Continuing from the previous episode about how a story can lose a lot by removing key context,
let's talk about an example of an adaptation that removed all of a story's context and made
it totally incomprehensible. Let's talk about the 2005 anime adaptation of Ken Akamatsu's Negima.
I really liked Negima when I was younger. It was my favourite manga all together for a few years,
and I don't even care about the fanservice. Yeah, I'm that guy who read Negima and Love Hina for
the plot. Fucking game-end me. But, that first anime adaptation was just awful. It's by the same
studio that made Love Hina less tolerable, by the way. This one's going to take quite
a bit of explanation so you have the context to understand what I'm talking about, so buckle in.
Negima is the story of a ten year old wizard from Wales who is hired to teach English at
an all-girls middle school in Japan as part of his wizard training. Just accept it so we can move on.
After a few small adventures, the series launched into a three volume-long arc, the Kyoto Arc,
which spanned Volumes 4 through 6; around Chapters 26 to 53. So, with an arc that accounted for half
of the series up to that point, can you guess how long its anime adaptation was, taking into
account the rough 2-3 chapters per episode of most adaptations of manga? Two. Fucking two!
Episode 20 is essentially a drastically cut-down take on Volume 4, with Episode 21
being the same for Volume 6. One wouldn't think this would be the case, given how the rest of
the anime is about as padded as... actually, I don't recall Negima doing a padded bra joke,
but in 355 chapters, there probably was one. For an idea of how this adaptation usually operates,
it's common for the opening chapter of a weekly manga to be double length (around forty pages) to
give it more room to properly set up the series. Not every series does this, but in my experience,
the vast majority of them do, including Negima. This chapter is then very easy to adapt,
largely unaltered, into the first episode of the nigh inevitable anime adaptation. Negima's first
chapter was split into two episodes with a ton of completely unnecessary padding.
Another example is Chapter 14's adaptation as Episode 15, where Negi visits Ayaka's home,
accompanied by Asuna and Konoka. In the anime, it's the entire class,
filling the episode with hijinks before eventually getting around to the original
point of explaining Ayaka's backstory. Or the one that reveals Chisame as a secret net idol
and has Negi learn her secret, becoming this weird story where she enters a war with the
class website for views but without the decency to have them write diss tracks on each other.
Now, I mentioned how the anime drew from Volumes 4 and 6; but what about Volume 5, you ask?
Volume 5 was the "Kiss Negi" event and its aftermath. The event was adapted into Episode
16, totally removed from the Kyoto Arc, which is where the issues start.
The story itself was only three chapters long, the perfect length for a faithful adaptation.
But, by moving it out of the school trip, nothing about it makes any sense, because
all of the original setup is removed and only a few details are given new explanations.
To summarise, Negi learns that Konoka, is being targeted by an evil organisation.
Setsuna is devoted to protecting Konoka and agrees to let Negi help. Worried that another abduction
attempt will occur during the night, Setsuna gives Negi some shikigami he can write his name
on to create a perfect double that can sleep in his room while he patrols around the hotel.
Negi flubs writing his name in Japanese multiple times, in one of the only acknowledgements of that
fact that Negi is not a native Japanese speaker and learned the language in about three weeks.
There's even a scene much later in the manga where Negi's students eavesdrop
on Negi and fellow British child Anya, who are apparently speaking Japanese in private.
While this is going on, Kazumi, who has recently discovered Negi's secret, works with Negi's bro
Chamo to arrange the Kiss Negi game, an event she'll broadcast to each room, where two girls
from each room have to sneak into Negi's room without getting caught by the teachers and kiss
Negi. Kissing is the primary method of forming a pactio contract, which Chamo gets commission
for every time Negi forms one. And thanks to a magic circle around the hotel, if Negi gets
kissed on the premises, it counts. Kazumi just makes money off the bets on which team will win.
Unbeknownst to anyone, Negi is off patrolling and all the shikigami have come to life, with the ones
he flubbed being weird freakazoids that try to kiss the girls of their own volition. Even the
one he did right does this for unexplained reasons when Nodoka reaches it. The doubles go poof when
kissed, so no one wins. The real Negi returns from patrol, Nodoka trips and accidentally kisses him,
getting the pactio. She then puts it to good use in the following few chapters, and over
the course of the rest of the series, giving this short filler-ish story long-lasting consequences.
In the anime, though, Kazumi doesn't know Negi's secret. She sends Negi into an abandoned
school building, under the impression they're playing a game of reaching the science room,
and he's getting a headstart due to his age. Kazumi reveals the true goal of the
event and sends the girls in. So much about this new setup makes little-to-no sense.
For one, the event is just randomly thought up by Kazumi with no prompting from Chamo,
which makes the kissing aspect random and weird. The girls brought their pillows and
pyjamas out with them in the middle of the night, instead of just being what they had
on-hand at the time while staying overnight in a hotel. Without the teachers patrolling,
which could easily have still been incorporated by saying the
staff caught wind of the game beforehand, there's no fail state for any of the girls,
so they just go in gung-ho and beat each other with pillows until... I dunno, they give up?
