Impression
Lots of plot-driving this week, particularly during that opening scene at FLT R&D Division – the one place where everyone’s greetings are extended to Tatsuya instead of Miyuki. It’s a bit disappointing that a fair bit was skipped from that scene, with too much emphasis instead given to testing Tatsuya’s Flying-Type Magic – they depicted all the scientists in that division being the only characters (apart from Miyuki) that worship the ground he steps on, and they never explained why. The LN would have explained to you that it was Tatsuya’s achievements as Taurus Silver that gave this division a great deal of influence in FLT when they initially started out with nothing, and thus they’ve pledged eternal loyalty to him. Similarly, Tatsuya’s monologue on his incapability to feel emotion ended up being mostly chopped out, with just a passing hint that he really is “heartless” in a literal sense – it’s not that he doesn’t hate Yotsuba Miya, it’s that he can’t. Those experiments left him as a “bogus” conventional magician, with only his emotion towards Miyuki being anything that’s left. Well… at least they got Shiba Tatsurou and the butler Aoki down right. Aoki’s a prat, while Tatsuya’s father is far too weak-willed – with how sadistic the Yotsuba sisters looked, I bet you anything he married into the Yotsuba family instead of the other way round.
You can tell that they’re trying to phase in lots of new characters while keeping some of the old ones around, which is about as awkward as watching only Course 2 plus Mayumi clap for Tatsuya when his name was announced during that ceremony. At least the Mikihiko x Mizuki ship set sail, right? I suppose this’ll do for introduction purposes though – each character will get their time to shine when the 9SC starts. It’s actually quite fun seeing some characters turn out really differently to how I’d perceived them in the novels – Chiyoda Kanon was less tomboyish than I expected, for example. You can pretty much recognize any character who’s vaguely important from their hair colour or any other features that stand out, so fear not!
I’m really glad they didn’t skip that scene of based Mayumi being all coquettish with Tatsuya. Hnnng that dress. When it’s not cutting anything out or pacing itself like a cyclist sprinting towards a goal, Mahouka tends to do pretty well – which is why its slice of life scenes are usually great. I loved seeing Hattori getting caught up in Mayumi’s pace and Honoka and Shizuku praising Tatsuya as best as they could to try and get Miyuki happy again. While the car “accident” (definitely not the work of terrorists here, oh no) itself was animated well, the way the scene was executed was a car crash of its own – Mari was correct in telling Kanon, Shizuku and Hattori to stop casting all at once, but the episode ended before she could reveal why. Surely it would have been better to end with a cliffhanger of the car flying towards them without anyone having done anything yet?
Based on complaints on other sites, I think the general problem with the Mahouka adaptation is the anime staff’s desire to appeal to the original Japanese diehard fans and otaku, ie. the ones who will be buying the BDs and merchandise, and thus driving the turnover for the show.
It doesn’t matter to the diehards that details are being ignored or not elaborated upon, the otakus who have read the LNs already know about these things and simply want them included/mentioned in the adaptation (and we all know how ridiculous their culture can be when it comes to inclusions and exclusions). It’s all about the adaptation meeting the expectations that the reader had in mind when originally enjoying the LNs.
Where it hurts is in attracting new viewers to the series, but the gamble seems to be that the loss here will be offset by the original fans sticking with it.
And a plus to original fan support would be that if lots of people insist the original is better, then that might encourage new viewers to check that out instead, which would widen exposure even more. Anime adaptations are probably designed to boost the popularity of the original work after all.
Thing is, I think a lot of people were expecting that Mahouka’s adaptation would be able to stand on its own without ending up as a happy complement to the LNs – given the hype it generated before it aired, at least. If all staff groups thought like that, the industry would be in shambles. With the heavy amounts of tech babble and complexity in the LNs, it’s arguable that it wasn’t really suited for animation purposes in the first place – both in the fact that it’d be 1) impractical to monologue for minutes on end and 2) boring for the viewers. Although the next step of a popular novel series usually is an anime. Thus a lot of people were expecting Madhouse to just adapt up to the Nine Schools Competition in two-cours, for some sort of compromise between detail and leaving out whatever wasn’t necessary… which didn’t happen.