A little after my Love Hina reread, I got started rereading Mahou Sensei Negima, the series Ken Akamatsu worked on after Love Hina finished up. I made it up to Volume 16 or so, stopped reading, and then went back a few weeks ago and wrapped up the storyline through Volume 18 or so.
Negima is interesting in a lot of ways. To my knowledge, it’s the longest series Akamatsu ever worked on, at 38 volumes. His next series, UQ Holder, is a spinoff / sequel to Negima, so its current 25 volumes are sort of also part of Negima. And unlike Love Hina or AI ga Tomaranai!, it’s not doing the same thing for 38 volumes, or shaking things up in little ways only to return to the status quo after a few chapters. The story of Negima changes and evolves as it goes on. Unlike Love Hina, which I noted was very consistent in its art style, tone, and characterization, Negima fundamentally changes in tone and story structure multiple times over its run. Negima is ambitious, massive, absurd in its scope. Right from the get-go, it gives us an entire class of 30 students to get to know, plus a bunch of other supporting characters, and it just keeps adding more, along with more locations, concepts, villains, and Greek and Latin spells.
Negima starts humbly, as more or less a cross between Harry Potter, Love Hina, and a child-teacher comedy. Ten-year-old Negi Springfield graduates from his magic academy in Wales and is assigned to teach a class of middle school girls in Japan. Most of the girls accept him right away. But Asuna Kagurazaka, who was in love with their former teacher and Negi’s good friend Takamichi T. Takahata, refuses him at first. It doesn’t help that every time Negi tries to use magic, he somehow blows all her clothes off. Yes, that returns from Love Hina. But the constant nudity and nudification-based combat is not just an annoyance like it became in Love Hina. It keeps dragging the series down even as it tries to get more and more serious, complex, and dark. You can always trust that every pitched battle for the fate of the world will be interrupted by a cutaway to a girl getting her clothes blasted off at some point. In a lot of ways, Negima becomes much more than the reincarnation of Love Hina that it starts off as, but it never entirely shakes that legacy, and that keeps dragging it down for a good while into its run.
Another early decision that drags the series down throughout its entire run is making the main cast so young. In a Love Hina-esque comedy world with no rules, characters like Mana Tatsumiya, who’s a hardened mercenary soldier and firearms expert at fourteen years old, are funny because we know that’s not how any of this works. But as the series gets more serious and starts to have real fighting and real stakes, the characters being so young starts to cause problems. It’s implied that Mana was out on the battlefield killing people as a small child, which is more disturbing than fun, but it’s never played as anything more than, “Wow, she’s such a badass!” The battles in earlier stories usually don’t involve actual death; they’re dangerous but non-lethal. But later, in the Magical World Arc (which will be covered more in later parts if I ever feel moved to write them), this same cast of fourteen-year-old girls and their ten-year-old teacher are thrust into various dangerous, lethal, and traumatic situations. They have to fight to the death; escape from slavery; suffer implied threats of sexual violence (which is usually Love Hina-style stupid and played for laughs; it only becomes sinister when you think about how it fits into the larger situation); make moral choices with huge consequences; and they’re portrayed as somehow stronger, smarter, more talented, and better trained than both adults and immortal beings that have been alive for thousands of years. They’re basically a cast of Mary Sues. I hate to use that term, because it has so much baggage. But I don’t know what else to call it when a ten-year-old boy is the only one with the power and wisdom to save two entire worlds of people, and everyone in the cast, including the centuries-old vampire, acknowledges it.
For all the problems I’ve mentioned, though, Negima has held up better than Love Hina. I still prefer the art of early Love Hina with less compositing and CG, but Akamatsu matures a lot as a writer over the series, which makes it even more baffling that he kept going with the nudification-based combat for so long. While I don’t love every character in Negima, I can name a lot that are likeable, have interesting arcs, act in believable ways, and are clearly thinking at a much higher level than the reptile-brain impulse that characterizes most of the Love Hina cast. The plot arcs are usually well paced and manage to find something for every member of the huge cast to do, no matter how minor; at the very least I can always find one or two panels that show me what the Narutaki twins, or Misora Kasuga, were doing during any given story. The world is not quite as fleshed out in the small details as it could be, but it’s a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy ideas and modern technology that feels unique and fun. (The Harry Potter books tell us things like where wizards buy underwear and how they send office memos, which are details we don’t get from Negima, but where the Harry Potter books take place in a small corner of Scotland and involve about thirty named characters lobbing sparks at each other, Negima takes place on a massive scale across two planets and at least three different eras of time, so a few details get left out.)
