1 I hadn't even know there was an OVA until you mentioned it.  I fail.  Searching for torrent now...

2 Marbles? I thought she used tokens.
(I just picked up the first volume of the Manga. )

3 I didn't know there was an OVA either.  (Goes looking).

OT: Did you get that pic I sent you?  Or should I not do that again?

4 Yes, I received it. Yes, don't do it again.

5 Picked up the first volume of the Railgun manga. Cute, but pretty much the same as the TV series for story.

6 The manga came out after the anime. However, eventually it did the Sisters story arc from Mikoto's point of view.

7 Dang, now I have to get it all!

8 Actually, I'm pretty sure that the start of the Railgun manga has the anime series beat by a good couple of years...

9 Updated, but still no.

10 I'm sort of between you and Pete on this. Railgun had moments, and I can't say that I didn't enjoy it, but I found parts of it tedious.

I'm really a sucker for voices though, and I liked Mikoto's voice a lot. I _really_ liked Kuroko's voice. I'm sure that if I were a native speaker I would have found it way over the top, but I'm not, and I loved her strangely clipped speech. (Off-topic, but I like Someday's Dreamers, which I know you liked, mainly for the same reason. Sora's [Tohoku-ben?] accent is incredibly endearing.)

So I guess it's a given that I will watch whatever comes next, just for Kuroko (or, more accurately, for her seiyuu.)

11 Being real professionals, seiyuu have to take on any kind of unsavory role in middling shows. From what I saw just recently, Satomi Arai was in Ookami+7 and S.Y.D., neither of which is very remarkable. As far as quality goes, they are worse than Railgun.

12 I'm not sure I'd say that I thought Railgun middling. I liked it a lot better than I would probably like a series picked at random. Enough to finish it, at least. I think I may just have seen enough anime at this point that I've gotten fairly picky about it.

What you say about seiyuu is absolutely true though. I like Ayako Kawasumi's voice acting a great deal, and I think it's clear that she's one of the most successful and respected seiyuu out there, but she has done some really terrible shows. This doesn't seem to harm reputations in Japan, which makes sense given the agency system there. I don't think there are a lot of seiyuu who make enough to reject paying work if they rely on the income from voice acting. We don't tend to hold bad roles against actors if they took them while they were still struggling to pay the bills.

13 Silly question inspired by the Railgun series: would you go on a date with the Stripping Woman?

More seriously, are the people behind the human experimentation in both series ever brought to justice? It looks like Academy City was founded by Dr. Mengele.

14

Academy City was founded by Aleister Crowley, who was no saint. His reason for doing so has not yet been revealed, but it seems that the goal was to create a level 6.

To that end, it was necessary to collect a huge number of potential trainees, in hopes that one of them might make that breakthrough.

Crowley is sometimes referred to as the most evil man who ever lived. Hyperbole, to be sure, but if you read about him he didn't accept too many ethical limits. "Do what you will shall be the whole of the law" is a quote credited to him.

So at Academy city, there are a large number of different research tracks devoted to creating a level 6.

The Sisters Project was one of them. And their willingness to create 20,000 clones of Misaka Mikoto and sacrifice them violently in hopes of developing Accelerator into a level 6 demonstrates the limits to which they are willing to go.

The experiment with the Child Errors which put all of Kiyama's kids into a coma was another research track. And the experiment at the end of the Railgun series was a continuation of that one.

After the girls interfered, and the kids woke up, Crowley and his lackeys disavowed all knowledge and blamed everything on Telestina. But if it had worked, and Haruue had become level 6, they'd have applauded -- even though a side effect of it would have been destruction of Academy city and deaths of most of the people living there.

Which is to say that by Crowley's standards, Mengele was a piker.

15

I didn't answer your question.

No, not yet.