(L) UQ Holder (Ken Akamatsu's new series)

[Endscape]

Originally Posted by NapoleonDeCheese

Spoiler for On the subject of Fate...:

Early spoilers are out, looks like he STILL has Chao the Rapist, whose only credentials through the whole manga have been having his ass kicked and trying to molest others before murdering them, on his payroll. But noooooo, let's still pretend Albino Boy has some higher moral ground to stand up over anyone.

The guy works for a PMC, so maybe Fate's already hired his services for a time and can't really break the contract yet. And I'm fairly sure UQ Holder at least, has never pretended Fate had any kind of moral high ground over anyone.

Originally Posted by amtro

I noticed that Touta sprouted 2 demon arms to stop the swords before blasting his own brains out.
Since when does he have that much control over his transformations?

Originally Posted by NapoleonDeCheese

Because Reasons.

He's been training to control his powers for a while now. If he can do a watered down version of Raiten Taisou, this isn't much.

Originally Posted by Ultragunner

Wow, who the heck is that at the end? A pure blood (? Vampire) who joined UQ Holder??

A UQ Holder member that's been teased for quite a while.

[SoloPanda]

I wonder why he attacked? I'd be willing to bet Touta and Kirie stopped time and trained like hell to get Touta like that. Only way i can think of. They could have been in there for several years with periodic breaks and return to normal time.

btw anyone get a Dynamis feel from his second form? Or cutlass i guess.

Wait a minute! we still didn't get to see what any of the artifacts do!

[AstroNerdBoy]

Originally Posted by Endscape

A UQ Holder member that's been teased for quite a while.

Haha! Literally since the first chapter.

[NapoleonDeCheese]

Alright, so after a few chapters where UQ Holder almost was starting to look like a good manga, the series' worst vices have returned in full force, which worryingly seems to happen every time the main driving arc is touched upon. The most tolerable parts (Santa's arc, Karin's past) seem to be those not directly attached to the Negi/Touta/Fate when he's remembered plot, which is like saying most parts of your mobility work except those depending on your spine.

And I've never liked Fate, but dayum, what happens to him in this chapter is just shameful. He was The Worf Effect on two legs so badly that Worf himself winced.

[SoloPanda]

Is there anywhere that did a breakdown of the cards on the first page?

Honestly, I don't think fate is beaten just yet. he obviously wasn't going all out there for whatever reason. I'm more concerned with why this fellow attacked. It says 3 months have passed, I'm wondering if Touta has caused some sort of problem in UQ holder during his training, or if this particular pure blood just came to play with him a little by killing him a few times, cause that seems to do.

I'm hoping they show a little of what happened during that time skip and one of these days show us what the cards do.

I really really hope that to finish in 2 years he isn't going to completely timeskip all of the training arcs, at least show us a couple of panels i don't need a full blown rocky montage.

[Shippuu]

Is there a reason Negi presumably can't do all those fancy Black of Venus transformations and summons and is stuck with only a single Raiten Sōsō transformation? Aside from them clearly not existing in Akamatsu's mind back then.
Poor Fate, that was just shameful. But I suppose you were doomed from the start against the might of a Mary Sue. Not even a training montage at Dana's but I suppose there's no more time for it.
It also bothers me how all these transformations have seemingly no coherence and consistency. The wings suddenly look nothing like the more angelic variants displayed earlier, and while Negi turns into an actual demon Touta looks more like a guy in a shitty-looking Dynamis-themed Sentai suit.

The most baffling thing about this chapter perhaps is Touta's power being supplied by Venus. The planet itself? It's civilization? Wait what? How does that work with the White of Mars? Venus may have demon inhabitants but Mars presumably had no life at civilization at all before the Magic World was made with the White of Mars. This is confusing. Does that mean it's not actually Touta's own power? Is he just a relay (his meeting with Asuna seemed to indicate something similar)? And apparently you can just distribute this once-awesome Venus power to all of humanity? Why exactly is Touta the only successful Black of Venus holder if it's that easy?
And no despite what Touta of Nazareth says making everyone immortal, just like making magic public, would be a terrible idea in reality but I suppose you'd have a less interesting story then.
Aside from Touta powering up off-screen it also bothers me that important information like this is also fed to him off-screen.

And vampire Fate finally shows up, though I can't really make sense of his name and no mythology comes to mind.
Now only Juuzou is left.

[SoloPanda]

Negi can do all of those. His version was made of lightning. If anything Touta has the lesser version in just the black shell form.

