This review is for people such as myself; Negima fans wondering if, and how they should read UQ Holder. Hop on. (Of course I'll spoil Negima).
-- VERIFICATION PRIOR TO MY COMMITMENT --
So, I started UQ Holder by skipping right ahead to chapter 129, which was named "Touta and Negi". Chapter 129, of course, is quite advanced in the story, but that's where I found the introduction of most of Negima's cast to this new series. Plus, there were descriptions starting the chapter stating that "it was now revealed that UQ Holder has been a sequel to Negima all along !". Seemed quite pulled out of someone's ass tbh, but reading along I found some scenes featuring the Negima characters that I would enjoy as an "epilogue". That's the only bit of slice of life sweetness motivated me to start from chapter 1.
-- WHY I LIKED NEGIMA, AND WHY I DON'T LIKE UQ HOLDER --
But as I thought, I could not bring myself to enjoy UQ Holder.
As I've stated before, I'm a long-term Negima fan; I've been reading it since the 5th volume barely was out. At that time, Negima still wasn't much of a shounen action series. The slice of life, school and harem tropes were much more present in it than the magic, much less the action ones. And that's why I enjoyed Negima so much, and that I kept enjoying it even 38 volumes down the line, enough to re-read it twice... It was all because Negima had started slow, and had built a strong basis before escalating any of the stakes. Negi was a teacher in a class of 31 girls, and nearly every one of them were given their time to shine. It wasn't about fights, it was about much more than that; protecting the characters we cared about and solving deep-rooted trauma trough bettering oneself and pursuing clear goals. Negi said himself that he didn't like to fight, and he was quite an intellectual. This made him highly atypical among shounen protagonists, imo.
But UQ Holder... it has no base.
It starts in Negima's future, when Earth and Mars have been linked by the elevator for quite a while. Somehow, Evangeline is now a teacher in a small country town (but we won't get to see any of that), and Touta, our new protagonist, is one of her students.
Well, this Touta guy is a stereotypical shounen protag if I've ever seen one. Absolutely dumb, wants to be friends with any stranger, his initial goal is to "travel to the tower and get to the top of it" as if no one cared to explain to him that it was an elevator... and who knows if anyone knows it's one, right ? The world-building is non-existent. We're supposed to care for this guy's school friends, but we barely see them for one chapter before he departs on his journey with Eva. And in ten more chapters, he'll be defying every one of his new senpai's expectations by pulling combat abilities we don't even get explained from sweet nowhere.
--EVANGELINE--
Speaking of Eva... I hardly recognize her. I know she could change a bunch in, how long has it been, 80 years ? But back in Negima, she was so cynical, so sadistic, such a tsundere, rightly prideful, and one of the most powerful mages to exist... And in UQ Holder, she's... some sort of doting mother figure; albeit a sloppy one... And why did she ever stop dressing in gothic lolita, she who liked it so much ? Now she wears the same bland outfit every day and I have trouble wrapping my head around that. Worst of all, now’s Evangeline gets UTTERLY DEFEATED by the first small enemy to come around, only to ask this idiot of a boy who's been playing with a sword as a hobby to save her ??? EVA BACK THEN WOULD’VE NEVER. WHEN HAS SHE GOTTEN SO SOFT AND DEFENSELESS ??
But it was a plot point to introduce the fact that she was a vampire and to make Touta join the ranks of this league of immortal people, which is this new series' gimmick. Well that prompts the question: why make this random boy immortal and not the countless other people she's liked and cared about up to this point ? I sure hope we can get an explanation down the line, as to why Eva has gotten this way in the last 80 years and why she makes this type of decisions now, cause I have to admit it's hard to respect this version of her as much as the old one. Maybe she's gotten happy; she told us herself that being happy made people boring...
But around chapter 66, she goes back to her childish looks, gothic lolita and cold personality. I guess Akamatsu finally realized what she had become, and started feeling nostalgic for the old Eva too.
--THE CHARACTERS--
I loved the character designs in Negima, I really did. Negi taught a class of 31 girls, so you’d think some of them would blend together in terms of design or personality ? Absolutely not. They were all very fleshed out from each other, each with interesting and unique designs. I loved every single one of them; when I think about which character I love the most from Negima I always go : “this one ? No, this one. But what about this one ? Oh, and what about all these ones too”, you know ?
But I don’t like the character designs in UQ Holder. Starting from Touta, what a bland guy. They all feel expandable, replaceable, non-appealing. The shtick of multiple of the main cast is that they’re androgynous. Other than that, in terms of design I think that one is ugly and that the remaining two are boring.
In terms of characterization, don’t even get me started. I hate the main cast. I don’t care for them. Reading what they have to say, seeing how they interact doesn’t interest me. Touta sucks as a protagonist to have, because every time I see him my mood plummets. They’re not connected as Negi was connected to the girls. Hell, they’re not even connected at all, by any background at all. They feel so eclectic from each other. They suck. Random punks in the street are better designed than them. They suck so fucking hard. The quality of the art is still the same, it’s still really good. What’s drawn just sucks.
--THE LOCATIONS--
Mahora, as a campus, was such a great setting to Negima. It was big and intricate and detailed and mysterious… To say things as they are, reading Negima led me to choose to go to a similar school as I was so enamored with campus Mahora. And the other locations were gorgeous too, from Evangeline’s house and resort to Kyoto on their school trip and everything.
