All Purpose Negima Fanfiction Thread

I can even understand bad deeds if they were I Did What I Had to Do type thing, but the fact is he does completely unnecessary things, like impaling Negi at the Gateport, attacking the ball and do I really need to say anything about his career as a teacher?

He's such a fail of a rival that we're meant to like.

Seriously, is Fate even popular in Japan?

edited 6th Mar '15 8:31:14 AM by Archivist10

The fun thing is that Fate is actually not that bad at a conceptual level.

The problem comes from the fact that Akamatsu forgot that we needed a transition from 'Evil Antagonist' to 'Secretly Not That Evil Anti-Villain'.

Fate should've been less evil from the start and should've had an arc to him in order to really work.

Ultimately, it's yet another failed attempt at pulling a Vegeta. People seem to totally forget why Vegeta worked as a 'Really Fucking Evil Villain Becomes An Ally', and that is that Vegeta was never really a good guy. He was still the same, and people acknowledged that he was very dangerous. Well, everyone but Goku, at any rate. His 'mellowing out' arc took all the way to the end of the series, when he finally dropped his beef with Goku.

It also helped that Vegetta kept getting humiliated again and again and again by stronger opponents.This makes his ego and jerkassery far less obnoxious because the guy just can't catch a damn break and he becomes more and more humanized in the audience's eyes.

Fate has none of that, even when he's facing far superior opponents he still maintains a sense of dignity which is boring and uninteresting. A fun thing about arrogant villains is that we like to see them loose their dignity.

Fate in the end wins and looses on his own terms, if he achieves CE he's fine with it, if he's beaten by Negi he's fine with that too.

This makes his defeat feel hollow because we never get that moment of catharsis that we all were hoping for.

I'll blame it on the incredibly rushed conclusion to the Magic World arc and the fact that by that point Akamatsu seemed to have pretty much ceased giving a damn about Negima.

That, and Vegeta is actually entertaining. His mannerisms, his moods, his quirks, all of those make him just entertaining to watch/read, which is what matters the most in any villain. Fate is flat and shallow, and his only humanizing quirks are either given too little time (his relationship with the Fatettes) or are of the annoying variety (his gratuitous screwing of 3-A just because he's a fucking creepy Yandere).

Tsukuyomi may be a sorry piece of disgusting scum, and she has little depth, but she at least has unpredictable, colorful mood swings and can go into Up To Eleven Love to Hate territory. Dynamis was a cool customer who really only was a dick to his enemies and made the best of his limited panel time with strenght of character. Even Basil Exposition over in UQ Holder wasn't as token boring as Fate, and Basil Exposition is just a petty bigot.

edited 6th Mar '15 9:31:50 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

Dynamis was a great deal of fun as a villain, which is mostly owed to the fact that he was a gigantic ham. Only someone with little to be ashamed of is as proud of having gone into hiding as he is, and few would boast about it. Plus, he's also Genre Savvy enough to know to prepare extra insurance beforehand and to know that the heroes are dumb enough to stop and listen to his monologue, which gives his extra insurance enough time to activate.

Dynamis for final villain!

edited 6th Mar '15 9:55:49 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

What's annoying is the story seems to claim that Fate is important for Negi's development. He really isn't, even though saying he wanted to be friends with him somehow makes him temporarily control ME IIRC.

He really seemed like he was trying to push some Nanoha/Fate and Naruto/Sasuke stuff here. But the circumstances are far different, with Naruto it made sense because Sasuke is a former friend and to Naruto, not breaking any bonds of friendship has always been a big thing and he had at least some chemistry with Sasuke before he turned bad.

But with Fate there's absolutely no reason character wise or narrative wise why Negi should want to become friends with Fate. He tries to give some half-arsed excuse that he thinks that Fate isn't such a bad guy from what Shiori told him, but that doesn't change all the unnecessary shit he's done to Negi and his friends.

Appart from the whole Tea vs Coffee thing the two characters had nothing that would spark an actual friendship especially considering that nearly all their interactions were always based on fights. Now that would work with someone like Touta and Kotaro, with the former showing to start becoming a Blood Knight, and therefore fighting to them is something very personal.

But Negi isn't a Blood Knight and doesn't see fighting as some personal deal, rather just a way to defend his students.

Fate wasn't even needed for the plan, Negi acknowledged that, he even spend more time teaching than Negi.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:00:10 AM by Archivist10

Don't even bring up Sasuke/Naruto, because that relationship is just as botched as Negi/Fate, the only difference is that it was par for the course in Naruto whereas in Negima it happened to be a very noticeable drop in quality. At least Negi and Fate's relationship didn't need to be retconned in.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:03:21 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

Really? Because Negi spontaneously wanting to be friends with Fate certainly felt like a retcon.

