UQ Holder

Not the character, but Akamatsu made Ayaka progressively more over the top as the series progressed, and after MM, made her completely bonkers. Guess which side sticks out more in fans minds.

Her purpose always seemed to be mostly a joke and an easy addition tothe harem with an unnecessary back story

edited 22nd Jul '17 5:36:13 AM by Archivist10

I keep forgetting that you didn't read the manga, so I shouldn't be surprised.

So I have to wonder what angle they're going to be taking with the anime adaptation in October. I've seen new (I think) omnibus editions of Negima! being put out with ads for the UQ Holder anime on them, and from what I've seen they're actually advertising it as Mahou Sensei Negima! 2. Which... isn't exactly incorrect, but still sounds like the kind of overpromising that initially led me to being disappointed with the manga in the first place.

(Unrelatedly, my last post here was waaaay the hell back in 2014. I'm sorry, Watchtower!)

It sounds like the latest chapter(s?) brings back a lot of the old cast... and promptly wastes them with shitty writing. Is that about right?

edited 23rd Jul '17 3:56:25 AM by RedSavant

I did read it.What makes you think otherwise this time?

edited 23rd Jul '17 7:50:23 AM by Archivist10

Sort of. I personally find it better by virtue of bringing characters I don't dislike into the fold, but the quality is...sports festival like, so there's not much to actually talk about. Its all flashbacks too, which unless Holder stops talking about Holder completely, it puts a damper on things.

But yeah, I have no idea how any studio would make this mess of a series work. UQ Holder by itself is anything but inspired, and it suddenly shifting into an awkward sequel series later down the line doesn't help. Oh, and the entire cast being shoved into a corner for a worse then Naru clone. Hell, Negima never actually got a proper anime adaptation, so I don't know how they're going to try and fill in the blanks for just about everything. The stories comprehensible without it, but it well and truly relies on good feelings from Negima to invoke any reactions.

edited 23rd Jul '17 1:47:44 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

That's definitely the feeling I got. The only reason I read UQ Holder at all after the disappointing first few chapters nerfed Eva into the dust and made her act like a different person just to curry the favor of the most generic character Akamatsu has ever written (remember collared kitty maid in the Magic World? More personality than Touta) was hoping for hints about the cast I actually cared about, and if this is the first time they've been back since Chapter 1, page 3 was like 'and then the whole cast died off, hope you like this tousleheaded moron', then I really wonder what they're gonna do.

If they wanted a proper anime adaptation they'd do the Martial Arts Tournament or highlights from the Magic World. That's peak Negima right there.

So what's going on?

Does this series STILL suck?

Yes, from what I hear, though Akamatsu is also taking the time to go back and mess with the characterization of Negima characters too.

Series has its downs and...less downs. Some things its done could have been cool, but Akamatsu doesn't capitalize on anything that isn't a incredibly boring protagonist. And the setting still has very little substance to it as well. The one arc that's actually kinda decent ends up with mass killings in Mahora topped off by a zombie apocalypse. The worst one is a terrible fanfic where the author forces his shitty OC to have a romance plot with Eva via time travel, shoehorning himself into her backstory. Previously, she was his maternal figure.

And then there's that. Rakan and Al have teamed up with the Negi possessed Lifemaker, Yue and Nodoka did the same and still look like teenagers, and somehow a Asuna with merged personalities showed up and did...something. The whole thing was weird. Now we're straight up in the Negima flashbacks.

edited 24th Jul '17 1:19:50 AM by SkormSnow-Strider

Wait, he shoehorned Touta into a time-traveling romance with Eva?! Nooo, god damnit, why couldn't he just stick to ruining her as Yukihime?!

You didn't know? Hoo boy, you have no idea how bad that entire stint was. It also introduced a Rakan like figure who apparently trained (despite not even being there) Eva in the first place who is a real vampire, rewrote Eva's origins so that she actually came from a family of farmers as opposed to nobility and got kidnapped for reasons, made it so Eva's attraction to Idiot Hero's all stems from her early interactions with Touta...so on and so forth. Shit was bad.

This was on top of giving Touta Magic Cancel too while learning he can absorb spells, because the arc wasn't bad enough I guess.

