10 Second Anime - Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Episode 1

Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Episode 1

An actual BAMF for a main character? And someone who has worked hard to become one? And they're actually showing this in Japan?

Geh.

I am not kidding when I call the main character, Tatsuya Shiba, a badass motherfucker. Three years before the show starts, he was a child soldier with the equivalent magical power of a thermonuclear warhead. We pick up his story as he enters high school, and for some reason his magical power has been handicapped so that he joins the Magic Academy's Track 2 for irregular magic users. Never mind that he's still the foremost ninjutsu master's best student. Never mind that he still has all the analytical skills he had on the battlefield. He wants to keep a low profile at school, but his admiring younger sister hates the idea that others can't recognize his skills. He can't hide his skills all that well, because all the force multiplying techniques he uses make the meager magic he can use still way too powerful.

Heh.

This is still high school, so we're going to have fun characters when the show throws the viewers some slice of life. We've got our too friendly student council president, overprotective student council officers, and just normal young boys and girls interacting with each other.

It looks like we're going to get the admiration Tatsuya's younger sister Miyuki has for her older brother played for laughs with some incest jokes. Tatsuya seems oblivious to how attached Miyuki is to him, but he is a little bit aware of how others can misconstrue their close relationship.

Hmm.

This show starts out right. We're introduced to the idea of how capable Tatsuya actually is, but part of the show's mystery is why he's been handicapped, why he's trying to keep it a secret, and why he chose to go to high school instead of working for his father, in some obvious magical military type work.

The literal translation of the show's title is The Poor Student of Magic Specialty High School. The school has two tracks of magic studies, one for pure magic users (which applies to Miyuki), and the other for poor magic users who have specialized skills. In this world, magic is used like any other technology, and Tatsuya ostensibly wants to be a magic engineer. With his analytical skills, that seems like a plausible cover story, but he's really acting like a hacker: exploiting the capabilities of the magic tools in non-obvious ways. Not just h4xx0r with l33t skills, but m4xx0r, because he's hacking magic.

Tatsuya notices that a lot of the students have numbers in their names. From the Student Council President who has the character for 7 in hers, to two others and himself who have the number 4 in theirs. Related to why he's attending high school? Or some character trait where he sees numbers in everything which accounts for his magic analytical talent?

We don't get many anime where our hero starts out strong. Usually in action thriller type shows, we get accidental pilots, or kids who try hard and will get capable and skilled as the show progresses. This one has a great mystery in our BAMF who used to be even more BAMF. We have a bit of world building and more character and setting establishing to go before we get to that mystery, but we're going to have fun as Tatsuya kicks some high school ass.