Talk:Kamijou Touma/@comment-220.255.1.145-20150419133356/@comment-4419516-20150419144805

Partially true. Let me explain:

A lot of people who criticize Touma usually use the arguments: "he just runs to the enemy and punches", "he has plot armor", "he's a gary stu", "his speeches suck", "no character development", "he's a boring harem MC," etc... You'll find that most of them are going by the anime and haven't read the light novels.

Index is a bit different to a "common shonen", which are mostly based on the tropes Dragon Ball series used. You know: hero gets stronger through training; unlocks powerups and techniques in the middle of the fight with barely any explanation; every enemy is stronger than the previous ones and power levels mean that usually the main character is the only one who can fight the bad guy while the rest of the heroes are stuck to cheering him up; everything is solved by brute force/"I have more power than you" fights. Most modern shonen are much better than Dragon Ball about this cliches but they still follow a classic formula.

Touma is the MC of the series, but his power is defensive to the extreme. He doesn't become physically stronger because of training or by unlocking powerups, he doesn't learn new techniques and neither does he win fights through brute strength. He has only improved mentally and that's how he wins his fights.

While in Index people who are too strong for most other characters to fight exist (the top tiers are basically undefeatable by people on the middle and low tiers; you won't see Styil winning a fight against a magic god), most of the fights are solved by applications of powers and using their brains to fight. A big part of the challenge Touma and anyone fighting a magician face is discovering how his/her power works and how to beat him. People who are used to shonen where strength is everything and powerups are common may have trouble understanding why he beat Accelerator or other enemies when they are objectively stronger than Touma in a fight. A good example on how the series works is in NT10 when the american soldiers easily capture and subdue Touma. Special forces or not, they were the people who in other series would be mooks that are wiped out by the MC in an instant to show the difference of strength. A lot of Touma's opponenents would have easily dealt with them. So no Dragon Ball power level arguments of "A can defeat B, B can defeat C, ergo A can defeat C".

Index's anime cuts most of the thoughts of the characters and explanations provided by the narration (basically anything that's not directly stated by the characters in their spoken dialogue has good chances of being cut). This works in some adaptations but for novels like Index where the explanations are an integral part of the fight it does make it so that Touma seems to just run and punch the enemy with no effort on his part.

But yeah, he punches (and kicks, throws sand into eyes, uses boiling tea, uses his jacket) because that's what he has: IB and street fighting skills. People seem to expect the MC to have flashier powers. I find it refreshing that he doesn't and has to actually think to win a fight.

Touma has little character development in the first series (and some of it like his fight with the Aureolus Dummy was cut). This first part is more about him changing other people's lives. NT goes more into Touma's character and is better because of it, but people who only watched the anime obviously don't know about it.

The speeches are a part of the fights in Index since the will of both combatants it's usually an important factor in a lot of fights (like Touma vs Hamazura in NT12). Some people don't like it.

The harem and romance elements are just used mainly for comedy by Kamachi. Their impact to the story is minimal.

The gary stu and plot armor are laughable attempts to use buzzwords to insult Touma. His fight record, stated and exploited weakeness, bad luck, school problems and all the times he's been injured and sent to the hospital easily disprove the first one. The second one is basically impossible to disprove since plot armor means "a character survived a situation in a way that strains my suspension of disbelief because he's still needed for the plot". Since this is mostly subjective it's up to each person to decide if the situation strains his or not.