The Early Stories: Volumes 1 – 2
The early Negima stories are mostly one-offs and a lot more Love Hina-styled comedy than later stories, even the smaller stories that come up between arcs later on. There’s a lot of shenanigans between Negi, Asuna, and the other girls as they all get used to each other and Negi gets to know the members of his class and learn how to be a teacher. Volume 2 has a longer story about Negi and some of the girls spelunking into the huge secret temple beneath Library Island to recover a magical artifact that will help them pass their final exams.
Volume 1 is Lova Hina-like in more than just general tone. A bunch of Negima characters are spiritual descendants of Love Hina characters, in that they look similar and have superficially similar personalities and roles in the story. Asuna is a spiritual descendant of Naru, the energetic, hardworking, and violent girl who gets off on the wrong foot with the main character, but is forced to be around him by circumstances and slowly grows to respect him. Unlike Naru, who was (supposedly, academically) smart, Asuna is athletic and strong but academically dumb, often compared to a gorilla. Nodoka Miyazaki is the spiritual descendant of Shinobu from Love Hina, the quiet, shy, somewhat childish girl who falls in love with the main character early on, before anyone else sees how great he is. Unlike Shinobu, Nodoka is bookish and smart.
As the series goes on we meet more of these characters who are spiritually descended from a Love Hina character, but Akamatsu differentiates all of them from their predecessors in very obvious and decisive ways. Naru could never make up her damn mind about anything, and she always made everything more complicated by jumping to stupid conclusions and flying off the handle. While Asuna does this sometimes, we see later on that she’s actually a lot more mature than she seems. It’s actually Negi who tends to make situations more complicated, and Asuna tends to simplify things for him by presenting a more straightforward point of view. Also, while it seems early on that Asuna might be the Chosen One, the inevitable romantic interest for Negi the way Naru was for Keitaro, by Volume 9 or so, nothing about the True Asuna Ending seems inevitable at all, and the series basically squashes that option by the end.
As for Nodoka, her love actually gets to advance. Her intelligence, both in book learning and in emotional intelligence, make all the difference for her compared to Shinobu. While her love does get stalled eventually, the reasons for it are completely different, and much more tragic, than what happened to Shinobu. And unlike Shinobu, who gets mocked and bullied by the other characters, in Negima the other characters are sympathetic and even admiring towards Nodoka.
But in the early volumes, it looks like these characters are set up to be the same as their Love Hina counterparts. In hindsight, it’s worth it to see how Akamatsu later subverts his own tropes, which even he seems to have realized are dumb (not that he manages to get rid of every dumb trope in his work, as I mentioned above). But it does make reading Volumes 1 and 2 just that little bit more of a slog.
Also, as much as I like a lot of the characters in Negima, there are a few pretty prominent ones that I never took to, mostly because they fit into that Ken Akamatsu “bevy of brainless beauties” mold that I mentioned in the Love Hina reread. One of them is Ayaka Yukihiro, the absurdly rich shotacon class president who serves as Asuna’s rival, and she’s around a lot in the early volumes. Now, even Ayaka is more complex and interesting than equivalent characters in Love Hina, but I still find her pretty annoying a lot of the time, and it doesn’t help that she has just as much Mary Sue energy as the rest of the cast, if not more, so the series is always talking her up as this paragon of humanity. Still, I’m sure even Ayaka is someone’s favorite character. She gets enough development that you could reasonably like her if you don’t find her usual shtick as annoying as I do.
