User blog comment:The Lord Reader/Touma's fights for anime-onlys/@comment-3969505-20200225165254

(A+ for the blog)

Most people don't give a flying fuck about novels/books, and will only judge things based on what they see in the TV shows and films, the books are better sure but the majority of "normies" don't care and the final judgement is gonna be by eyeballs looking at the TV screen (and to some extent i agree with them).

IMO the real problem is two-parts:

1#  that TOARU-verse for the most part is being worked on by the wrong kind of anime-adaptation studios/companies who are expecteng to adapt the source material they were given into their typical shounen genre/tropes specific framework........and Touma no matter how you cut it just lends himself so well into a super-lucky/durable (whenever it's convenient), borderline fanatically idealistc/moralizing Shounen Action Hero who's supposed faults and problems are just there for the background decoration (most of the time)........which would have been perfectly fine if the setting was a total fantasy worlds like Naruto/Toriko/Hunter-x-Hunter and the like, but it isn't, it takes place in the Urban Legend Fantasy/Sci-fi genre world (with smattering of Superhero) that largely resembles our very own despite all the alternate history divergence points and "Near Future" stylizing, again despite all those factors the world of TOARU-Earth is very clearly modelled after our own.

2# The paradox nature of Touma's character as the main hero of the story: Touma is blander then bland, a walking black hole of boredom, a chewing gum with no taste, his charisma and presentation is accidentally worse then Tenya Iida's.(a dude that's trying real hard to act like a propa goodie-two-shoe robot, when your character is much more boring and cringe-inducing then that guy without intending to, your main hero character sucks donkey's asshole)

Kamachi wasn't putting a lot of thought when making this idealized self-insert (a simple handwave of "touma comes from a bloodline that deals with this shit constantly and IB/Mysterious Thing is something a that haunts them from time to time" would have been more then satisfactory at this point but we don't eve get that), this series is what now ? 16+ years old and we still don't know jack shit about Touma ? that's pathetic and you fans still defend this shit ? why ? i can understand if you grew up in Japan because let's face it, Touma is a very modern Japanese society-context heavy character, very much desgined to appeal to the typical japanese late teen audience.

(anyway long story short: Shiage is more interesting, even Gunha a deliberate half-parody character is cooler.) the most damning trait about him is that for a very long time (until the final phase of WW3 i think) Touma was more or less a reluctant passanger-type protagonist (and when that stays too long it's unappealing as fuck), the vast majority of his heroic adventures and shenaningans were purely reaction/passanger based, he was never the original proactive driver in any of them, he was constantly dragged, pushed and manipulated into these situations and adventures, almost each arc ended with some sinister mastermind sipping their tea and saying things to the effect of "All According To Plan", his moral math codes constantly exploited (up until the last part of WW3), how is that compelling ? and by the time he wised up to all the manipulations (to his credit), it was too little too late, the signature traits of the character has long been established.

then there is another caveat to his character, a constant propoganda about how "I'm just a regular, everyday normal high-school student !"...............that's a humble bragging at best, a blatant, infuriating lie at worst, Touma is only normal when it comes to his school grades, in almost everything else he is in the absolute maximum of human ability, if not superhuman outright without the Imagine Breaker factor.

his striking strength is massively above what a teenager of his stature and weight should be capable of, lifting grown-ass men off the ground, sending them flying and knocked out cold.

the speed of his reactions/reflexes and battle instincts EVEN WITHOUT factoring the powers of his powers-nullifying arm are already sufficient to keep up with people who comfortably dodge/block bullets after they already left the gun barrel (including tornados, soundwaves and explosions) and when you factor his anti-power/magic arm it's basically FTL auto-pilot precognition.

Touma's durability, both physical and mental (including his "gas tank" stamina) is the stuff of legends, absorbing and keeping on functioning with wounds/pain that will knock down cold or outright kill for good a fucking grizzly bear or two on many adventures, mentally he is literally Godlike-level (possibly a positive sociopath of sorts which is why he terrifies the Kiharas), his personality/willpower endured a hundreds of millions of psychological tortures and came out intact.

outside his academic grades/education, he's an Anti-Magic/Esper Combat Prodigy, very proficient at figuring out the mechanics, patterns and weak points in any magician and esper he runs across, analyzing the enemy's motivations, etc...