There's also a small change in that Ayaka's partner is Chizuru instead of Chisame,
even though Chisame is being coerced into helping with the broadcast anyway,
so that could have still been used to rope her into competing. Maybe the change was
made to justify the broadcast happening at all, even though the manga didn't need to;
or to make all the groups consist of roommates, since Ayaka rooms with Chizuru and Natsumi.
The real issue, though, is with Negi's role. Negi drops his torch in the dark science room,
and creates a ball of light to help him see, which illuminates the anatomical dummy. Negi faints and
the ball randomly makes a set of doubles of him. These doubles function the same as in the manga
version, and Negi himself is switched out for a double by the time Nodoka gets there.
Where Negi disappears to, why the ball of light does what it does, and why the doubles are so
fucked up, all go completely unexplained and it just leaves the viewer confused.
And once the clones are gone, the episode basically ends. Negi only shows up in an
epilogue that doesn't explain where he went, and there's no pactio circle or accidental kiss
between Negi and Nodoka to give her an artefact. This entire episode can be skipped with no issue,
while the chapters it was based on are essential for setting up Nodoka becoming
one of Negi's closest friends and most valued allies in future arcs. And don't say it would
have been pointless to include setups like this right before the end when they won't go anywhere,
because Episode 22 did include Negi's desire to be taught by Evangeline and Ku Fei, which
was something he developed because of the Kyoto Arc in both versions,
which goes nowhere in the anime because the final arc comes right after it.
About the only thing they did properly recontectualise was Asuna's absence,
from also being on patrol to just being asleep. Why they felt the need to explain
why the girl with the early morning paper round would be asleep late at night,
rather than what's actually relevant to the plot, I'll never know.
In theory, the change tightens up the Kyoto Arc by removing what is partially filler from the middle,
and it'd be weird to have this episode as the middle third of the arc when it's
unrelated beyond the location. But, so much of the setup for the story really
does hinge on that original setting, and you need to put in effort to re-contextualise it,
but anyone who's heard of six finger Makie knows how little Xebec cared about effort with
this show. Which is weird, because some shots are lifted directly from the source material,
so it's weird that they show so little effort in this much more important area.
Even removed from the school trip, the old explanation could still have worked with a
bit of tweaking. Or better yet, adapt the Kyoto arc properly as the final third of the show,
rather than trimming it down to leave room for an original ending where Asuna fucking dies
and Negi and the girls go back in time to beat up Satan and save her from her pact with said Satan.
No, I'm not making this up. That's actually how the show ends and it's somehow fucking garbage.
I don't know how you make anime schoolgirls beating up Satan for his lunch money garbage,
but these guys somehow did it. It's like making a Ninja World War boring. How do?
And you know what the weirdest thing is? They did something similar with another part of this
arc and it actually kinda worked. Towards the end of Volume 4, Nodoka spends some time with
Negi and confesses her feelings for him. This is about two chapters before the Kiss Negi game,
by the way. While the places they go to are changed, there is an episode where Nodoka
spends time with Negi and confesses to him. Episode 17... the episode right after the
Kiss Negi event. As far as adapting Chapter 33 into a non-school-trip context goes, it works,
but it could have been so much more by coming before the event as a way to quickly advance
their dynamic with the confession, then the accidental kiss, then her discovery of his secret,
then her joining his team, which worked really well in the manga.
And the Kyoto Arc received another frustrating context-discarding alteration in its climax.
Negi gets hit with a petrification spell that affects him too slowly and will suffocate him
once his throat turns to stone. Konoka forms a pactio with him to awaken her latent healing magic
so she can save him. In the anime, Setsuna gets "badly hurt" so Konoka forms a pactio with her,
even though the point of this pactio in the manga is that Konoka is borrowing some of Negi's magic
to help her use her own. The magister gains no magical benefits, and Konoka would be the magister
here since Setsuna is not a magic-user. But, it's fine to make lazy changes like
this to titillate the twelve-year-olds with some girl-on-girl action, right?
This is all just one reason not to watch this godawful adaptation, but there are plenty
of others, and I'm not even talking about the godawful dub by Funimation. It jumbles around
stories, such as placing the main plot of Volume 3 before Volume 2's. It randomly changes character
hair colours, including taking peachy-brown-haired Chisame, a character who is supposed to look like
a completely normal person who doesn't stand out before switching to her bombastic net
idol persona, and gave her dark green hair that stands out immensely. Except in the final battle,
where she's got brown hair like in the earlier OVA for some reason? The series also gives a bad
first impression with its intro showing all the girls happily playing together,
including the much more serious, stoic or antisocial characters. It's bullshit.
And definitely don't watch the dub. You get some of the worst pronunciation I've ever
heard in a dub, and general Funimation script fuckery like this travesty:
Chao: "Wales, England."
Fuck you! Chao is supposed to be the smartest girl in the class. She's a
super genius from future space and she doesn't know what England is? Fuck you!
But if you think that's bad, try sitting through the live action drama. Yes, this is also real.
That abject failure probably deserves an episode of its own, at some point as well.
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Today's recommended videos are RTFM Negima| How Not to Adapt an Anime and its sequel,
Why Manga is the Better Choice, by The Self Hating Weeb. They do a good job of
explaining why Negima is worth checking out, and why watching the anime version
is basically like checking out Resident Evil through its movies.
If you want to game-end yourself that badly, there are more humane ways to do it.