Aug 18, 2023
Very minor spoilers for the first book/first half of the anime, nothing you couldn't see coming thanks to the heavy foreshadowing used in both.
I jumped headfirst into the series after a certain twist while watching the anime, excited to see how the story builds on things from there, but was incredibly disappointed because it just... Doesn't.
Instead, afterwards we get a load of totally not quidditch, cringey magical sex ed and everyone being in love with the main character but no one making a move. That is, when we actually focus on the main characters at all. About half of each book focuses on barely related
...
characters and their stories. At times it feels like someone accidentally spilt an anthology of short stories into the main books considering so much time is spent on them and almost none is spent on the more interesting and much more relevant characters or plot points, like the cousins of his family, the other people helping the MC, or even the main characters themselves. Ashbury's broomriding subplot is the most offensive example considering it barely connects to just one of the main characters and as far as I can tell had no actual impact on anything. It's almost like someone put a filler arc into the book considering how little it involves the main cast and the impact it has.
Having finished the eight translated books there still don't appear to be any answers to even the most basic questions the end of the first book poses, like why do these people work with and have the same goals as Oliver? It'd be nice to think it's a show don't tell thing, but nothing else in these books make me think the writer's capable of anything of the sort. Like, we're constantly told that most people in magical society are evil and cruel, but other than the mustache twirling bad guys no one we meet is actually like that. On top of that, everything else is overexplained, partly because new concepts are constantly being thrown in rather than using already established ones.
One good example of this is 'grave soil' and other similar techniques that are mentioned a lot early on but then almost never come up again. Instead we forget all about the fact that the MC's spent ages getting good with that kind of magic and has gone through brutal training to do so. No techniques or characters evolve or grow, instead we get timeskips and suddenly they can do things they couldn't do before and behave completely differently. Like, say, a certain bookworm turning into a yandere at one point and it never coming up again.
While reading through the first book which is as far as the anime's covered at time of writing, I couldn't help feeling that unlike in most adaptations, the anime's done a service to the books by cutting a lot of the unnecessary stuff away. I'd gone into the books hoping to find out more about the characters and the world, but instead I got things like characters explaining what just happened - right after that's been described. For example, 'Nanao turns and swings her sword' followed by someone going, "Did you see? Nanao swung her sword!" Except it's far worse because instead of a few words, each of those is paragraphs long instead.
When that's not happening, people are gushing about how cool the MC is or looking at their friends and realising for the 50th time that, wow, I have the strength to do things I wouldn't otherwise thanks to the people around me! Honestly, sometimes it feels like these characters wouldn't be able to make it the bathroom without the encouragement and support of multiple people, and by skipping so much gushing and internal monologue, the anime does a much better job of keeping things from getting bogged down.
I was tempted to drop the series multiple times, and the only reason it gets a score as high as 4 is because I was interested in seeing where it was going. But, looking back at it now, the answer was nowhere, and I really should have given up on it before getting as far as I did.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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