Mahou Sensei Negima – Chapter 338

And Chisame thought HER blog posts were wordy.

So after all this time, we finally get to find out what Negi’s plan to save the magic world is. He’s been so tight-lipped about it that I thought it would take 20 students and ample use of rope to get it out of him. As it is, it still took Chisame to get him to admit his plans. Now that I’ve actually heard it…I’m still a little confused. Where, exactly, did Negi think up a plan like this? It feels very removed from everything we’ve seen up till now, and I was expecting it to be related to something he’d learned during the Magic World arc. And considering how deep into his magic studies Negi would have to have been, it’s surprising that he would come up with a plan so drenched in science and politics. Considering his backstory, I’m surprised Negi even knows the word “terraform”. That being said, I can at least understand the logic behind his plan. I really didn’t think I would, because most series that contain large amounts of magic have a tendency to resort to it to solve problems. The main issue with the magic world was the decaying flow of mana, and I was under the impression that his plan would revolve around that. He has an ally that completely negates magic, so it isn’t like the Law of Conservation of Mana is an absolute. Instead, the plan he came up with works around the mana flow problem, which is probably for the best, since I would assume Cosmo Enthelecheia exhausted all the plans they could come up with using magic.

There’s one thing that I’m still wondering about, though: why is Negi himself so important in all this? I understand that he came up with this grand plan, but he doesn’t really have to do very much throughout the whole operation. The political side of things is being taken care of by Kurt Godel and friends, and whatever Ayaka’s family is doing, it likely wouldn’t involve a lot of his participation. I can’t see how he needs to be involved so much that he has to put in this much of a workload.

Maybe this just stems from me not knowing a lot about politics, but that also brings up an issue I’d previously forgotten about, and that’s the absurdity of a ten-year-old knowing all of this. There’s young geniuses, there’s the Professor from Nichijou, and then there’s this. A normal child of Negi’s age wouldn’t even be able to memorize the above speech, but he can analyze complex issues from roughly nine different dimensions. It may be strange to say this now, when the series is based around a 10-year-old English teacher, but I have trouble believing Negi is capable of this. Even if he’s mentally much older from all the trans-dimensional training exercises, I don’t think he had time to study during them.

I think I can see where they’re going with this, and that’s the eventual concern that he shouldn’t be in such a hurry to grow up. He may have accepted that he isn’t his father, but soon he’ll need to learn that he isn’t his mother, either, and shouldn’t try so hard. Maybe soon, the project will become self-sustaining, and there will no longer be a need for him around. Maybe that’s when he’ll start to accept that the world can turn without him, and he can stop trying to be so important. There has to be some sort of childishness left in him somewhere. An adult wouldn’t have looked to Science Fiction to solve his problems.