You don't even know what a retcon is, do you?

It wasn't a retcon, since a retcon means altering the past events rather than changing shifts after a point with little rhyme or reason. But it's still a definitely patched-on abrupt plot development. Until that point, Fate had given Negi little reason to care about him. The other Averrunci and Dynamis also did what they thought was the best for Mundus Magicus, yet Negi never thinks at all about setting them straight and befriending them, or regrets their ultimate fate. And other than Quartum, none of them did anything to the girls that Fate himself wouldn't have done under the same circumstances. Hell, had Sextum or Quintum or even Dynamis been placed to teach 3-A, odds were they wouldn't have as pointlessly dickish to them either. Fate basically gets the treatment just because Plot Says So.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:16:52 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

Dudes I said it felt like a retcon. I wasn't being literal.

There was as much build up there for friendship as the romance between Neo and Trinity in The Matrix.

Not a retcon. Its not particularly OOC either where Negi is concerned, but rather the fact that Fate was never really go any comeuppance for his asshattery. It was practically endorsed due to him teaching the people who he antagonized in previous arcs without their input, nor did he demonstrably changed his conduct beyond throwing his hat in for someone else.

EDIT: You...you can't feel retcons. It either is or it isn't.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:20:21 AM by SkormSnow-Strider

Dynamis would probably take the teaching job entirely seriously. I... kinda wanna see his approach to teaching English.

Retcons are binary. If it alters prior continuity, it's a retcon. Negi wanting to befriend Fate isn't a retcon. It doesn't alter anything that was already known or implied about the past. Sasuke and Naruto having a relationship beyond what pre-timeskip showed us is. It changes the fact that Naruto disliked Sasuke because he was jealous of the fact that Sasuke was better than him in almost every way and it also changes the fact that Sasuke didn't even acknowledge Naruto as anything or anyone remotely important until Naruto forced himself into Sasuke's field of view.

Tropes Are Not Bad, and that includes retcons. Though this one is a pretty bad retcon.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:30:52 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

I feel like I could argue against some of your points of Naruto, but the focus of this discussion is Fate and we both know neither of us is going to be able to convince the other.

Dynamis actually wouldn't be too bad of a teacher...unless he hears, sees, or thinks about anything regarding Takamichi. Rest of the class would be one giant rant about the "glory" days.

edited 6th Mar '15 10:41:05 AM by SkormSnow-Strider

Archivist, are you seriously trying to argue for the truthiness of a retcon?

No. I'm arguing over how far of a retcon Naruo and Sasuke's relationship is.

... There's no 'how far of a retcon'. Again, it's binary. Two states. Either it is, or it isn't. You can't be a 'partial' retcon any more than you can be 'partially' pregnant.

edited 6th Mar '15 11:04:41 AM by IAmNotCreativeEnough

In fairness I do think we've had discussions on the Naruto pages regarding which can be taken as retcons and which can't. The same with Ass Pulls.

Sometimes one sees one sometimes another doesn't.

There's no real discussion over whether something's a retcon or not. A retcon doesn't necessarily contradict previously stablished canon.

For instance, Goku being an alien doesn't contradict the previously stablished canon, but it is nevertheless a retcon.

The discussion happens because a lot of people think retcons have to conflict with previously stablished canon in order to be called as such, which is just not true. A retcon can be a 'reveal' just as much as it can be an 'asspull'. I refer you to Goku being an alien once more. It's a 'reveal', but it's something that wasn't originally there.

Sasuke and Naruto were not originally friends. In fact, originally, it's pretty much clear that Naruto is jealous of Sasuke and Sasuke ignores Naruto's existence because he is just not relevant to Sasuke's interests.

That depends somewhat on how you can interpretwhat they mean by friendship friendship. Usually they mean more along the lines of True Companions, like how Shikamaru said even though he doesn't like Sasuke he was going to help retrieve him.

Thing is I felt that since the preliminaries in the Chunin Naruto and Sasuke had a healthy respect for eachother.

...then Itachi came along.

edited 6th Mar '15 12:17:25 PM by Archivist10

Archivist, you're talking about Naruto and Sasuke's friendship as it developed in part one. Everyone else is talking about the flashbacks showing Naruto and Sasuke were actually friends back in the academy (as opposed to the Unknown Rival thing that they had going at the start of the series) that started showing up just before the time-skip and got more and more ridiculous throughout the rest of the series.

I personally attributed those to Naruto blatantly misremembering the past.

It would be Naruto blatantly misremembering the past...

... if we didn't also have Sasuke flashing back to that.