1 The accelerator bit gets extremely wordy - there's a couple eps in there I think you can skip and miss little to nothing, though maybe it just seemed that way. I found it got better afterward, though.

I was disappointed about how the first few eps promised lots of Index, (whose conceit I like) and the later ones didn't follow through. I suspect the original novel was better about this, based on the final eps, the Wikipedia entries, and Sixten's review.

Unfortunately, I found the most evocative thing about the entire show, by a significant margin, was the first intro version. I read all sorts of things into it, (that are decidedly not there) but those things would make one of the best stories ever committed to binary.

2

Actually, I find Index more annoying than anything and I'm not missing her at all. The potential present in the premise about Index is intriguing, but if it were fully developed she'd be too strong, too overwhelming.

3 I hated them both about equally. Railgun came across as a schoolyard bully, only superpowered: a person likely to abuse her superiority over mere mortals. And Index was plainly annoying.

4

Pete, did you watch through to the end of Railgun's arc (that is, the end of ep 14)?

There's a reason Railgun acts the way she does, and it isn't because she's a bully. Now that the reason has been resolved, I'm looking forward to seeing whether she loosens up.

When she was a kid, maybe 5 years old, she was convinced to participate in a medical program where her DNA would be analyzed and used. The doctors told her they wanted to learn how her electrical power worked so that they could use it to help paralytics move their limbs again. And she, being a good little girl, agreed.

It turns out they had something rather less nice in mind. They wanted to learn to clone her, in order to make an army. And later they used that army for something distinctly unpleasant.

The highest ESPer level theoretically is level 6. At this time there is no one with that level, but Mikoto is one of seven known level 5's. The researcher's super computer told them that another of the level 5's, a kid nicknamed Accelerator, could be trained to achieve level 6 through a series of combat exercises. If he fought against and killed 20,000 clones of Mikoto, then it would happen.

And they're doing it, and the program is a bit over half done. The alt-Mikoto that Touma fell in with is #10032 and in ep 13 it's her turn.

The real Mikoto knows all about this. She's seen the clones and talked to some of them. They aren't all active but quite a large number of them are. Some of the battles have involved many of them at once, and she stumbled onto a battlefield after the fighting was done, and saw maybe a dozen of her clones laying dead on the ground, covered with blood.

She hates what's happening. She hates every bit of it. And she feels responsible for a great evil. She's carrying a pretty big load of emotional baggage.

In ep 13 she decides that the only way to end the program is for her to take on Accelerator, and to lose rapidly, and to die.

A lot of her toughness is put on. She's trying to work herself up to doing that.

5

Speculation about Touma: Reportedly there are 7 known level 5 ESPers, but only 6 are publicly known. The identity of the 7th is a mystery.

Touma supposedly is level 0, but I think it's becoming clear that his power (they call it "imagine break" but I keep thinking of it as "cancellation Alice") really is pretty great. I wonder if he himself is the subject of a secret development program and that he's really considered a level 5 as well.

He's defeated two level 5's now in battle. It's hard to see how that justifies categorizing him as level 0.

In Gakuen Alice, they did that to Mikan, who had the cancellation Alice. They made her a "zero star" but by the end of the series she's ranked much higher than that.

The cancellation Alice by its nature is difficult to rank. It's mostly a matter of how its owner chooses to use it, against whom, when, and how effectively.

It may be that they've ranked Touma as level 0 for his own protection. If they publicly announced him as level 5, they'd be painting a target on him.

6 I'm not so sure...
Imagine Breaker seems to me to be the kind of ability that's entirely useless in isolation. In fact, Touma points out that it actually has negative effects, in so much as it seems to make him incredibly unlucky. The level 0 rating probably comes from the fact that his ability doesn't do anything discernibly impressive.

7

This show caught me very much by surprise. I think that mentally I had it confused with Kannagi, which is a pretty big confusion.

What I was expecting was an insipid high school harem show including one magical girl. What I'm actually watching is techno-horror and it's a lot more involved than I had expected.

I also remember reading lots of comments and complaints about how talky the show was, and there definitely have been a couple of episodes where there was too damned much dialogue. But that hasn't been as common or as overwhelming as I had thought it would be, and now I think I'm more tuned to the rhythm of the show, so it isn't as much of an issue.