User blog comment:Auric Drake/Theory on Touma's true power/@comment-34962159-20180721032804

I've been doing some more thinking and I'd like to expand on the "Touma isn't actually normal" point.

Out of the three protagonists, Shiage is the one who is actually normal. This is despite being a delinquent with a bunch of useful skills (shooting, pickpocketing, lockpicking, driving both wheeled and treaded vehicles). He has effectively no power, his Level 0 status giving him a weak AIM field and nothing else. He is consistently fearful of Level 5 espers, whereas Touma only shows any fear towards them when seriously fighting them, treating them casually otherwise (see his interactions with Shinka in NT Volume 12 for an example).

Another thing is Touma's ability to forgive anyone no matter what they've done to him. While forgiveness is a  major theme in Kamachi's work, Touma takes it to an extreme. To best illustrate this, I'll use an example from The Unexplored Summon://Blood Sign (spoilers for that series below):

The main character of Blood Sign, Kyousuke, absolutely hates the greater-than-divine figure known as the White Queen. He has literally devoted his life to killing her. This stems from an incident where the White Queen was tricked and accidentally killed a lot of people, then deliberately killed an even larger number to prevent Kyousuke being killed. This incident included the deaths of many important leaders, leading to chaos in the world. After this, the White Queen becomes a yandere towards Kyousuke and deliberately endangers people to get opportunities to meet him.

In Index, on the other hand, Othinus deliberately kills everyone else but her and Touma (except the Magic Gods, whose existence was not known to either of them, so is irrelevant to this dicussion). She then proceeds to subject Touma to an unspecified, but very large, number of hells designed to break his will. The last of these succeeds and drives Touma to attempt suicide. After that, she almost kills Touma an immense number of times. In the end, though, she's convinced to restore the world to the one that Touma remembers.

Objectively, Othinus' crimes are infinitely above the White Queen's, or any other character in Kamachi's series, or almost all other characters in fiction in general.

And yet Touma not only forgives her for all of this, he then decides to protect her by fighting the world that he just saved. After that, he has no trouble living with her. This is a tremendous difference from Kyousuke's attitude to the White Queen. True, the White Queen is a more personal enemy than Othinus was, and she has yet to have a change of heart, but I seriously doubt that those can explain the difference.