Oh my god, that's just... someone please stop him. Mrs. Akamatsu, please demand more hiatus.

Man, romance in this series is just ridiculous. For one it seems like Akamatsu can't even decide who the love interest should be, going from Kuromaru to Eva and now Kirie seemingly at random. Not to mention somewhere halfway in he decided it should be a harem series and introduced some girls who obviously serve no purpose except to pad it out.

It's just absurd on all accounts.

I must be one of the few people not bothered by Akamatsu's changes at all. I really enjoyed the arc with Dana, young Eva and Touta.

Dana annoyed me, and I did dislike what she did to Eva's character.

But that aside, I've been enjoying most of UQ Holder. It's not as good as Negima before it, but I don't think it's as trashy as this thread thinks it is.

edited 24th Jul '17 6:20:18 PM by DarkHunter

I mean, I think Touta is a huge downgrade in character quality from Negi, and implying that he had such a strong impact on one of the most standout and consistently enjoyable characters from Negima, to the point that she spent six hundred years looking for replacements for him, is really hard to swallow.

I would've been fine with Dana if she didn't exist only for shounen power ups and to promote what is truly a self-insert fanfic incarnate. Like some things in Holder, cool concept, but Akamatsu's incompetence can't make use of any of it.

It wouldn't be so bad if it had nothing to do with Negima, and I suspect the Negima stuff is what bogs it down in the end. On its own (that's really impossible at this point) it'd be just another mediocre shounen series floating around. Only reason anyone bothers with it is probably because Akamatsu's name is attached to it, and that's it. If it ditched most of the Negima stuff, axed at least one of Touta's uber powers, and tried to actually focus on the whole immortality bit, it'd be a passable series.

edited 24th Jul '17 7:59:47 PM by SkormSnow-Strider

I mean, yeah. Like I said, the whole bits about the space elevator, the hundred-year time leap, magic smartphone apps (fucking gag me) - all of those were easily the worst parts of Negima, and those being the parts that carried over into UQ Holder did no favors to a series that started with such weak character hooks and unforgivably rushed pacing.

I don't recall magic-apps in Negima. Most sophisticated thing there was Chachamaru herself, and Chisame's artifact. Stuff on MM is a close second, but it wasn't framed by the way of apps.

I will say though, one of the characters in UQ Holder responsible for app development was actually kind of cool. I forget his name, but he's the first disabled character I've seen in a magna in a while, so I thought that was neat. He's been used...twice.

His name is Ray. When I saw him in Dana's castle during that Training Arc, I thought, due to his presence, he'd make some sort of contribution to the story. But nope. Just more wasted potential. Same with Lazlo, the Afro guy.

edited 25th Jul '17 4:34:55 AM by waterwalker

Given how little these characters appear or matter, I'm surprised someone actually bothered to remember their names beyond "Afro guy" and "Wheelchair lad".

Nah, Negima was just barely poking its nose into magic apps (hurf) at the end chapters, if I remember right. But it was one of the first things introduced in UQ Holder and presented as a natural extension of the tech-magic development done for the space elevator, and all that.

Chachamaru and Chachazero are great, not least because of their personalities, but because the whole magitek androids thing (and Chao's Tron Lines magic circuits) followed the aesthetics of 'long-lost ancient civilization' style magitek, where even the tech part is Sufficiently Advanced that it still feels like mostly magic. But "magic apps" is so mundane and boring. All that brings to mind is 'rate 5 stars to keep using Iaculatio Fulgoris! Share your favorite #MalleusAquilonis selfie on Twitter! ;)'

It's classless, in a word.

I see absolutely no problem was 'magic apps'. Seems a pefectly reasonable result from introducing magic to the modern society then fast-forwarding 80 years.

Frankly, from the moment the series was introduced with Negi's grandson as the MC, and all the unanswered questions lingering from Negima, I always thought this series was going to end up dealing with Negima stuff, so the shift there doesn't bother me

Same thing with Touta's Magia Erebea and Magic Cancel. Both are cheap copies of the original, I don't have an issue with him having those two abilities.

edited 25th Jul '17 7:28:40 AM by Chaosjunction