Anime Spotlight #2: A Certain Opinionated Blogger

Step into the Anime Spotlight, Weebotaks, for the last anime-related post of the year!

Sometimes Magical, sometimes Scientific, it's always Certain to be the Seinfeld of action anime franchises. Now that you've returned from your trip down the Google rabbit hole to "the show about nothing," strap in for the sprawling universe of Academy City, starting with:

A Certain Magical Index--Somewhere in Academy City (a city-sized school in Japan that's basically a social experiment with psychic powers, underground criminal organizations, a student military, and Unit 731-questionable scientific endeavors going on beneath the surface), we meet a "Level Zero Esper” named Touma Kamijou (who is extremely stubborn, secretly overpowered, has dark, spiky hair, and wears a giant, invisible sign that says “Kick Me, I’m an anime trope!”). One day, a young nun named Index falls out of the sky and lands on him because the downside of his overpowered ability (he can shatter illusions and nullify all magical and psychic energy that comes into contact with his right hand) is that he is cursed with harem protagonist-level bad luck the next day, and he spent the previous evening fighting Railgun (voiced by professional spirit animal Brittany Karbowski in the dub), a teenage girl who shoots electrically super-charged coins with her fingers. Despite being annoying, selfish, and otherwise completely useless, it is revealed that Index’s brain was overwritten with information on every magic spell ever created, and a bunch of witches and wizards who work for the Catholic Church (like that sentence makes any kind of historical sense) want to crack her open and rule the world with the knowledge inside her head. The series frequently shifts between scientific and religious conspiracy plots, weak harem mechanics, impressive shonen action scenes, sparse humor, and heavy suspense and drama. However, even with the constant tonal shifts, short event arcs, and genre variety (not to mention the solid character work), the first two seasons of Index feel long, drawn out, and unfinished. It’s like when someone in a cooking competition has an hour to fix a multi-course gourmet meal and they spend their time milking a cow, squeezing oranges, and making corn flakes from scratch so they can serve the judges cereal and fruit juice, then realize they should have also made toast. Yes, the action is worthwhile and the story justifications for the action are well-written, but to get from fight to fight is often a slog. On the upside, Index does a decent job at illustrating the conflict between science and religion, fleshes out its large cast competently enough for a series of its length and breadth, has great fight scenes, and is justifiably funny enough when it needs to be. But still, the overall tone is kind of bland. In Season III, the chefs finally serve their toast, but said toast is overloaded with forgettable side characters, obscure religious artifacts, and uninteresting, overly situational psychic abilities that do little more than stretch the series’ runtime between the arcs and character moments we really want to see. Long story short, the Certain franchise is at its best when the focus is on the main cast: Kamijo and Index, Accelerator (whose spin-off I will address later) and the Misaka girls (the electric coin-shooter mentioned earlier, and her clones, the original of whom has her own spinoff, which recently wrapped a third season), a few of their inner circle, and just enough charismatic villains to keep things interesting.

In order of  release, we next look at:

A Certain Scientific Railgun--Mikoto Misaka (a.k.a. "The Level Five Railgun of Tokiwadai Middle School") gets her own series, and despite the bland-to-annoying supporting cast (a girl who wants to be an Esper, a girl who can warm things with her hands and grow flowers out of her head, and an onee-san-obsessed yuri stalker with teleportation powers and military clearance), it is a more captivating show than Index. If you can get past Kuroko Shirai (the teleporting lesbian stalker-cop) constantly trying to grope Misaka, Ruiko complaining about not having any powers, and every voice that isn't Brittany Karbowski sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard, you're in for some brilliant dramatic writing, solid romantic-comedy beats, clever connections to events in the Index series, and action scenes that have Misaka putting Miles Morales to shame. Everything in the first two seasons builds up to the "Project Level Six Shift" massacre, wherein the aforementioned Accelerator is told that he can break the Esper ceiling (Level Five is the highest-known, measurable class of Esper in the franchise's Universe, but shady organizations are always trying to surpass it through highly questionable means; case in point...) by murdering 500 psychically networked clones of Railgun, and crosses paths with Kamijo and the original Misaka. The recently-wrapped third season begins with yet another shady laboratory trying to use a mind-controlling socialite's signal-boosting tower to create a Level Six and turn its mindless wrath on Academy City. Then the story tiptoes through a mini-arc about precondition and programmable muscle memory before teaming Misaka with a group of child mercenaries to take down another dark lab who have created a Frankenstein's Replicant with a soul and matter-assimilation powers because in the Certain Universe, mad scientists want to be and/or create God despite not believing in Them. The world these series present is predictably bleak and can be annoying, but it's emotionally gripping and visually spectacular when Misaka goes all The Brave One on the scientific underground. Railgun is Best Girl for Certain.

A Certain Scientific Accelerator--so, you might be asking yourself why anyone would watch--let alone make--a spin-off about an overpowered sadist who murdered almost 500 teenage girls for fun and power? Well, it's because he has sort of a Mandalorian-Baby Yoda relationship with their third-person-double-talking "little sister," he understands humanity enough to give a damn sometimes, and it's fun watching him throw buildings at supervillains. Following the failure of Project Level Six Shift, Accelerator is living a semi-clandestine life with Misaka-Misaka, a.k.a. "Last Order," a.k.a. the cryogenically young human data processor for the network of surviving Railgun clones. He crosses paths with an Esper necromancer one day (props to writer Kenji Sugihara for actually making a version of that word combination that makes sense), who is on the run from the child mercenary group that would later team up with Misaka original in her third season. As it turns out, a shady underground laboratory wants to use her necromancy (based on Jewish folklore and spiritualism, appropriately enough to the franchise's running commentary) to--you guessed it--create another Level Six. So to save the girl, or Academy City, or his own ass, or just because he's jealous of another potential Level Six and needs something to eviscerate, Accelerator answers the call to anti-hero action. And, as previously stated, it's fun watching him one-hand entire buildings at people. As of yet, there is no second season planned.

I hope everyone has a Happy New Year. Or, at least, that you will all be happier with the new year than the old, because 2020 is literally about to be hindsight.

If you are inclined to check out the Certain Universe for yourselves, affordable streaming subscriptions can be found through VRV (Crunchyroll, HiDIVE, and Rooster Teeth), Funimation, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. 👀 Otherwise, I will see you in the new year with a review of Appare-Ranman!

Note: VRV and Funimation are your best bets for these particular series.

AniMeister,

Out.