Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ A Certain Scientific Railgun/Index ( Chapter 24 )

There are several problems with Railgun and Index. First, they are horror stories which pretend to be shows for kids. In these stories, children are taught to be psychotic, and then use their psychosis to warp reality in order to develop them into weapons of war. This is canon, not fan speculation. The children are also experimented on with the approval of their government, and even when they commit violent acts on other children, including murder, they are reprogrammed to forget their crimes and released back onto the streets to see what they'll do next. So not only are the government torturing kids, they're enabling them to do it again as repeat offenders. 

The next problem in the series is God exists. This is canon, not speculation. Two of the characters are actually blessed by God, note the capital G, to act as his right and left hand, mostly for smiting, although they generally rescue people too because they are good people stuck with these responsibilities. Despite the fact that God provably exists, one of the main antagonists, Aleister Crowley (based on the real English cult leader/mystic) insists on challenging God in his efforts by murdering and maiming children in his city of science that Dr Mengele, the Nazi torture-doctor, would probably think goes a bit too far. 

Finally, magic is real in this world, and nobody can use two spells at once, and if someone with an Esper ability, which nearly all the kids in this city of science have, try to use a spell there's a problem and they bleed or need to be hospitalized before they die. So obviously, ESP is actually a spell. This is a spoiler that never gets revealled because the author got bored with the setting and wrote Heavy Object instead. There are several times in Railgun and Index which hint strongly that ESP is a spell. They just never admit it, and everybody is too stupid to work out what I just explained and makes perfect sense. Because the author of the series is dumb. And you cannot write smarter characters than you are. This is one of those laws of reality. 

Despite the big flaws, the characters are really well designed, the voice acting is excellent in both English and Japanese. The imagery of daily life in Academy City is plausible, except for the windmills turning backwards in the OP/ED credits. Overall it is a pretty setting. The giggling villains get old immediately, and anyone who has ever played a video game would absolutely shoot them the first time they did that in real life. There are plenty of security around with guns. They'd probably shoot their boss before anyone else did. It would have prevented some pretty awful mass murders in the story, and shortened the plot considerably. That's hard to take, really. That the author thinks modern Japanese JSDF would do what the Japanese military did in Nanking... I have a hard time accepting they would embrace that sort of evil today. Yes, they kept re-electing Abe, who was literally the grandson of the monster behind Nanking's atrocities... no I'm not kidding. No, seriously, prime minister Abe is literally the grandson of Japan's biggest monster and many people cheered when he was assassinated by a JSDF soldier with a home made shotgun. He had it coming, believe me. Japan is in extremely dire straits due to his corruption. But even considering that, I really do not believe JSDF would stand by and let 10,000 girls get serial murdered like in this anime. Or that it would qualify as entertainment. This is also why this show is not for kids, and probably not for teens either. And anybody with sense finds the villains even more unrealistic. 

The upside of all the problems is you don't feel bad about messing it up in fan fiction. The people running academy city are monsters, so murderizing them is a moral act. And it should be done by adults, not the kids in the story. Any adult who stands by and does nothing doesn't deserve to be counted as part of the human race. So feel free to include assassination in any fan fiction stories of Index or Railgun. 

There are a number of interesting non-evil characters in the story. There's a stripping teacher, who has a dark back story and terrible regrets she wants to fix. There's the tragic lesbian. There's the starvation of our spike haired hero and his poor memory. There's the origin story of the serial murderer albino. There's the Sisters. There's the forgotten Ojou-sama. There's the PE teacher who is bad at her job. There's the sexually frustrated railgun (that's canon), and her only dating option. There's the terrifying truth of the flower girl. There's the more terrifying truth of the pinkette teacher. There's the secret of the dorm headmistress. There's probably other interesting secrets, like the spy and the Captain Japan guy, with the limit of human stats. These make for interesting interactions and they have memorable faces and reasonably interesting back stories. They are easy to write, and the author did well with their creation. Why he couldn't create villains without giggling I can only presume drugs were involved. Or serious lack of imagination.