|
Touta has much less defined goals. I mean, this is the guy who at first only could think of 'I wanna be a singer' for a motivation, which would have been a perfectly good reason to struggle in a manga set in the world of music (IdolMaster Holder? I'd read that, I think). But after that... his 'get stronger to protect muh friends' motif is not any different from Ichigo's, for instance, and they don't come much more iconic than Ichigo (Naruto, for all the jokes about him, had the stuff to be quite complex and intrincate a character, it's just it was mostly wasted). His revenge on his parents' death never went anywhere because he never had an emotional connection to them and the plot never cared about them anyway.
Right now Touta is mostly driven by a combo of a goal imposed upon him by others (left to his own devices, he wouldn't have connected with Negi at all, and he doesn't really have a good emotional link to him yet, not that you can really fault him for that. Negi is basically a random big plot point that crashed into his life otherwise after just being that cool relative Touta had heard about) and the 'muh Evangeline, muh woman' mindset that borderlines on the creepy when he feels himself entitled to have the ultimate romantic saying on his mother figure he has the hots for since he saw her as a little girl.
Negi's got the same simple but effective lifechanging character driving trigger of Bruce Wayne's parents being gunned down, or Emiya being rescued from the fire by Kiritsugu, the single big traumatic event in a key formative childhood moment, which works much better than all the attempts to ram a character drive for Touta without really driving one all the way home that have been tried with Touta.
Negi's also got the moral ambiguity about him. He's the Lawful Good type that will be so to a tee... as long as it ultimately befits his ultimate goals, at which point he'll do things like escaping authority, breaking into forbidden chambers to steal secret spells, or, you know, that thing where he'd planned to stick his loyal best friend into a personality destroying century long sleep without consulting her or anyone else first. For all Negi's a great nice guy he's also kind of a little fanatical bastard when it comes to what he wants to see happening, something Touta doesn't have... for better or worse, Touta's more of a traditional white hat figure.
|