[NapoleonDeCheese]

And no despite what Touta of Nazareth says making everyone immortal, just like making magic public, would be a terrible idea in reality but I suppose you'd have a less interesting story then.

Everyone in Mundus Magicus know about magic and they seem to do mostly fine. It's not like this is the Nasuverse, where magic decreases the more people uses it (despite it being that way back when magic was more powerful) because Muh Mystery.

[Shippuu]

Originally Posted by NapoleonDeCheese

Everyone in Mundus Magicus know about magic and they seem to do mostly fine. It's not like this is the Nasuverse, where magic decreases the more people uses it (despite it being that way back when magic was more powerful) because Muh Mystery.

Well we don't really know how magic works in this setting in general but when it comes to the Black of Venus at least this chapter seems to say the opposite, and the more people use this power the weaker it gets overall.
I would attribute the lack of magical problems in the Magic World to the fact that their society was built from the ground up with Magic in mind and evidently they have plenty of problems still. If more time had been spent in the Magic World I'm sure we would've seen more of it. In fact early UQ Holder seemed to deal with the magic on Earth thing a bit more closely but like many things it was just swept under the rug.
I just refuse to believe that you can just give most people on the planet what amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction and expect things to turn out even remotely fine afterwards.

[Dargor]

Originally Posted by SoloPanda

Negi can do all of those. His version was made of lightning. If anything Touta has the lesser version in just the black shell form.

Raiten Taisou is just one of ME's applications. For the most part, its only intended function was to absorb spells and physically take on aspects of them for buffs. It wasn't intended for humans to use, which is why Negi wound up transforming due to its encroachment.

Why can Touta do the things he can do with it? We all know the real answer to that, but the in story reason is probably because he was specifically created to be some freaky ME monster thing like Cutlass is, even though that's not what the spell was ever meant for.

Well we don't really know how magic works in this setting in general

This is unequivocally not true. Unless Akamatsu truly stopped giving a lick about things, which is entirely possible, Negima had a very through and in depth magic system explained in its lexicons at the end of most of its volumes. There's even a website that catalogs them here. I'd take a read on it, since its actually pretty good stuff.

I just refuse to believe that you can just give most people on the planet what amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction and expect things to turn out even remotely fine afterwards.

Except they can't. Most mages aren't particularly powerful, and even in this series, a simple Sagitta Magica is considered impressive. The number of people in this series that actually are shown to be capable of magicks of that caliber are extremely few and far between, and half of them aren't even human.

[Shippuu]

Originally Posted by Dargor

This is unequivocally not true. Unless Akamatsu truly stopped giving a lick about things, which is entirely possible, Negima had a very through and in depth magic system explained in its lexicons at the end of most of its volumes. There's even a website that catalogs them here. I'd take a read on it, since its actually pretty good stuff.

I've read Vetus and I have the entire 70+ pages of the Lexicon Negimarium from the official release. While it does tell you about the origins of Ki, Mana or specific spell effects and techniques including cited and footnoted historical references and lots of technobabble it doesn't actually explain how magic is made and how spell construction works or even how a magic circle is drawn. Considering the 2 pages of Greek Mythology for Zect's multi-layer barrier or Magia Erebea each it might be similar in nature to the Idol Theory of Index, which allows for spells to be forged (somehow) out of legends and history. People's belief and the collective unconscious seems to play an important role, as it's the basic for Holy Magic and the reason why classical magic is dying in the setting but the exact mechanism remains unknown so I would hesitate to call it an actual system. Or at least not a hard magic system.

I'm also starting to wonder whether Ken has retconned several things. Here we have the confirmation that Venus pumps infinite energy into Touta and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that the White of Mars does the same. It would explain how Asuna can single-handedly stop the Magic World's collapse as long as she remains sealed even though it never really made sense why she could do that in Negima where all we knew is that she possesses the power of creation and destruction, not the power to stop entropy and generate infinite energy. But where does the planet get this energy from and what is it? Is it a special kind of energy or Magical Energy? If it's the latter it would be a problem as Negima made it perfectly clear that magical energy comes from Life itself, of which there is almost nothing on Mars (or Venus, unless demons somehow terraformed it) save a few microbes.

[NapoleonDeCheese]

I just refuse to believe that you can just give most people on the planet what amounts to a potential weapon of mass destruction and expect things to turn out even remotely fine afterwards.