But some other characters that would later become my favorites do show up and get some screen time in these early volumes. Aside from Nodoka, there’s also her best friend Yue Ayase, a short, sarcastic girl who likes philosophy and very weird drinks. Yue is present in a lot of Volume 2, though we don’t get to know her that well until later. And there’s Konoka Konoe, Asuna’s best friend and the granddaughter of the school principal. Konoka is bright, positive, and cheerful, but she’s also quite intelligent. She knows how to have fun, but she’s not rowdy or obnoxious like a lot of the “fun” characters in Ken Akamatsu’s manga tend to be. In Volume 2 there’s a storyline about her grandfather setting up marriage meetings for her to try and get her into an arranged marriage, but that story was later dropped and what Akamatsu does with her later on is a lot more interesting than that would have been. (To be honest I like Konoka from Negima?! even more though. Negima?! was an anime that reimagined the series as an absurdist comedy. I also sometimes call it “Pani Poni Negi” because it was made by Shaft and the style is very similar to their show Pani Poni Dash. Pani Poni Konoka was hilariously weird, somehow knowing and airheaded at the same time.)
If the series were ever rebooted, I think a lot could be done to tighten up these early volumes and make them fit more neatly with the tone and plot of the later stories. They’re pretty tedious to read, a lot like Love Hina but even more directionless since we don’t know where the series is going at this point.
Evangeline Arrives: Volume 3
Evangeline A.K. McDowell, the villain introduced in Volume 3, is my favorite Negima character and probably my favorite character Ken Akamatsu has ever created (granted I haven’t read much of UQ Holder, which she is also in). She’s a loli vampire, hundreds of years old, incredibly powerful but often held back by her conscience and morals, despite how much she leans into the “evil villain” role that she’s been given by society. Her difficult life (and afterlife) has made her harder and more pragmatic than she might have been, but she’s never as evil in deed as in her words, and even a lot of seemingly cruel things she does are actually tough love. I can’t even remember if I liked loli vampires before Evangeline or if I started liking them because of her. And as a servant, she has a robot girl named Chachamaru Karakuri, who is technically a robot maid since she sometimes dresses in a maid outfit while serving Evangeline at home. Now, a loli vampire with a robot maid for a servant is a great symbol of how the world of Negima combines magic with sci-fi and modern technology, and also the most goddamn anime thing ever, and I love it.
Evangeline isn’t quite as interesting in Volume 3 as she later becomes—we mostly see her playing the villain role and stomping Negi in encounter after encounter, until he manages to outwit her at the end and then win her respect. But she does carry the volume. About half of it is about Negi doing his best to grow and figure out how to get around this obstacle in his way, and the other half is Negi learning about Evangeline and her past with his father. At this point the series’s main story starts to kick in as we learn about Negi’s father, the Thousand Master, and how he saved Negi from an attack that destroyed Negi’s village five years ago, even though he’s supposed to be dead. So Evangeline is not just a great obstacle or an interesting character; she also helps advance the main storyline.
Chachamaru is also a great character who we get to learn more about in this volume. I loved the chapter where Asuna and Negi tail her, hoping to catch her on her own and take her out separate from Evangeline, only to discover that she’s beloved in the community because she feeds stray cats, helps old ladies cross the street, and plays with local children. They still try to attack her, but at the last minute Negi calls back his attack because he hears her asking Evangeline to feed her cats if she dies. Negima comes back to this question again and again over the series: how ruthless is Negi willing to get to achieve his goals? This was the first time he had to ask himself, but it wasn’t the last.
The Kyoto Arc: Volumes 4 – 6.
This is the first big arc. It takes us out of the academy, introduces a ton of important characters that stay with us through the end of the series, and fills in a ton of details about the world and how magic works.
After defeating Evangeline, Negi finds out that his father had a house down in Kyoto. He wants to visit to look for evidence for his search, but he can’t get away from his teaching duties, so he hits on the idea of taking a field trip to Kyoto. Before leaving, the headmaster warns him that the Kantou Magic Association from the northeast side of Japan has a sometimes unfriendly relationship with the Kansai Association that oversees Kyoto, and the Kansai group might try something if they hear that a Western wizard is leading a field trip into their territory. On the train there, a splinter cell of the Kansai association attacks and tries to kidnap Konoka. Negi fights them off, along with Asuna and Setsuna Sakurazaki, a swordswoman and demon hunter from the Shinmei School (which is the same school that Motoko’s family ran in Love Hina. We even see Motoko or her sister vaguely in a flashback, which raises so many canon-breaking questions about the world that I have chosen to pretend don’t exist).
