Raildex verse (A Certain Magical Index, A Certain Scientific Railgun, A Certain Scientific Accelerator)

I tend to try not to think about that.

So do I. You really need to ignore that in the Index works.

I don't think Last Order is really used for fanservice the way, say, Kuroko or Lessar are, is she? More of a 'cute innocent kid' thing.

Maybe she isn't anymore, but I don't actually read the light novels so I can't say.

I can think of two instances in the anime where she was: In her introduction episode, and during that weird bath scene with her, scientist lady and anti-skill lady.

edited 11th Jun '16 10:29:10 AM by Elfhunter

Her intro scene was a little odd, but I'm hesitant to call it fanservice. I dunno, it just felt like it was more demonstrating how little Accelerator cares than titillation. And the shower scene was definitely pure comedy, especially comparing it to Touma's similar scenes.

This franchise has always used Naked People Are Funny a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of the people involved are young, so it can get a tad uncomfortable.

See, in the case of her introduction, if it had been a brief reveal of her being naked after he pulls her robe off, I could have agreed with what you're saying. But the scene focuses (and I mean focuses, with a pan up and then zooming in to pan up again) so long on her naked form I just can't overlook the fanservice angle in that one.

The second one I can agree with.

New Railgun out.

Things are apparently going to get... weird with our robot clone friend. Also, a whole bunch of new characters to keep track of, I guess. Great.

The new team is the Scavenger group that Accelerator beat the crap out of in his manga, for people who don't keep up with that and are wondering who the new people are. The guy in the overalls has basically a scrying power, the girl in the maid outfit can control paper, the girl with black hair can control friction, and the last girl has a bunch of equipment. They're also all cyborgs I think. So it's basically ITEM 2.0. Presumably these arcs are going to tie together somewhat, since the Railgun one is dealing with a scientific method of seeking a soul, while the Accelerator one has the necromancer messing with souls and the scientist using corpses to generate Esper abilities.

edited 29th Jun '16 1:55:39 PM by RedAcer

Well that actually makes the Accelerator manga sound interesting enough to read again, at least to see what's going on.

Things Index finds delicious: giant robots

Preview for NT 16 is out, and at least the prologue is translated.

I was expecting some dumb nonsense based on the plot summary and how the beginnings of these novels usually go, but this actually looks promising.

edited 5th Aug '16 9:06:50 PM by clockworkBabbage

I'm enjoying it, but i'm 99% sure this has to be a dream or alternate reality or vision or something. For one thing I don't see Kamachi doing something like this when it's heavily implied by the text that boatloads of AC residents have died as a result, it's not really his style. It also just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I can't imagine how things could possibly have gotten this bad that fast.

If you're right, I'm going to be rather disappointed. Because this was a competently-written prologue that did a damn good job at making me want to know what happens next, and having it not be real would be a tremendous cop-out.

I suppose it could be real, but it'd just be so odd. It'd be jumping from a mostly very linear plotline running NT 13 through NT 15, to suddenly a post-apocalypse? If it is real i'll be interested to see where it goes, because that's a pretty big leap right there. I'd hope Kamachi isn't gonna just start dropping plot points. I mean hell, Mikoto's on the cover and Touma's already mentioned her in the prologue. Is that AAA stuff going to stay on the sidelines here or is it relevant?

I don't know if you caught the plot summary while it was still up, but AAA was definitely mentioned in there, as was the whole apocalyptic situation. Sure, we've seen that those plot summaries can, at times, be all but entirely blatant lies. But I'm not getting that vibe from the prologue here.

The series hasn't done time travel yet right? There, Touma has to avert the bad future. Now we can get all the bad plots into Index!

Translation of NT 16 has now started. Still generally keeping my good impression from the preview.

Oh ok, nevermind, there's the nonsense I was expecting. Still liking this overall though.

edited 13th Aug '16 8:35:37 PM by clockworkBabbage

AAA Mikoto is still awesome, so that's good. Sorta scary but good.

Kamachi just has this marvelous ability to remove any and all of the tension he's spent any time building, doesn't he?

Cinema Sins is right, playing the pronoun game to faux build up suspense do get annoying after a while. "That person" repeated over and over again was quite grating.

Otherwise, I very much like this volume so far. The action and conflict started straight away, no waiting around as to when the antagonist will show up due to fillers and no question as to why it doesn't pick up the plot threads left in the previous volume, NT 16 does just that. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I also enjoy Shokuhou's interactions with Touma, despite the bittersweetness of it.

I suspected Yuitsu was the one responsible when Kuroko said the girls had discovered the Elements were mostly made out of carbon, since she has the St. Germain virus and creating animals was its thing.