But UQ Holder has no particular setting. It happens anywhere, in a futuristic world I don’t like. They do go back to Mahora around chapter 40, and Mahora still exists as it did back then. But how could I bear seeing that gang of nobodies talking in the same staircase Negi and Asuna once became friends ? Bathing in the large bath the whole class once did, training in front of the World Tree as Negi once trained ? These scenes felt almost… blasphemous. As if they were dirtying the memories I had of people I loved.
--THE SETTING--
In early Negima, the fact that he was a magician was something that Negi had to hide at all costs, or he would be turned into an ermine and he would never be able to do magic anymore. That, coupled with the whole pactio thing that involved kissing and marriage, made magic feel like such a secretive thing that implied things that were almost taboo to think of as a child. As such, knowing that, as Negi grew closer to each of his students, it would become harder to hide his secret from more and more of them made the growing of a friendship between Negi and the girls terribly thrilling. To be real friends, he had to share his secret. If he revealed it to the wrong person, he may have become unable to ever pursue the goal of meeting his father again. But as a child, he needed people to confide in and these girls were the only people he knew in Japan. He had to form a connection with these girls, and that connection had to be genuine. That’s what was so interesting. It really drove the character development, this idea of real trust and the vulnerability that came with asking for help from another person. By the end, when they were all a big team surrounding Negi in the magic world, when Negi had his harem of 20 girls in a flying ship on Mars… it was more than a simple harem or a simple shounen battle, you could really see and feel what bonded all these characters together. You had been there every little step of the way, when every pactio was concluded individually, and you had seen the vulnerability the characters shared and the will they had to create a bond together. You could imagine what it would have felt like, to have been in place of that girl kissing Negi and having his magic go through your body for the first time. You could understand what bonded her to him, and you could see how hesitant Negi was to form such bonds. Every pactio was magnificent, and who cares if it made Negima a harem. It wasn’t cliché.
In UQ Holder though, magic is from the start something everyone in the world knows about and can do. It makes sense, as Negi saved the whole world with magic 80 years prior. But whatever happened to erasing people’s memories ? To time-traveling ? Negi could have had prevented a world where everyone knows about magic if he had wanted to. Guess he didn’t. Well, there goes the thrill of magic being a secret.
And pactio ? We don’t even talk about it anymore, in UQ Holder. Imagining the cards all the girls could gain through pactio : their designs, their powers, the clothes that would come with them ; that used to be one of my favorite things in Negima. And I enjoyed wondering about the setting the pactio would happen in, too. I thought pactio was such a great concept, that it really raised the stakes in both the romance and the magic department. But now it’s gone. Whoop di doop.
--IN CONCLUSION--
UQ Holder fails as a singular entity. It has to piggy-back off Negima to be a decent manga. However, compared to Negima, it is a poor manga. Hence, I would argue UQ Holder is not only a boring manga, but a bad one.
--POINTERS ON HOW TO READ IF YOU ONLY CARE ABOUT NEGIMA--
Chapter 24 is when we first see what Negi has become
Fate appears in chapter 29
Visiting Mahora around chapter 40
Mana Tatsumiya appears in chapter 62
Start reading at 112 ish
125 Negi is back for real
--TL;DR--
Point is, UQ Holder is a typical shounen
It only cares about action, fights and looking cool (trainings aren't even shown)
The protag is uninteresting, has no dept (he's amnesic from the start)
You can't say it inherits much from Negima (Magic is hardly explained)
And the whole thing feels incredibly rushed (from the start)
--EDIT 04/09/2022 : WHY UQ HOLDER IS EXCUSABLE--
With Akamatsu abruptly ending this series, I gained a newfound interest in it and in why it was made. I learned that Akamatsu had hastily ended Negima in protest to a proposed copyright law he didn't want enacted. I learned he had started UQ Holder a year later, in 2013. I learned the proposed copyright law was dropped in 2015. And that got me thinking : maybe that's why UQ Holder starts in that convoluted, unclear way. Maybe that's why it took so long to reveal that Touta was a clone of Negi and that Negi was dormant. Maybe because it couldn't be revealed before, due to copyright.
This point of view really does change my enjoyment of UQ Holder. Because it, maybe, gives a reason to the wacky writing. Touta is excusable as a bland protagonist if we take into consideration that he only is a two year-old clone. Touta's relationship with Eva, and overpowered abilities are excusable if we take into consideration that he is a clone of Negi. Eva's personality change is excusable if we take into consideration that Akamatsu just wanted to finally write a good love story for one his dearest, saddest characters. The rush in the storyline is excusable if we take into consideration what point it wanted to get to.
And most of all,
I think I can get behind it if it ends in a "it's just one possible timeline" kind of way. UQ Holder's story is but an ellipse in Negima's timeline, as maybe it was to Akamatsu when writing it : he couldn't continue Negima, so he drew "a possible alternative to it". It was but an ellipse in his career, caused by copyright issues. Now, he is free to pick Negima back up just where he ended it before if he so desires. And knowing that UQ Holder means nothing more than that, "a story you can still enjoy while you can't enjoy Negima" brings peace to my heart. It sure is better than nothing.
