Behind The Nihon Review

Electro-cute

Our modest forum gets a little bit of anime related discussion and one of the ongoing series that’s particularly being talked about is Railgun. I found it was interesting that a couple of the guys thought that ep 13 was going to be the last… until recently, I too didn’t realize that the show had been slated for 24 episodes (at least according to MAL). I could see the sense of it though: ep 12 was a culmination of the biggest story thread so far, and ep 13 would have made a fitting place for it to have its denouement and end in the fun, relatively serene tone that marked the surprisingly entertaining earlier episodes.

A lot of the guys haven’t seen Index… I, on the other hand, can’t help but constantly compare this anime with it’s predecessor and have generally approached it as a second series, rather than the spin-off that it’s supposed to be viewed as. I mean, let’s face it, as far as female characters go, Mikoto dominated Index too. She played an active role in more episodes and seemingly did more with the screentime she had than the show’s titular character… well, at least, that’s what it felt like. While Mikoto was out there doing things like kicking ass and other activities normally associated with a heroine in an action series (like being tsunDERE), Index seemed to be busily competing with Komoe for the title of the series’ “biggest moeblob”.

Madness?

So, while I admit that I’m way too hung up on comparing these two series, there’s one conclusion that I find almost inescapable: Railgun is simply better than Index at pretty much everything. Chalk that one up to a better director, for one: Nagai Tatsuyuki has put together other half-decent anime like Toradora! and Honey and Clover II. Railgun is a completely different genre again, but I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s no coincidence that good directors are involved in good anime… the question here is, what has Nagai done with Railgun to make it, well… good.

Good!? Mental aside: did I just call Railgun good? Has my tsundere facade for the entire Toaru franchise melted away in an unconscious admission of admiration? Is this where I flabbergastedly try to cover up that I carelessly dropped my guard? It’s not like I like Railgun or anything… I’m just blogging about it because no one else will (beside all the episodic bloggers). As good as Railgun has been, it’s not an “epic”. I’ll reserve that word for Kara no Kyoukai-calibre stories and cynical attention-grabbing post titles. It has been immensely enjoyable though. And, as with most action anime, the winning formula has been characters.

You must be at least this GAR to be a female lead in an action series. Is it crazy to suggest that there's a bit of Tokiha Mai in this character?

They’ve scrapped Index and relegated Touma to a side role. The only way they could have improved this is if they scrapped Touma too. Kuroko has a bigger role, and the new characters they’ve introduced, Uihara and Saten, are wonderful. Is Uihara a moeblob? I wouldn’t disagree with anyone who thinks she is, but she’s a lot more active in the story than the moeblobs of Index, and she’s just eminently more likable. She’s utilized better and the major difference, as far as I can see, is that she has someone even more likable to play off in Saten. Saten might be one of the best written characters this franchise has seen. She works well in the fun moments because the series has infused her with a very palpable sense of humour, but she’s also believable in the more dramatic scenes, because the series has gone about building her character in a rather Toradorable! way, hence the Nagai influence. This is what he brings to the show, IMO… key characters are developed better, and there’s a better recognition of when scenes should be quiet, when they should be tongue-in-cheek and when they should be melodramatic and/or just straight up GAR (cf. Mikoto in the most recent ep). Index was brassy pretty much most of the time, but Railgun comes off as a much better executed and more sophisticated work.

I find the thematics in Railgun mildly interesting because they seem to be driven by a set of philosophies that, strangely enough, strike me as conservative. When Saten’s “level upper” bender ends badly, it’s pretty hard not to see the whole saga as an allegory for illicit drug use. It might not have been completely out-of-place at this point if President Bush Sr. appeared on screen and lectured “winners don’t use drugs”. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and we know now exactly who made level upper and for what reason, but at the time it struck me as a bit of a cop-out that the writers had to resort to a side effect which was appended ad hoc as the major consequence of using level upper. This is sci-fi after all, and technology is the great double edged sword. Surely there are other consequences to having people gain access to amazing powers cheaply and in a way that undermines proper protocol, other than just having them pass out after a short amount of time using these powers to commit petty misdemeanors. And, even if this was the case, why hadn’t Judgment gotten around to a public service announcement to discourage citizens from using level upper by informing them that it’ll kill their brain cells and their sex drive and that buying it gives money to terrorists and shovelware game makers? It’s no surprise that the first wave of users have no idea what level upper does, but that Saten was still ignorant of its side effects by the time she got around to using it requires a few coincidences, especially considering how close she is to the inner sanctum of Judgment.

This show's sense of humour is one of its strengths.

There are a couple of other little things as well: the consequences of having a city completely covered by CCTV cameras are shown as entirely positive, while the very process of giving kids massive supernatural powers isn’t really questioned. Although, the latter of these is apolitical… most people can see the potential dangers in concentrating immense power in a few otherwise unvetted people (students at that) for the sake of science and technology. It’s interesting, though, since it’s implied in Index that people usually have to work their butts off to reach the higher levels, yet Tokiwadai’s students, all of whom are Level 3+, are treated like rich girls. It’s a funny class system which doesn’t quite make complete sense.

I’ve really liked the first twelve eps of Railgun. It’s fun and action-packed and isn’t slowed down with leaden exposition and excessive, often pointless plot twists like Index was. When Railgun goes into explanation talk-fest mode, it at least has the courtesy to do this well away from any fight scenes. But this just has superior characters, and that’s usually all you need for a superior anime. Even the way the character relationships are “structured” is better. In Railgun, the characters are tight: there’s the four main girls, then there’s Kiyama and Konori as side characters, and everyone else is an extra or a once-and-done episodic character; in Index, on the other hand, the characters are sprawling and, other than Touma, no one else is really a main character or even a permanent side character, and their relevance to the plot basically depends on whether a particular arc is a “psychic” related one or a “magic” one. With so many characters coming and going, you don’t get as good a chance to really get to know them. There’s more personality in Railgun‘s characters as a consequence, IMO, so when they get around to developing them, what they do ends up sticking. This, I’m reasonably convinced, is the key difference between the two shows… the rest is polish and execution.