YMMV / UQ Holder!

• Alternate Character Interpretation: For 99% of her screentime, Cutlass is a ruthless monster of a person who takes obvious pleasure in inflicting harm, but after she is killed by Evangeline, Touta sees an image of her. She can't help but laugh at him before her expression turns very sad, hinting that maybe, just maybe, she wanted things to turn out differently between her and her "brother".
• Broken Base:
  • UQ Holder inherited quite a bit of Negima's base, which is split between being pissed this isn't a more direct sequel, happy to see a new setting uncluttered by Negima's large cast, and those still mad that Akamatsu ended Negima so abruptly as a Writer Revolt against the publisher, and then went back to them anyway. Mitigated somewhat by Chapter 129, where Akamatsu added a new element to the title, which likely will be used with the Animated Adaptation... Magister Negi Magi 2, the Japanese outright saying Mahou Sensei Negima 2. It now IS the direct sequel... as much as it can be with most of the original characters and plotlines long gone, anyway.
  • The fans are also rather torn down the middle on the topic of Evangeline's new character design and personality, some to the point of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • The revelation that Touta is a Konoe and apparently Negi's grandson brought back some of the old Ship-to-Ship Combat. A lot of fans speculated that this meant that Negi ended up with Konoka, which pissed off both Konoka/Setsuna fans and fans who wanted Negi to end up with pretty much anyone else. Though much of the fire of this debate died out when people realized that the timeline is set far enough into the future that it was possible that Negi's child could have married Konoka's child. It turns out that while Touta is a genetically altered clone of Negi, the woman who gave gave birth to him by proxy was a woman from the Konoe family, heavily implied to be Konoka's daughter.
  • The entire Touta x Eva potential romance angle. There are just as many people uncomfortable with the idea (and not just for the reason detailed by the entry for Squick below) as there are fans who are gleefully boarding the ship as the Ship Tease grows more frequent.
  • The fact that the series is getting an anime adaptation, since Negima! has yet to have a proper anime that finished the story. Slightly mitigated by the fact that the cast list, for the legacy characters, is EXACTLY the same, and the OAD ends with... the original anime's ending theme in a new recording, and the new anime series will have a new version of the original opening theme.
  • Several fans were rightfully shocked when instead of Nodoka, Yue or even Asuna, Negi's bride is shown to be Chisame, one of the lower tier girls in his class, and prefer to consider it Fanon Discontinuity (if you haven't already considered Negima Fanon Discontinuity already due to some of the events of the original manga). Others feel that Chisame being Negi's bride makes perfect sense considering the events of the Magic World arc (where Chisame slowly taking over Asuna's role, especially once Asuna got captured and was replaced by Shiori in disguise) and the fact that Chisame, like Asuna, has elements inspired by Ken Akamatsu's wife.
• Contested Sequel: Seeing as Negima! Magister Negi Magi was always going to be a Tough Act to Follow, this was a given. Debate goes on and on about whether this series should've been a more direct sequel, it's own series with no Negima ties, or is fine the way it is. While it does address a number of the lingering plot threads that it's predecessor left dangling, consensus is that both the characters and settings, while solid on their own, are heavily overshadowed by the parent series.
• Continuity Lockout: Plot points from Negima! Magister Negi Magi, will get things confusing especially for readers coming in cold, though the series does try to explain them.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Dana's Training from Hell. All that abuse on the Numbers is made irrelevant due to their immortality, so why not kill them a thousand times over to train them?
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In one of the most unintentional Book Ends ever, one of the first questions readers had from the first chapter gets an answer in the final chapters. How can a Konoe be Negi's descendant if Konoka is with Setsuna? Why do the Konoe twins, Honoka and Hisana address Negi as their grandfather and Touta like a sibling? One answer was Touta turning out to be a clone, but from the Distant Finale we have the far simpler answer of surrogacy.
  • After the intentional FromSoftware reference of Kirie's checkpoints being bonfires, we now have the unintentional reference of "Yue Ayase, the All-Knowing!"
• Ho Yay:
  • Touta and Kuroumaru have plenty of Ship Tease, but it's quite hard to tell if it is Ho Yay since Kuromaru's No Biological Sex. Kuromaru eventually Jumping the Gender Barrier and solidifies their relationship with Touta when they have sex, averting this trope.
  • Karin is violently jealous of Touta due to his closeness to Yukihime.
  • Fate continues to display a heavy amount of Ho Yay towards Negi. Touta even calls him on it.
