My current love affair with anime (the last one was probably Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex) started with an AMV on YouTube. Happens a lot to me. In this case it was AMV Railgun|Lucky Strike by AMV-X. It features a lot of clips from the first season of A Certain Scientific Railgun. A cute girl capable of launching hypersonic projectiles from her hands… So, I bought the first season on DVD. Well, that was a mistake. Obviously. Four sets of series DVDs and a film later, I’m hooked.
Railgun is a spinoff series from A Certain Magical Index (Toaru Majutsu no Indekkusu), which started out as a light novel by Kazuma Kamachi, illustrated by Kiyotaka Haimura. There are manga adaptations (by Chuya Kogino) and J.C.Staff have produced the anime (with English adaptation by Funimation). I have to admit that I prefer Railgun to Index. Railgun is a more self-contained storyline, but if you want to understand the entire package, you really need to keep up with all of it. And understanding the world is what makes this universe watching.
Basically, it’s all set in a city (part of Tokyo which has been redeveloped) named Academy City. There are 2.3 million people in Academy City and eighty percent of them are students undergoing what’s known as power development. Read the original light novel and you’ll wonder why anyone would willing go there: power development involves rigorous mental training combined with drugs and the application of electrodes in the brain! However, the payoff is that successful student become ‘espers’ which basically means they’re superheroes. The titular character of Railgun, Mikoto ‘Railgun’ Misaka, is an ‘electromaster’ and the third most powerful esper in the city. She can control electricity (and magnetism since the two are connected) to the extent that she can wallcrawl by magnetically attracting the metal reinforcements in the concrete, throw huge electrical attacks, and create swords and whips from sand which cut like buzzsaws. Her signature move is to magnetically accelerate an arcade token to three times the speed of sound: she can make herself into a piece of battleship artillery. Awesomely kickass. Her friend is a teleporter able to teleport object into people. She takes out a particularly hard opponent in one episode by demolishing the building they are in by cutting the support beams with panes of window glass. And don’t get me started on Accelerator.
Now, espers can do all this weird stuff because, when you break it down, they believe they can. An esper constructs a divergent world view in their head in which, for example, they can manipulate electricity with their thoughts. Then they have the imagination and power to enforce their reality on the rest of the world. I was stoked when I finally figured this out because, essentially, that’s what the Ultrahumans in my books do. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Ultrahumans differ from normal humans in the way their brains and minds work. On their own, superpowered muscles wouldn’t let you do half of what a super does in fiction (in fact it would probably be a curse rather than a gift), but if you add in a will which is making the universe work the way the super wants it to, then you may have something. And here’s a Japanese author using essentially the same idea. I don’t suppose it’s a new concept (didn’t think it was when I was writing it, especially because I’d had similar concepts in my head when I was a teenager), but it’s awesome to be able to watch supers based on that concept kicking ass, taking names, and going to the beach for the obligatory fanservice episode. The esper mechanics are a little more deliberate than the way my Ultrahumans work; Ultrahumans usually have no idea how their powers work. (Now. More is learned about Ultrahuman physics every day!)
If you fancy giving the Index universe a try, I recommend Funimation’s streaming service which has all of the series and the Index movie to watch and will start airing A Certain Scientific Accelerator this week. If you aren’t subscribed, you could probably get through all the episodes in the trial period (don’t tell them I said that). I’d suggest starting with Railgun‘s first season rather than Index. The stories are more or less standalone and you don’t need to understand the more convoluted plot of Index to get into it. Be wary of the second season of Railgun: it will make you tear up, along with laughing out loud. (The Sisters are great – all I’m saying to avoid spoilers.) And I hope you enjoy it as much as I have and continue to do.
PS. I’m not getting paid for recommending this. Sadly.
PPS. While I was in Japan, the first episode of a new spinoff, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, was due to air and it happened that the TV in the hotel had the channel it was showing on. So, I figured I’d watch it. Okay, so I wasn’t going to be able to understand any of it, but what the Hell, right? It’s weird how much I did understand, even if it wasn’t the words. Looks like a good start and I can’t wait for the English dub to turn up on FunimationNow this Friday.
Witches and Ray-Guns 