Training at magic takes years and years of formation, and many, like Takahata, are born unable to even use it. It's just Negi and his class were a bunch of magically gifted freaks of nature whom Konoemon probably placed together around the Twilight Princess, his ultra-prodigy-potential granddaughter, the immortal vampire, the experimented half Mazoku mercenary, the ghost, the bird hanyu, the probability altering girl and the Mazoku princess of Venus on purpose.

If magic is revealed, most people will still remain unable to use magic for years, and that's only for those with the patience, the means (there's a rather limited amount of people able and willing to teach it) and the natural gifts to learn. That's why magic apps were such a game changer, but those advances won't be ready in another 80 years from Negima's time.

EDIT: Wow, looking at it again, the scene where Fate is beheaded IS stupid looking. It looks like he's a mannequin having the head slapped off its neck.

The guy works for a PMC, so maybe Fate's already hired his services for a time and can't really break the contract yet.

I forgot to address this before, but I'm pretty sure you can break contracts whenever the contracted party repeteadly fails to deliver in terms of efficiency at what they are supposed to do, especially when you, as the contractor, hold titles of the caliber of 'Strongest Mage in the Solar System' (for all the good that title has done for Fate ever since.) I'm reasonably sure I remember him even going against Fate's orders before (when going after Kuromaru in the tower?) which would be a solid cause for his contract termination.

It seems that just, for some reason, Akamatsu is in love with the character. Even Tsukuyomi would make more sense to keep bringing back at this point, at least she has solid lore foundations and connections, and yet we don't even know yet if she's supposed to be the same Tsukuyomi or a copycat.

[Dargor]

Originally Posted by Shippuu

I'm also starting to wonder whether Ken has retconned several things.

Oh, he probably has. I'm almost convinced at this point that almost everything about magic from Negima was not his own work. Everything new UQ holder has introduced at this point has been so bare bones and poorly constructed, its probable that most of the work of that kind was coming from an assistant.

Let's face it, if Akamatsu was that kind of author or into metaphysical world building, we would've had more examples of this way before Negima was a thing, and if he actually cared that much about a setting to put that kind of work into it, it would've continued into Holder.

It would explain how Asuna can single-handedly stop the Magic World's collapse as long as she remains sealed even though it never really made sense why she could do that in Negima where all we knew is that she possesses the power of creation and destruction, not the power to stop entropy and generate infinite energy.

A lot of this has to do with us knowing jack all about Asuna in the first place. Despite the Lifemaker being an effective god in this setting and where both ME and the Royal Families magic originate from, she can't actually port MM over into CE on her own. So there's something about Asuna that makes her vital enough to do something the Lifemaker can't, so her being the magic worlds corner stone isn't surprising.

Will we ever actually get to explore any of that though? No, probably not. My guess is he's gonna shove some two bit paragraph somewhere and call it a day.

[Shippuu]

He will have to at least explain the reason why Ialda cannot use the White of Mars. Basically the entire story hinges on it. There would be no plot otherwise. She clearly uses a lot of dark techniques and her ability to devour people's souls might be an actual application of the Black of Venus, but it wouldn't explain why she isn't using Magia Erebea, or why Venus and Mars are apparently not pumping her full of energy and she is stuck with All The World's Evil instead.

I mean I'm glad I'm finally getting SOME answers about the mechanics of the setting, but it just makes it more confusing instead.

[Dargor]

Originally Posted by Shippuu

He will have to at least explain the reason why Ialda cannot use the White of Mars. Basically the entire story hinges on it. There would be no plot otherwise. She clearly uses a lot of dark techniques and her ability to devour people's souls might be an actual application of the Black of Venus, but it wouldn't explain why she isn't using Magia Erebea, or why Venus and Mars are apparently not pumping her full of energy and she is stuck with All The World's Evil instead.

I mean I'm glad I'm finally getting SOME answers about the mechanics of the setting, but it just makes it more confusing instead.

IIRC, Magia Erebea is based on the Lifemakers abilities, and not something that comes from her directly (Except she does now as the Negi!Maker). ME was developed by Eva, but how she picked something Dynamis claims comes from her in the first place was never answered. I've always guessed since it was revealed back in Negima that it might have something to do with the fact that the Lifemaker experimented on her in the first place. It'd be consistent with Negi's eventual transformation and the fact that Touta and his sister all have similar traits to some extent. Also, the Lifemaker is directly credited for siring the entire Vesperina line, so that connection has been always been there. I think its less an issue of that she can't use it, and more that she just doesn't.

