All the villains are terrorists, more terrorists, and the Chinese, none of whom are presented as anything other than cardboard cutouts of villains. Tatsuya though is always presented as the hero. Light Yagami did a pretty good job of it as a similar smart person with dangerous beliefs and phenomenal power. You can totally do villain as protagonist thing. He's a cold-blooded killer who wipes out several thousand people without remorse during the show. His calm attitude and dangerous intelligence is perfect Bond villain material. The weird thing is, Tatsuya would make a pretty great supervillain. In Mahouka it's Tatsuya delivering the speech about how equality is a bad thing and we should destroy those who seek to change that, and we're supposed to agree with his outlook. Except when Charles delivers his speech about the myth of equality, it's by Norio Wakamoto hamming it up to 11 as the most evil character in the world.
#MAHOUKA KOUKOU NO RETTOUSEI EPUB NOVEL CODE#
You know that big Darwinian speech given by Charles Vi Brittania from Code Geass where he goes on about how the strong will destroy and subjugate the weak and that's why everyone will bow down to Brittania and all hail Brrrrrrrrritannia? That's Tatsuya's, and by extension the author's outlook on life.
It got to the point that for long periods of the show I found it easier to treat Tatsuya like he was the villain. Whenever the show tries to make me feel like Tatsuya is inconvenienced, it ends up flipping around and making me feel like I should be on the side of the people against Tatsuya. It's purely lipservice though that has no practical limitations on his capability to do literally anything. Yet the show likes to pretend he genuinely has factors against him. Any problem presented to Tatsuya can be solved with no issue. When your main character is as perfect as this, there is no tension. But he is not very good at pushing a square inch block across a floor so clearly he's a flawed character. He can detonate the power equivalent of an atomic bomb over anywhere in the world. He can take down an entire platoon of terrorists by himself.
He creates the power of flight on a whim.
He solves magical problems that the rest of the world have been struggling with for years. In his spare time he's the world's greatest engineer, fronting as the mysterious Silver creating the best magical equipment in the world. He's baffling intelligent to the point that he can calculate mind-bogglingly complex magical problems in milliseconds. He is a master magician who can cancel out other magicians magic. This is the only thing he is bad at in the world of magic. He's there because he is bad at pushing a square inch wooden block across a floor with his mind.
Tatsuya Shiba is a highly talented magician who has been placed in the crappy kids class. The first point it fails at, and the main point that drags down the entire show, is the main character. I can find nothing to recommend about Mahouka. Something that at the end of the day I could say "sure it was mostlyīad, but there was this one thing about the show that was enjoyable". If I could keep watching I might be able to find something good about this anime. At another point it was purely to see if I could finish it as a personal challenge. It might have been because people said it gets better in the novels later and I wondered at what stage that would be. At some point it was a scholarly interest in why this was the latest hottest thing in light novels. I'm not entirely sure why I watched all of Mahouka.
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