Setsuna is Konoka’s bodyguard, trained from a young age to defend her from threats. When they were younger, they were friends, but Setsuna has started to distance herself from Konoka, believing she can’t protect Konoka effectively if they’re too emotionally close. Setsuna is definitely somewhere on my top ten list of best Negima characters. While she has a vaguely similar arc to Motoko from Love Hina, where she has trouble balancing her devotion to the sword with her desire for love, the more serious situation around her, and her tragic past, makes her hesitation much more sympathetic. Her devotion to the sword isn’t some abstract, theoretical thing like it was with Motoko; it’s an actual worry whether she’ll be strong enough to protect the person she loves when the time comes. And she does love Konoka, as a friend at first, but later on also romantically. As a yuri fan I of course find Setsuna slowly acknowledging that she loves her mistress and best friend, while Konoka gently but unceasingly tries to let on that she’s open to Setsuna’s love, absolutely adorable. But I also like it from a story perspective. In Love Hina, so many characters’ arcs revolved around falling in love with Keitaro. Motoko’s whole arc was that she hated Keitaro, but then she fell in love with Keitaro. Negi is no Keitaro—he has a lot more personality, he’s smarter, much nicer, has a cool side to him, and he’s only ten, but he’s still much more mature. But still, it would get ridiculous if the entire cast was in love with Negi. And if your cast is thirty girls plus Negi, and not all of the girls are in love with Negi, it’s only natural that some of them might fall in love with each other. And Setsuna’s relationship with Konoka has its own interesting dynamics, different from anyone’s relationship with Negi: while there’s no age difference and no real rivals, Setsuna has to contend with a social class divide and the realization that she’s in love with another girl, plus her own trauma and self-esteem issues over her past. It’s also more interesting than where Konoka was headed before Setsuna came into the picture: in Volume 2 she was running away from her marriage meetings and hitting on Negi, so if not for Setsuna, she probably would’ve been just Asuna’s best friend and another also-ran in the battle for Negi. And Setsuna also figures in character development for Asuna and Evangeline down the line.
In Volume 3, Negi’s talking pet ermine Chamo showed up and introduced the idea of a Pactio, a contract that a wizard can make with another person to grant them their own powers so they can help in battles. Negi makes a Pactio with Asuna to fight against Evangeline. During the Kyoto arc, Nodoka becomes the second girl to make a Pactio with Negi in a silly story about sneaking around the inn after dark and stealing kisses. (Kissing Negi is what triggers the Pactio.) She gets an artifact called the Diarium Eius, a diary that can read minds. The first time I read this story arc, this blew my mind. I was expecting Nodoka to get treated like Shinobu, be kept in the dark about magic forever, willfully ignore more and more obvious signs that something is supernatural about Negi, and then finally find out about magic and ultimately be forgotten except in the naked group shots that still plague Negima. (I’ve been purposely not mentioning them to focus on the good parts.) But Nodoka not only gets a useful artifact, she also gets a story where she’s the key to winning a battle, and is clued in to the truth about magic right away.
Nodoka helps Negi and Asuna defeat Kotaro Inugami, another character who sticks around for the whole series and becomes pretty important. This also blew my mind the first time I read the Kyoto arc. I couldn’t believe Akamatsu had introduced a male character besides the protagonist who wasn’t just a useless loser meant to make the protagonist look better by being even more worthless and skeezy. Kotaro is, in fact, the first sign of Negima shifting gears into a shounen action series. He’s the strength-obsessed rival character, basically the Vegeta or Katsuki Bakugo of Negima.
We also meet Konoka’s father, Eishun Konoe, the head of the Kansai Magic Association who was also a companion of Negi’s father. Like the Harry Potter books that Negima takes inspiration from, Negi keeps meeting old friends of his parents through the series and gradually learning more about them from the reminiscences of their old friends.
The arc ends with Konoka being captured by the enemies, which include Chigusa Amagasaki, an onmyoji; Tsukuyomi, a rogue Shinmei swordswoman obsessed with Setsuna; and Fate Averruncus, a mysterious mage. They use Konoka’s latent magic power to summon the Ryomen Sukuna no Kami, a massive ogre, and an army of demons. Negi, Setsuna, and Asuna do their best to fight it off, but in the end the academy headmaster finds a loophole in the spell that keeps Evangeline bound to the academy and sends her to help. Evangeline unleashes her full power and defeats the ogre, showing for the first time how powerful she actually is. Tsukuyomi and Fate both show up again, Fate in a very major role, but here he mostly neutralizes Negi so that Evangeline’s power is needed. His strength also spurs Negi to escalate his combat training in the next few volumes.