Basically what I'm saying is, Asuna's a freak and shouldn't be used to demonstrate the norms, Touta be damned. I mean, the Royal Families magic is implied by Yue to be why Negi is so adept at magic, as infuriating as that is.

[NapoleonDeCheese]

Let's face it, if Akamatsu was that kind of author or into metaphysical world building, we would've had more examples of this way before Negima was a thing, and if he actually cared that much about a setting to put that kind of work into it, it would've continued into Holder.

To be fair, that kind of thing would have felt completely out of place in AI Love You or Love Hina. Those works didn't need complex world building or lore, and so I imagine they were much easier for him, and would have been for anyone else too, to lay out.

EDIT: Come to think about it, if this guy was an UQ number the whole time... did Fate ever stand any chance against them whatsoever? I mean, between him, Eva, Gangooru, Karin, Ikkuu and Jinbei they should have been able to just walk in at any point they wanted to and bitchslapped him until he cried uncle. Dana's technically not part of the organization and is supposed to stay out of things Because Neutrality and Boredom and Superiority Reasons until she decides not to Because Touta Reasons, but this guy IS a part of the numbers and thus an actual active member.

[Shippuu]

Too busy with loli races to do actually worthwhile stuff. Besides this fight was really more about personal business between Touta and Fate and they probably didn't do anything together because Shounen reasons. I also feel like Fate has been nerfed dramatically and probably wasn't even that strong to begin with just like Ialda's other puppets. Five years are apparently enough for even people like Yue and Nodoka to stand against the archons of the creator of an entire world.

Besides, vampire Fate didn't help because he was conveniently absent just like Juuzou.

[NapoleonDeCheese]

Other things of lesser interest.

OF COURSE that whenever two characters actually express the intent to sit down and talk things out maturely, and perhaps lay out some of the lore and backstory like civilized adults sharing valuable and personal information alike, a third party would suddenly pop up and trigger that Death Flag on one of them. That old chestnut of contriving things so 'mysteries' and character development can stall longer, even WHEN YOU'RE ALREADY IN THE FINAL LAP OF THE SERIES.

With all the black rose petals I kept on expecting for Kodachi to pop up behind the new guy at any moment, too.

"He's as strong as that Rakan brute!" Sigh... Well, okay, with all the plot coupons, of course he would be. Still comes off as such blatant shilling for some reason. Again, out of all the old tactics to sell and wank a character, pointing out they're now as strong or stronger than a previous well beloved and popular character is one of the oldest and most worn out.

If you want to stress out the terrorist situation is getting out of control through a few panels, maybe those panels should be spent actually showing your ALLEGED HEROES stopping those threats in a montage with some narration or something, instead of calmly HAVING THEM HEAR THE NEWS ON IT while chilling in their dream bath house playing maids and butler.

Edit: Sorry, I misremembered one of the panels for a moment there.

[Endscape]

Originally Posted by NapoleonDeCheese

EDIT: Wow, looking at it again, the scene where Fate is beheaded IS stupid looking. It looks like he's a mannequin having the head slapped off its neck.

Maybe because it's one of his earth doll replacements?

I forgot to address this before, but I'm pretty sure you can break contracts whenever the contracted party repeteadly fails to deliver in terms of efficiency at what they are supposed to do,

What I meant was that the PMC that hired them might not have another person of Chao's skill available (and yes, he is fairly skilled) to give him.

It seems that just, for some reason, Akamatsu is in love with the character.

If Akamatsu was in love with him, he wouldn't be getting his ass kicked every time he appears

Originally Posted by NapoleonDeCheese

EDIT: Come to think about it, if this guy was an UQ number the whole time... did Fate ever stand any chance against them whatsoever? I mean, between him, Eva, Gangooru, Karin, Ikkuu and Jinbei they should have been able to just walk in at any point they wanted to and bitchslapped him until he cried uncle.

They could, but why bother buying trouble?

[NapoleonDeCheese]

If Akamatsu was in love with him, he wouldn't be getting his ass kicked every time he appears.

He always could bring back the wolf guy and his old partner, they actually were cool, and to be fair TO THE MOOOOOOON remains a pretty effective move against immortals. No matter how broken Touta is, if he's sent to the Moon you've still taken him out of your hair. Or the Gonk Monk. Or Cyber Tsukuyomi. Instead, it's always Chao, Chao, Chao, and it never even has the payoff of explaining whether he's related to Lingshen or not.