I'm not clear on the relationship between the two series To Aru Majutsu no Index and To Aru Kagaku no Railgun.

I know that in the original book series there's a side-story about Railgun, and the Railgun anime is based on it. What I'm not sure of is whether it's a prequel, a sequel, simultaneous, or an alternate reality.

Do the "sisters" show up in the Railgun anime? I think that's the crucial question I'm wondering about. Because if they don't, then the Mikoto character is entirely different. If that got left out, then I'd have to start over from scratch trying to understand her.

Eps 10-14 of Index lay out what seems to be the primary part of her back story, and it explains why she is prickly, and feisty, and aggressive, and cold. Without going into details, there's a lot on her mind.

I'm wondering if Railgun is analogous to Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, where they skimmed off all the happy funny stories and left all the tragedy, drama, and pain for the other two series to tell. The FMP franchise overall is not very nice. In the sense that there's a lot going on, and a lot of people suffer because of what's going on.

In Index I've seen the same thing. The city is bright and clean and well maintained, and the people are well dressed and well fed. Lots of people there smile a lot of the time. But it's clear that there's a lot of real ugliness underneath that clean exterior. Touma gets involved in quite a lot of it; that seems to be the story being told.

Mikoto's story arc is one of the ugliest reveals in the series, going beyond even Index's story arc and Aisa's story arc in that regard. Thinking about it makes me feel just a bit nauseous, in fact.

If they left all that stuff out of Railgun then it might well be unrecognizable. It's the essence of the Index story, it now becomes clear to me.

UPDATE: This is the most horrifying moment in the series for me so far, from ep 11:

What they're all wearing is night vision visors. What the one in the middle is carrying is a body bag, which contains the corpse of another of them who was killed minutes before.

It's horrifying for what it implies, not for what it shows. And what is revealed later is even worse than what this scene implied.

If that aspect of Mikoto's story is omitted in the Railgun anime then it's an entirely different character in an entirely different place, who just happens to look the same.

This is the substance of the Railgun character. If they excised it, then she has no substance. All she has is a super power and a lesbian stalker.

UPDATE: I think part of why I'm asking this is that on other blogs I've seen a lot of comments to the effect that the Railgun anime is frothy and doesn't have a lot of substance, concentrating mainly on the lesbian stalker. If they excised Mikoto's back story, then it's to be expected that what they'd end up with would be frothy concentration on the lesbian; that's all that's left.

UPDATE: I just took a look at the list of books in the series on Wikipedia. The Index anime is telling the story straight through in order. The first book in the series was the Index story arc, the second book was Aisa, and the third was Railgun's story. There are 19 books in the series so far including one that came out a week ago, and at this rate there's enough material out there for three seasons at least.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:16 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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