have fit towards Negima's end are starting stuff in UQ Holder. UQ Holder is all about bumping up the power bar over and over (because Akamatsu seems to have forgotten true good storytelling tension doesn't have to rely on a nonstop escalation, although since his core audience sees things the same wrong way, it still works for him). No way he won't bring a 'BIGGER, BADDER, MORE FEARSOME THAN FATE!' character at some point to rattle the readership.

To clarify, my point was on starting the series with some new guy having already bumped out Fate. I too can see Akamatsu bringing in some guy bigger and badder than Fate to keep up the tension at some point, though I don't see it happening anytime soon. Not while "kicking Fate's ass" is still the closest thing Touta has to a goal.

Also, forgot to mention this other point because I was sleepy as fuck when I last posted:

It seems like while UQ Holder and Fate's Ala Alba are at odds with each other, neither are actually fighting each other, if you catch my drift. UQ has (as far as we know) not tried to hunt Fate down despite being their "greatest enemy", and Fate has not only been in hiding for years but has also so far acted solely because of Touta, not UQ. The impression I'm getting is that the conflict between Eva and Fate is purely ideological: they have different agendas/methodologies and resent each other too much to cooperate or compromise, but neither are invested enough to actually declare war on each other.

Which would be nice, if UQ Holder was an ideological manga, but more than 50 chapters in, it's pretty much all brawls with little rhyme or reason. We still have no freaking idea what are Fate and Eva's supposed ideologies about, an idiot lead like Touta isn't asking anytime soon beyond MUH DEAD PARENTS I DON'T REMEMBER ANYWAY, and that makes very difficult to care about any ideological conflict, since we don't even have the slightest idea exactly why are they at odds with each other.

... this is another break week, right?

edited 20th Oct '14 7:43:15 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

You see the primary ideological difference between Eva and Fate comes down to blah blah blah... In short Eva believes that blah blah blah while Fate thinks blah blah blah... Simple, right? Now gimme some fights!

It'd be sort of novel if Fate was actually the moderate one in this situation and that, again, UQ Holder's intentions are not entirely benevolent or even slightly malignant. But that would be too much for the super friendship gang who's there to stop the poor weak and inconsequential humans from all dying because of how powerless they are.

Dunno. Hata mentioned that Akamatsu said on his twitter that he took a three day break or something, but also goes on to say something about spoilers existing anyway, and makes it sound like next week is the break week. So...no clue.

edited 20th Oct '14 11:06:36 AM by SkormSnow-Strider

You know what this series made me realize? Breather chapters are really important! Seriously, this series has like no breather chapters, and it shows - we get so very little explanation or characterization because all we get is a constant action, action, action followed immidietly by the next arc of the same.

This is why I moan when the Me-Too Internet herds whine as one about the EEEEEEEVILS OF FILLER. I mean, yeah, the extremes of the Naruto anime are simply grotesque, but as we see here, we fail to get a real sense of actual friendship when we don't ever see the characters doing anything together but carrying missions out.

The problem IMO is that people on the Internet have become too jaded between Naruto's flashback-mania, Inuyasha's refusal to progress, and DBZ's infamous "spend episodes screaming". Thus, for anything having a plot, any moment that doesn't immediately move the plot/fight in some way gets lumped into this big umbrella of "filler" and shunned. People underestimate just how important "filler" can be in terms of making you actually like characters beyond their powersets.

I'm pretty sure I've noted in the past the lack of breather episodes as part of how UQ's pace feels too fast even when it also appears glacial. It feels like it's constantly rushing to the next plot point because it doesn't want to take a moment to sit down.

We get some breather moments, like pretty much everything with Santa in the dorm, but that's about it. The problem is, the only character we see get any downtime is Touta and he's boring as hell.

See, those don't really count as "breather moments". Too quick, and too tied to this arc's plot.

What we need in terms of "breather" is basically to have a chapter or a couple of chapters of Touta and friends bumming it around back at base. Some kind of meaningless hijinks so that personalities can play off each other and develop. Something to help the story relax.

Well, they are the closest thing we got. I would agree....they don't really count for much.

Part of the problem is there are to few characters. Character development is about the same as Negima(relative to the number of pages), but the problem is there are fewer characters, so it stands out more.

You sure? I feel that what little character development has taken place (really, I feel that the only qualifier is Karin, and that's barely applicable given how often she gets ganked out of the story) still is negligible compared to Negima, even by page count. It all comes back to the fact that Akamatsu is flat out not playing to his strengths, and is squandering it on gimmicky bullshit and constant battling taking the vast majority of panel time.

Too few characters? Love Hina made good use of an even smaller cast. If anything, a big cast usually makes hard to give everyone enough moments in the spotlight of their own.

This reminds me of that one argument I started in the Negima thread, about how that series could have benefitted from smaller and more focused cast.

And yet, here we are, with a smaller and yet far worse developed cast.

Fullmetal Alchemist had much larger cast and they were much better developed.

God, Akamatsu just sucks compared to Arakawa.

Being fair, almost everyone sucks compared to Arakawa.

Point.

To be fair, FMA never actually pretended that the minor characters (Who still had their awesome moments and lived to see the end of the series) were anything other than that, as opposed to Negima which sort of built up some expectations on them and then proceeded to shuffle them off for an entire arc which collapsed in on itself at the end.

Not that I personally minded that given that everyone left behind were characters I didn't particularly care much about, but the point still stands.

"And yet, here we are, with a smaller and yet far worse developed cast."

That just sort of speaks to how crap Akamatsu is at the moment as opposed to disproving the notion that Negima's cast size caused some problems.

edited 20th Oct '14 7:00:01 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

Yes, but FMA characters have significantly higher screentime given/character development achieved ratio than those from Negima.

I have a feeling that one of the biggest problems with Akamatsu is that he keeps biting off more than he could chew.

Eh, I'm sort of neutral on FMA on the whole, so I'm not entirely convinced that any of the development outside some of the core characters (Which was still far more then Negima's) was hugely substantial as opposed to the fact that they were just handled more eloquently in general. Having multiple plot lines all leading to a single conclusion (Which kind of goes with how Arakawa supposedly started FMA from the end to the beginning) helps.

edited 20th Oct '14 7:05:22 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

I never really got the impression Akamatsu had more than a vague idea how stuff was gonna go and just pulled a bunch of plot hooks he had lying around into an ending each time. Kinda reminds me of the recent Hayate issue where Hata made a joke about cleaning a bunch of them up bc he had to many lying around after 10 years.

Worked better in Love Hina since the only real thread running through was Naru was gonna win. Didn't work as well in Negima since the long-running background plot was "findng Nagi" and that both didn't get much screen time and no-one cared really.

The problem is, UQ doesn't even have the vague thread of consistency running through it. Getting to the space elevator seemed like it was for a while, but that seems to have been dropped. This whole thing really feels like a prologue where your waiting for some event to happen that starts everything. I thought the fate fight might do that, but this arc doesn't seem to be related to that at all.

More or less. I'm pretty sure Akamatsu sorta knew where the plot would eventually flow to, but by the time we actually got to an arc that would directly deal with said plot, Akamatsu got (Insert reason no one ever came to a consensus on here) of the whole thing part way through and screwed it all up while trying to end the series.

That said, I'd argue that Negima's early meanderings throughout the series worked to its favor more then what it took away.

edited 20th Oct '14 10:03:43 PM by SkormSnow-Strider