Yuiitsu was clearly responsible since the end of the last novel. There wasn't any question that the plot of NT 16 would be directly related to that, and the only other option would have been Aleister going after Mikoto, which would have ended pretty much instantly.

I'd definitely agree that it certainly started strong and is generally enjoyable. I'll have more thoughts once it's actually done being translated.

Well.

Were this novel not directly a result of NT 15, I'd say it would have been a rather good one. Again, I loved how it started, and the writing and plot in general were actually pretty good (by the standards of this series at least). But this novel wasn't something we can just take on its own, and how that's been handled has made me a bit annoyed. Rant incoming:

I mentioned it earlier, but I can pinpoint the exact line where I knew this novel wasn't going to do anything I really had wanted it to. It was the moment where literally the entire character arc Mikoto was going through was resolved entirely off-camera and with nothing significant happening. Now, yes, it's true that Index isn't Railgun, and therefore Mikoto isn't the protagonist, so in general I'm willing to let stuff like that slide within Index. But this time, NT 15 and 16 were very much about Mikoto in a significant way; 15 had set up a significant character arc for her to deal with, and 16 - being directly related to the events of 15 - really should have dealt with it. But that was all tossed aside in favor of Kamisato, who is pretty boring as a character IMO.

Again, things started off pretty good with regards to dealing with the issues Kamachi had set up in 15. Mikoto shows up, and it's clear that Kamachi is at least trying to show that A.A.A. was a bad thing for Mikoto, both physically and mentally. Sure, the execution could have been a lot better had she not reverted to "flustered schoolgirl" so easily, but we should be charitable and give Kamachi credit there. Due to the events of 15, we have a good sense of tension (even if we strongly suspect, due to the nature of this series, that nobody's going to actually get hurt) and it's all directly related to what NT 15 had set up. You're left wondering how exactly everything's going to be resolved and whether any significant decisions are going to have to be made by the characters, or whether the fact that Mikoto clearly crossed some kind of a line in terms of the moral standards this series goes by at the end of the last novel will ever be confronted. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all we get. Mikoto blows some stuff up, nobody thinks anything of it or seriously tries to address the A.A.A. in any way, and then... Yuiitsu blows up the A.A.A. off camera, and that's the end of that. Nobody gets hurt, and nothing significant happened character-wise. And not only that, we're explicitly told not only that everyone involved is safe for now, but that there is no more threat to them for the foreseeable future. The entire plot thread - something that had been set up through the entirety of the previous novel - was pretty much just discarded, and all the tension disappeared barely halfway through the novel.

Now, there is still the possibility that these issues weren't actually discarded, and that this will be further addressed later. A few things were actually pretty unclear - did Yuiitsu destroy all of the A.A.A., including what Mikoto was wearing at the time? Or just what was in the hangar? Did Yuiitsu choose to go after Kamisato and just take out the A.A.A. Mikoto was using on the way, or did she tell Aleister she'd deal with Mikoto, but then also try and take out Kamisato after that was done? If she chose to go after Kamisato, will Aleister still have any reason to go after Mikoto if the A.A.A. was destroyed? I don't know. None of it's clear from the novel, and I just can't trust that anything interesting will be done with it. My impression is that it was just dropped because Kamachi found Kamisato more interesting to deal with for some reason - despite the fact that the main reason he was around (Touma and Kamisato's conflicting worldviews over why they had their hands) was already resolved.

Again, there were decent things in here. I'm not going to hate this one like I did NT 4, and if Kamachi absolutely felt like he had to focus on Kamisato, he at least did something halfway decent with it. But you don't just throw away plot threads that you spent so much time setting up. It's terribly bad writing, even by the standards you'd normally hold this series towards.

edited 20th Aug '16 5:49:30 PM by clockworkBabbage

I'm pretty sure the whole AAA plot has just been shifted to a future novel, since at the end of NT 15 it was stated that Yuiitsu and Aleister would pick either Kamisato or Mikoto to go after, and I doubt that conversation happened just to be ignored. Since Yuiitsu stated at the end that AAA was a diversion for her and that she's after Kamisato, i'm assuming Aleister is still the one after Mikoto, and he hasn't even shown up yet so presumably he hasn't yet played his hand. Plus I don't think even Kamachi would just drop it like that.

I'll probably write a more detailed summary on my feelings on the novel later.

edited 20th Aug '16 5:57:29 PM by RedAcer

Possibly, but like I said, I can't trust that - especially because we were told that the A.A.A. was destroyed. Were this to actually be addressed later, I'd be less annoyed by the failure to do so here. But that still won't excuse the poor execution - if Mikoto wasn't going to be important in this novel, she shouldn't have appeared to the extent that she did and the main source of tension that 15 set up should not have been resolved - and again, I am stressing this - entirely off-camera.

edited 20th Aug '16 6:05:18 PM by clockworkBabbage