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From the Bookshelf: A Certain Magical Index 1
It doesn't happen quite as often in these modern days, but anime series I only seem to pick up on by noticing how interested other people have become in them aren't yet just old memories. There's even a subcategory of shows I pick up on the interest without quite getting just what it's supposed to be about, which can make the wait for them to be officially available over here a bit more piquant. For the series A Certain Magical Index, though, it seemed a wait of uncommon length for it to be available over here; I gather that had something to do with the tangled circumstances of Geneon giving up on directly distributing anime over here and Funimation eventually picking up some of the titles it had or might have had. When the wait ended, though, all of a sudden some of the people whose interest had first caught my attention seemed offended the show was only available on DVD, all the way to criticising the general story setup. I wound up taking my own time getting around to watching it, and for all that I'd thought I had braced myself against the criticisms something else about the series (which I soon understood at last as one with lots of characters in a setting like a "superhero universe almost without the costumes") sort of crept up on me.
I already understood A Certain Magical Index had been adapted from "light novels," and as with a few other anime series I also understood to have been begun as those prose works the series structure had an uncomfortable resemblance to episodes' worth of the characters standing around talking to each other to set things up before an episode's dose of action to close out that self-contained chunk of plot. As much as I can find the casual criticism that dismisses anime adaptations in comparison to the original source material kind of annoying (particularly when moving on to that material seems to hint at boasting about skills at moving that much further beyond the casual fan, or at least in reading Japanese), that particular feeling can get to me. Somewhat later on I did feel rather more impressed by its spinoff anime A Certain Scientific Railgun, and wondered a bit if that series apparently being adapted from manga helped its episodes deliver a bit more action a bit more often.
However, Yen Press has begun a fair press towards translating and releasing light novel series (a far cry from some unfortunate experiments I just happen to have heard about or even started buying from the later days of Tokyopop, when it, trying just about everything to see if something would click, would start translating novels but give up after just a few volumes), and after having bought a good many volumes of Haruhi Suzumiya and Spice and Wolf (the series that perhaps had started really rubbing that "standing around and talking" feeling into me) I took particular note of it licensing A Certain Magical Index. At the same time, I did wonder if it would be any more interesting to read some stories than to watch them; it has been sort of slow going through some of the Spice and Wolf volumes. All the same, I was ready to hope the prose would be more engaging than some of the amateur translations I've encountered (without much in the way of illustration, they can get rather more stilted than even the most awkward manga "scanlations"). I did seem able to move at a brisk pace (even with a fair dose of bold text), and wondered a bit if the book, which only included illustrations every so often, made it a bit easier to accept the designs of some of its female characters without always having to face impressions of there being something "fetishistic" about their outfits. (However, there was an image or two described in the book that I wondered about "working better visually.") I also, however, did get to thinking back and wondering if that impression of the anime amounting to a great deal of talking had only developed in later "plot arcs" adapted from later volumes. I also managed to get a better sense of the apparent contradiction between the protagonist Touma possessing an infallible defence against all magical and scientific phenomena but his also being considered "powerless" by the scientific world at large. In any case, I am ready for further volumes to come (hoping for a good number of them, of course), but I did get to thinking in the final pages that the dose of pathos in the conclusion would eventually get to be just "one thing that happened early on" multiple adventures later. (Just how long things have been running was suggested by the author's note translated at the back; I got to thinking that perhaps certain "recent" developments that some people keep obsessing over "getting into anime" might have been around a bit longer than they want to think. In any case, I did contemplate that the baggy socks of "Railgun" Mikoto Misaka, introduced in an almost tossed-in way in this volume, are the one element that really seems to bring "an earlier time" to mind for me.)
I already understood A Certain Magical Index had been adapted from "light novels," and as with a few other anime series I also understood to have been begun as those prose works the series structure had an uncomfortable resemblance to episodes' worth of the characters standing around talking to each other to set things up before an episode's dose of action to close out that self-contained chunk of plot. As much as I can find the casual criticism that dismisses anime adaptations in comparison to the original source material kind of annoying (particularly when moving on to that material seems to hint at boasting about skills at moving that much further beyond the casual fan, or at least in reading Japanese), that particular feeling can get to me. Somewhat later on I did feel rather more impressed by its spinoff anime A Certain Scientific Railgun, and wondered a bit if that series apparently being adapted from manga helped its episodes deliver a bit more action a bit more often.
However, Yen Press has begun a fair press towards translating and releasing light novel series (a far cry from some unfortunate experiments I just happen to have heard about or even started buying from the later days of Tokyopop, when it, trying just about everything to see if something would click, would start translating novels but give up after just a few volumes), and after having bought a good many volumes of Haruhi Suzumiya and Spice and Wolf (the series that perhaps had started really rubbing that "standing around and talking" feeling into me) I took particular note of it licensing A Certain Magical Index. At the same time, I did wonder if it would be any more interesting to read some stories than to watch them; it has been sort of slow going through some of the Spice and Wolf volumes. All the same, I was ready to hope the prose would be more engaging than some of the amateur translations I've encountered (without much in the way of illustration, they can get rather more stilted than even the most awkward manga "scanlations"). I did seem able to move at a brisk pace (even with a fair dose of bold text), and wondered a bit if the book, which only included illustrations every so often, made it a bit easier to accept the designs of some of its female characters without always having to face impressions of there being something "fetishistic" about their outfits. (However, there was an image or two described in the book that I wondered about "working better visually.") I also, however, did get to thinking back and wondering if that impression of the anime amounting to a great deal of talking had only developed in later "plot arcs" adapted from later volumes. I also managed to get a better sense of the apparent contradiction between the protagonist Touma possessing an infallible defence against all magical and scientific phenomena but his also being considered "powerless" by the scientific world at large. In any case, I am ready for further volumes to come (hoping for a good number of them, of course), but I did get to thinking in the final pages that the dose of pathos in the conclusion would eventually get to be just "one thing that happened early on" multiple adventures later. (Just how long things have been running was suggested by the author's note translated at the back; I got to thinking that perhaps certain "recent" developments that some people keep obsessing over "getting into anime" might have been around a bit longer than they want to think. In any case, I did contemplate that the baggy socks of "Railgun" Mikoto Misaka, introduced in an almost tossed-in way in this volume, are the one element that really seems to bring "an earlier time" to mind for me.)