Touma's fights for anime-onlys
A common refrain about the series, especially from anime watchers, is that Touma's fights go only one way: Touma makes a speech and then punch his opponents, while they don't do anything against him or do not use tactics. This leads to accusations of Mary Sueism, Plot Armor, Plot Induced Stupidity, etc.
However, the novels reveal that there are more going on in those fights, and Touma rarely wins them alone or through sheer shounen will. Rather, the anime adaptation frequently fail to convey that properly. I experienced it first hand when I watched Index III and saw what happened to Accelerator vs. Touma Round 2, or the weird things they did during the final confrontation with Fiamma (people will remember them standing on far apart pillars …
The Great Game
"The Great Game", also known as simply "the Game", refers to what scholars have dubbed the Sherlockian game, a pastime by Sherlock Holmes fans attempting to retrace the biographies of Holmes and Watson and root their fictional lives into the real world. They construct elaborate chronologies of the adventures, try to bridge inconsistencies and retcons in the Holmesian canon (and Arthur Conan Doyle made lots of them), create biographies and family history for the duo, that kind of thing. It is usually a light hearted activity and not to be taken entirely seriously, but can be useful, like in resolving contradictions in a writer's canon or simply having fun filling in the blanks the author did not think of.
So this blog was created because I w…
Comprehensive list of Yen Press translation choices and other idiosyncrasies
I know I've been absent for a long while. But I did not procrastinate: I decided to try to make a fuller comprehensive list of all the differences in term translation (an example here) in the Yen Press version of A Certain Magical Index. It will be kept up to date for every novel that comes out. I'm also thinking of taking requests, since I will probably forget some things.
Without further ado:
Should we add Yen Press translations to articles?
It's been a while.
Concerning the title, I don't mean replace the names of articles and terms used throughout the wiki by what translations Yen Press use, but to supplement the articles with them, like with the Grimoire article (which seems to be the only one to do so presently): "An "original" grimoire (魔道書 Madō-sho?, lit. "Book of Magical Ways"), also known as ancient text in the official Yen Press translations"
While I think there are many hits-and-misses and bad choices of translation that make no sense ("Crossism", "demon god", and "Automatic Clerk" come to mind), there are also some I find really interesting, and that I can even approve of.
Examples:
Those are just the one that struck me most.
So, thoughts?
What do we know about esper powers?
It has come to my attention that esper power, arguably the most used and shown supernatural power in the series (in that most of the action take place in Academy City, and there are the two spin offs), is actually still in the vague on many parts. We supposedly have the mechanics, but not in full, and the backstory is sketched at best. Here is a rundown of the unknowns of power development of which we haven't received a full explanation:
- According to Tsukuyomi Komoe, Level 0s are an anomaly, since the Power Curriculum Program can theoretically allow people to gain their own personal reality, and therefore powers if they consume enough "curriculum". So why do they exist, and why are they the majority of esper population?
- The Power Curriculum …