When I read the Kyoto arc for the first time back when it came out, I thought it was genius. I didn’t read Volume 3 until after I read the Kyoto arc (Barnes and Noble was out of stock, that was how things went back then), so I missed the gradual shift from Love Hina-style harem comedy to action. So at the time it felt like we went straight from the usual dumb antics to an exciting story that introduced a ton of great characters and took existing ones in interesting directions. This time it didn’t impress me quite as much. It’s still a good story, but tonally it’s really uneven, even more than the rest of Negima. Volume 4 is mostly serious and action, and while Volume 6 has some lighthearted moments, it’s also a lot of serious action. Then Volume 5 is a pillow fight for Negi’s lips organized by Kazumi Asakura, the school reporter and spiritual successor to Love Hina’s Kitsune. The harem comedy shenanigans here are better written than the shenanigans in Volumes 1 and 2, mostly because the characters are more defined and we know their motives and desires, so there’s some emotional stakes to it. Nodoka has confessed her love to Negi at this point, and he hasn’t given her an answer, so she’s almost obligated to take part. Yue joins her to try and fight the other girls off of Negi for her best friend’s sake, and captured my heart right away when she monologues about how stupid her classmates are and how terrible this situation is for poor Nodoka, who has a serious crush on Negi and now has to compete with a bunch of girls who are just messing around. I do like what we eventually get out of this—Nodoka on the magic side, relevant to the plot, fully aware of what’s going on, and in a good position to advance her relationship with Negi. But it still feels jarring to interrupt a serious storyline with fighting and high stakes for a classically stupid Ken Akamatsu harem comedy interlude.
Also, all the chuunibyou Ancient Greek spell incantations, and massive lore dumps about the history and theoretical principles behind the magic spells in the extra material, which I loved so much when I was younger, feel tedious now. I skipped over all of it this time. I can read the Greek alphabet, but not quickly or fluently. When I was younger I took the time to go over every single word, really taking in every alpha and zeta, enunciating every phi and chi, noting the word-final form of sigma and every rough breathing symbol, and because I was a massive chuunibyou dork, it gave a ton of weight to the battle scenes. It gave me a thrill every time I got to the last panel of Evangeline’s invocation and read her “Kosmike Katastrophe”, and she snapped her fingers and destroyed the Sukuna with what I knew, thanks to the extra lore, was an ice spell that lowered the proximity around the ogre to absolute zero, the utter absence of molecular motion. And I’m still a massive chuunibyou dork, but I’m a lot lazier and more ADHD now, so I just skimmed over the incantation until I got the last page and didn’t read the extra lore about the spell.
But I still find the effort put into the spells and their lore fascinating. When I think of an intellectual mangaka, or even an intelligent mangaka, Ken Akamatsu is just about the last person I’d ever think of. But he, or someone on his assistant team, had to put this all together. That was such a surprise to me, and is maybe an even bigger surprise to me today. I have no idea if the Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit in Negima is accurate or if it’s just a bunch of nominative nouns and infinitive verbs they looked up in a dictionary and strung together with Japanese word order. But even that, even the very idea that Western spells are in Latin and Greek and Eastern spells are in Sanskrit, goes far beyond what I’d expect from a man whose idea of humor was Naru having diarrhea and trying to get away from Keitaro so she could take a shit while Keitaro wants to talk about their relationship. Which just goes to show that we all contain multitudes.
Conclusion
It sounds like I’m being hard on Ken Akamatsu both in this post and the one on Love Hina. And I am. Frankly, if I read either Love Hina or Negima for the first time today, I’d drop them quickly. All the praise for Negima I wrote here comes with a huge caveat: there’s still constant, artless nudity covering every single page, eroding the gravity of even the most serious situations. For example, that big battle with the Ryomen Sukuna no Kami, which ends with that awesome moment where Evangeline comes out of a portal and blows it away? Just before that battle, Asuna loses her panties and runs out into the fight without them. Even during some of the most dangerous moments, panels are framed so we can see up Asuna’s skirt to her naked butt. It’s not funny, it’s not sexy, and it adds nothing to the story. And you only even get to that point if you read Volumes 1 and 2, which are the same kind of tedious, repetitive comedy as Love Hina, stuffed to the gills with girls getting their clothes blown off. Even as the narrative tells us how amazing, powerful, smart, strong, and wonderful these girls are, Akamatsu simply can’t resist blowing their clothes off or conjuring mysterious winds to blow up their skirts so we see their panties or putting scenes in the bath for no reason (similar to the “sexposition” in shows like Game of Thrones).