  • Touta made pactios with both Ikku and Santa offscreen. For those not in the know, he kissed them.
• I Knew It!: When Touta first developed ME, many fans were quick to speculate that he was some sort of construct. A year later, it was confirmed, albeit with some additional details.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A fair amount of people were far more interested in how the harem subplots of series, Negi’s in particular, would resolve over the Shonen action, which is somewhat understandable considering how its predecessor ended abruptly.
• Narm: In the TV release of the anime series, all nudity is censored with goofily smiling pictures of Negima's mascot character Chamo the Ermine. While this doesn't work against the tone in the comedic scenes, the constant presence of funny looking animals blocking Karin's body just ruins the mood in the otherwise tense and brutal fight between Karin and Chao the mercenary in the showers.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat:
  • A funny, one-person example among those who ship Kuroumaru with Touta. Since Kuroumaru is genderless till sixteen there are those who would like to see him become male while there are others who would prefer him to become female. A smaller party would prefer him to stay genderless, which may be possible since, as an immortal, Kuroumaru might not age.
  • Played straight on the other hand, regarding pairing Touta with either Kirie (due to the latter's Tsundere tendencies) and Yukihime (As of Chapter 96, looks like the latter did have some feelings for him.)
  • With the reveal that Negi chose Chisame, the debate about who he should've ended up with sparked back up. There's also the matter about the Formal Pactios he made with Nodoka and Yue...
• Shocking Moments: In the last panel of the series that feature Negi and his surviving Ministra Magi, all seven of the main female characters from Negima, they are accompanied by six children, with everyone but the boy trailing behind Negi and Asuna, who instead looks like Negi, looking like near identical younger versions of the girls. The implication that Negi went on to actually enter a polygamous relationship with these girls shocked more than a few fans of the series.
• Squick:
  • Fans were pretty quick to raise an eyebrow when a romantic subplot appeared between Touta and the past Evangeline in Danna's dimension. A meeting that Yukihime apparently remembers. Considering she is pretty much Touta's adoptive mother, the idea of a romantic love between them was met with... skepticism.
  • The increased emphasis on repeated Kirie fanservice following the shift in magazines also may count.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Most of the members of UQ besides Kirie, Touta, and Yukihime get this to some degree, but by far the worst offender is Santa. Introduced early in the series as a malevolent spirit, he befriends and joins the Numbers after his arc ends...And that's the end of his prominence. He's one of the more unique characters Akamatsu has ever created and has zero limelight shone on him when even some of the more minor characters like Gengorou get some chapters to themselves. He also makes no appearance in the anime whatsoever.
  • Nikitis is also given this treatment. While there are prominent men in the series, one on Touta's mental wavelength and as powerful and knowledgeable as Nikitis is rare, and his banter with Touta made him a popular candidate for an ally or rival. However, much like Santa, he doesn't get much screentime following his introductory arc.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It's established through Cutlass that Touta is the only successful clone of Negi and Asuna out of dozens of experiments. Fate planned to use those "failed" clones as soldiers, however Cutlass is the only one that Touta actually meets, and it's never elaborated upon what happened to the others or how Touta felt about them.
• Tough Act to Follow: As the sequel to Negima, this was pretty much a given. While the manga was far from an outright failure, managing to run for a good 8-9 years, roughly as long as Negima itself, UQ Holder was unable to have the massive multimedia success that its preceding series enjoyed. Case in point, compare Negima's many adaptations to UQ Holder only managing a single season.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Nodoka appearing as an antagonist as well as roughly the same age as in Negima caught many fans off guard.
  • Yue still being alive wasn't entirely unexpected. But her as an antagonist and still looking like she did in Negima? Very unexpected.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Some readers have noted that the changes to Yukihime's backstory make her appear to be a liar, whiny and antisocial by choice at best. Even if she did hate Dana, the latter did help teach her self defense. With the other vampires, Karin and any other immortals she may have met, if she was alone at any point then it was by choice. This is mitigated by the fact that Yukihime was separated from Karin by another High Daylight Walker, and her most frequent company were bounty hunters. Then she goes on to create the "Family of Immortals" herself.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's not quite clear whether Shinobu is a girly boy or a tomboy Bokukko, though most readers assume the latter due to being an expy of two Shrinking Violet girls from Akamatsu's previous works, but with the introduction of Kuromaru who hits the readers hard with this trope, many are not trusting their own judgment. Chapter 97 makes it pretty clear that Shinobu is a girl.

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