10 Second Anime - Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Episode 26 [END]

Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei - Episode 26 [END]



Shiba the Destroyer plays the ultimate BAMF until the very end. Mahouka ends with the prevention of war and the reunion of close siblings.

Heh.

I know the Japanese like the puns they make with homonyms and alternate pronunciations for their kanji, but it took the last episode to make it explicit that Tatsuya is supposed to be the next incarnation of Shiva the Destroyer. Even the Great Asian Alliance's ephithet on the Demon of Okinawa, where we saw the child soldier Tatsuya use his Material Burst in the first few seconds of the very first episode, is Mahesvara, which is an insulting name for Shiva. Tatsuya's alias as a Special Officer is Oguro, but it's spelled with the kanji for daikoku (大黒), the god of wealth, also known as Mahakala, another incarnation for Shiva. Those individual kanji can be pronounced "o" and "guro" in other contexts. If you were reading all this stuff, I'm sure it would have made more of an impact, but hardly explaining how the magic works was already rough for this anime adaptation.

Aunt Maya has quite the hime-sama attitude. The whole season of Mahouka was an introduction to its world and its major players in relation to the Shiba siblings, so it's a bit disappointing we didn't have time to see more of her.



Well, at least the phone conversation gave us a small chance at Miyuki upskirt fanservice...

Sure, we can turn a drop of water into a nuclear bomb. Just do away with all that messy fission or fusion and convert atoms into antimatter. You get the full E=mc² that way instead of some minute fraction. Atomic BAMF, not atomic bomb...

Miyuki sure does like freezing people solid. Although I have to ask, how did she get inside the final locked room if the villain had to break in? It's anime, roll with it.

Tatsuya can read the Eidos, which is the Mahoukaverse term for the information grid of psion particles around people, and magic operates on that psion cloud. Tatsuya's extra special gift is that he can "read" the Eidos of the last 24 hours, and using his Regeneration spell, rewrite the Eidos up to whatever point he wants to. From what we've seen before, he could do it only to himself. Maybe this wasn't the case, but it's what we were shown. Anyway, because he's "reading" this psion cloud, he also experiences whatever the thing or person went through, but in a much compressed time period. That could be maddening, if he had a full range of emotions, which he doesn't. We're beginning to get an idea of what all the experiments the Yotsubas ran on Tatsuya were all about.

I still don't know what the Great Asian Alliance was up to with their premature invasion, but erasing their fleet while it was still in port should be a good deterrent to them and anybody else trying to do the same to Japan.

Tatsuya was doing too much strategic military BAMF'ing, so we needed to have some small scale action with his schoolmates and their rematch with Lu Gonghu. It looks like we still just needed Mari and Mayumi, with the others as distractions.



Mari still had the measure of the man, with Mayumi finishing him off.

Hmm.

While I appreciated Miyuki's explanation of how Tatsuya's Regeneration spell works, and somehow it's become a spell he doesn't even need his CADs to use on himself, I would have liked more of an explanation on what the Great Asian Alliance was doing in committing so much military force on retrieving those magic archives. Why then? Why use it as a pretext for all-out martial adventurism? Perhaps we'll get an explanation in another season of Mahouka as a stray conversation piece.

The last few moments of the episode was setting up the next arc, as if this show was just moving on to the next story. Miyuki's voiceover epilogue was good enough to serve as our stopping point, and to establish the potential for greater conflict between the magic-users and the rest of the world. It still felt a little tacked-on with its mentions of history and what-not, but I'm not going to fault it too much for trying to end an episode that looks like it compressed so much already into one show. Tatsuya became a walking strategic nuke by season's end, which is a fine way of closing the circle on the first impression we got of him in a flashback from the first episode. BAMF, from beginning to end, Shiba the Destroyer wanting to become the Giver of Life.



Final Thoughts.

Depending on whether you like old-fashioned hero mythology or modern secular humanism, you would love or hate this show. Mahouka was decidedly a hero myth, with a humble demigod throwing off his origins, only to be discovered for what he was, and to be pulled back into the wider conflict between Man and the Gods. Contemporary anime fans call this main character a Gary Stu, because we don't see his humble origin as he slowly increases his skill to become stronger. Some of this preference for a main character in whom we witness his growing power comes from needing to identify with the hero. I don't. I've read enough history, mythology, and sagas to know which kind of story is being presented, and to appreciate those hooks and refrains each kind throws at me.

Tatsuya was the next incarnation of Shiva the Destroyer. The interesting part of this hero myth is the Destroyer wants to become Brahma, the Giver of Life. Shiva is associated with the bull Nandi, which was his main mount and gatekeeper, which is why you had Tatsuya naming his invention corporation Taurus Silver. Silver, as it is pronounced by a Japanese tongue, would sound almost like Shiva. Mahakala, the god of wealth, was Shiva's other gatekeeper.

If you don't know any of this stuff, which adds a lot of fun, evocative story-telling, then you could appreciate it as a Superman story, in which he lost some of his power, and had to rely on his intelligence to navigate whatever adventures and conflicts he found himself in. Batman, which is apparently what detractors of this kind of story like more, was indeed very intelligent, but so was Superman. Tatsuya was the MacGyver of his limitations, and each first episode of an arc gave us the clues and tools he would use to get out of that locked room of a plot to escape into the next chapter.

One thing many detractors will not admit is that a major reason they hated this show is that the main character insulted their politics. The first arc had the magic users fighting against social activists, who were actually being used as political agitators by foreign powers. This was an almost exact retelling of Communists influencing many artists and academics during the Red Scare. What people don't like to focus on these days is that even though the methods of McCarthy in the Senate and the HUAC read like a witch hunt these days, there were actual spies and lives were ruined by the actions of the Soviet agents. In Mahouka's case, Tatsuya was correct in saying that the lure of "equality" recruited many who felt they could not find prestige in the current system, and needed "revolution" to establish a new system where they could. This is a political lie, and those who seek it are hypocrites, because they do not fight for "equality," rather the opportunity to be the new ruling class. Ever was it so. Social justice is just a new term to fool people into fighting for communism. Don't listen to the newspeak, look at who speaks it, and see how they are still the same.

Well, you've got a hint of where I lie on the political spectrum from that, but those striving for "equality" also don't like Gary Stu's who just seem to appear in a story with incredible gifts. But they only see what they want, and not the scars all over Tatsuya's body. Again, if they saw the story of those scars, instead of when they started this story, the reception might be something else, but this is a hero myth, not a legend being born.

Do you like myths or legends? How you answer that will determine whether you like how a story introduces its hero. Do want to see where the journey begins, or where the journey ends? Because even in hero mythology, these demigods start off being born somewhere. But that's not the point of a hero myth. The hero must battle the gods as the champion of Man. In a legend, the hero does not need a relationship with the gods. The legend being born is the point of the story itself. Myths and legends have their different rhythms, archetypes, villains, and settings. They definitely have different heroes in them. If you like the legendary hero, and hate the mythical hero, then you won't like Mahouka.

My question, which I would like to see answered in future seasons, is with Shiva the Destroyer trying to become Brahma the Creator, who is Vishnu the Preserver? We've barely seen enough of the story so far, and my imagination leads to the Clan system not liking very much how an incarnate god hopes to change his nature. The mythical hero will always have his conflict with the gods, whether he is a champion of Man, or not.