But Negima is still interesting, because you can see Akamatsu growing as a writer right there on the page. There’s still a lot of bad habits and stupid shit left over from his older work, but as far as writing, Negima is far and away above what passed for a character arc or a storyline in AI ga Tomaranai, or even Love Hina. The huge cast isn’t just about looks or gimmicks like “ninja girl” and “robot girl”. Some of the characters play supporting roles and some of them are in main roles, but each one has her own path, her own goals, her own growth to do. That’s very different from Love Hina, where everyone’s path ended with falling in love with Keitaro and the only difference was just how little chance they had with him. And even Negi himself has a personality, and a past, and goals informed by his past, and the girls who fall in love with him (and even the ones who just regard him as a little brother or a best friend) are responding to that. Some respond to his virtues, like Nodoka, who admires his clear vision of what he wants to achieve, and the hard work he puts into achieving it. Some respond to his faults, like Asuna, who worries about his tendency to throw himself into danger all alone, refusing to ask for help or consider the consequences. Those virtues and faults feel uniquely Negi’s, and the way each girl reacts to him feels uniquely hers.
To put it another way, lots of mangaka made rowdy harem comedies in the same time period that Akamatsu was making AI ga Tomaranai and Love Hina. A lot of them showed standard harem comedy archetypes falling in love with a bland average guy with no personality. Akamatsu’s work did a lot of that as well. But even as far back as the middle of AI, and certainly in Love Hina, there was some real heart and some real vision to what Akamatsu was doing. He wasn’t a hack trading in the usual cliches of harem comedy. In a lot of cases, he was actually defining what would become the usual cliches. I don’t see To-Love-Ru ever existing without Love Hina, for instance. Love Hina draws heavily on the setup of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku and makes it rowdier, hornier, constantly nakeder, and more over-the-top unrealistic. (Akamatsu acknowledges the influence of Maison Ikkoku in some of the extra material.) To-Love-Ru does basically the same thing for Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura. In some ways, being the cliche definer works against him now, because it’s all been run into the ground and I’m sick of seeing it. And some of the things he introduced I didn’t like even back when I first read Love Hina. But even now, I got invested in some of Love Hina’s characters. I cared what happened to them, and I wanted to see them happy in the end. I just can’t say the same for a lot of other harem comedies that followed in Akamatsu’s footsteps.
That germ of a good writer, one who understands character and uses it to drive a story, starts to sprout in Negima. You don’t see it until Volume 3, and it doesn’t become incontrovertible until much later in the series. And of course, it’s not perfect. Negima is still full of storytelling and character flaws, even setting aside the obnoxious constant nudity and skeevy gremlin sexuality. For instance, pretty much every villain until much later just gives up, tells Negi and the girls how awesome they are, and walks away, which lowers the stakes once you know they were never in any real danger. And there’s the Mary Sue energy I talked about earlier, and the tonal clash when harem comedy and shounen action collide. And the fact that, until quite late in the series, everybody can do magic in front of a bunch of non-magical people and just say “It’s just CGI bro”, and the non-magical people will just believe that and go, “Wow, CGI sure is advanced nowadays!” Unlike Love Hina, which was very consistent and even, Negima is inconsistent and uneven. Its tone and its writing quality jump all over the place. Some story arcs are better than others, for sure, but even within a single story, things are uneven.
I can forgive a lot of those flaws, though, because Akamatsu was doing his best to grow. He could have just stuck to the premise he started with in Volume 1: Harry Potter but horny. He didn’t, and he probably lost some readers along the way. He probably also turned away some readers who were there for a shounen action series but weren’t interested in naked girls on every page. Eventually he does manage to give up that weird security blanket, and I respect how hard it probably was to reach that point and how much courage it took.
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