Anime Spotlight For the Week

Our Anime for the week Goes to the Toaru Series. It has been under obscurity with a cult following That premiered Oct 5, 2008. The unique thing about this anime is its segregation of magic and science while our main guy over Here Kamijyou Touma is caught in between.  Also there is Misaka Mikoto whom with her Notoriety got her own spin off Title Toaru Kangaku no Railgun featuring her own adventures. 

Academy City, Japan, is at the forefront of science. Besides being 30 years ahead of the world technologically, more than three-fourths of this peculiar city's population consists of students developing their psychic abilities as espers in various institutions. Among these students is Touma Kamijou, a high school boy with the lowest psychic rank of zero, but with a mysterious power no scientist can understand: "Imagine Breaker," which allows him to negate other supernatural abilities.

This, however, doesn't affect Kamijou's life in the least as he plays his role as a regular teenager; that is, until he meets the strange Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a young girl who has memorized the entirety of the forbidden grimoires, and now a dangerous organization is hunting Index down. With several magicians looking to harm the girl, Kamijou will defend his new companion at all costs as he discovers a strange new realm of the supernatural.

And with that let us now meet our Main 3 cast.

                                                                Touma Kamijou (上条 当麻)

Age: 15-16
Height: 168 cm
Classification: neither Esper nor Magician; a normal human with a unique ability
Ability: Imagine Breaker
Level: 0
Famous Quote: It's my dream to go back home smiling, without having lost anything.

He is the series' protagonist. He has the lowest psychic rank possible at Level 0—largely because the people testing psychic abilities cannot detect or classify his abilities. His power is Imagine Breaker (幻想殺し, "Illusion/Fantasy Killer"), a power which negates all magic, psychic, or divine powers but also his own good luck. Due to the nature of his power, the founder of Academy City considers him neither a Psychic nor a Magician but rather a normal person with a unique ability.

He tends to stay away from trouble but possesses a strong sense of justice, albeit somewhat shallow and dogmatic. He is a smart student and knowledgeable about certain subjects yet is a failure in his esper studies. While he is an idealist for the hopes of other people, ironically he is cynical about himself possibly because of his powers.

                                                    Index Librorum Prohibitorum (禁書目録)

Age: 14-15
Height: 148 cm
Classification: Magician

Index, also known by her full name Index Librorum Prohibitorum (禁書目録, "List of Prohibited Books"), is one of the main heroines and the titular character of the series. She is a young nun from Necessarius (必要悪の教会, Hitsuyouaku no Kyoukai, "Church of Necessary Evil"), a branch of the Church of England. Index is small in stature and has a petite build. About 14 or 15 years old, she has thigh-length, silvery-blue hair with very white skin and large green eyes. She also wears a white robe with golden embroidery sewed onto every edge of it, the Walking Church, that prevents any injury on her, but it is later destroyed by Touma when he touched it with his right hand, which is why her uniform is stitched with golden pins. Her mind has been implanted with the 103,000 magical texts of the Index-Librorum-Prohibitorum as she possesses Photographic memory, which makes magicians wonder if she really is human because just one grimoire is poisonous to the mind, and one is more than enough to kill a person without the proper preparative.

When she is being invaded by outsiders or injured, her self-protection system personality, Johann's Pen (自動書記〈ヨハネのペン〉, "Automatic Writing"), will be activated to allow her to use magic to cast high-class magic attacks such as St. George's Sanctuary (聖ジョージの聖域) and Dragon's Breath (竜王の殺息〈ドラゴンブレス〉, "Killing Breath of the Dragon King"). Her self-protection system will use the Feather of Light (光の羽, Hikari no Hane) to force a reset on Index's own memory should a manual reset fail to be performed. Although she does not know that she has magical powers, she can easily identify the types of magic by seeing it or somebody describing it to her and know how to counter them. Her vast knowledge of the Index-Librorum-Prohibitorum within her mind makes her to be one of the most powerful characters so far and becomes very helpful to her friends in various situations using skills like Spell Intercept (強制詠唱〈スペルインターセプト〉, "Force Chant"), and Sheol Fear (魔滅の声〈シェオールフィア〉, "Voice of Destruction of Evil") and makes her a target of interest for many.

She is often elated by a variety of things and is slightly ignorant and curious of modern technology. She usually is gentle and polite with people and has a kind nature, but she is also easily irritated especially by Tōma who usually ends making her mad in some way as consequence of his bad luck which ends with her biting him. She also has an large appetite and uses any excuse to get food from anyone and likes watching an anime series called Magical Powered Kanamin.

                                                                Mikoto Misaka (御坂 美琴)

Age: 13–14
Height: 161 cm
Birthday: May 2
Hair color: light brown
Eye color: light brown
Classification: Esper
School: Tokiwadai Middle School
Level: 5
Ability: Railgun (level 5 version of the Electromaster ability)
Known Relatives: Misaka Misuzu (Mother), Misaka Tabigake (Father)

Mikoto Misaka is one of the series' main heroines in Toaru Majutsu no Index series and the protagonist of her side story, Toaru Kagaku no Railgun. A psychic user of Academy City, her powers are ranked Level 5, the highest rank for the most powerful psychic users, and she ranks as third-strongest out of the seven people who hold this rank in Academy City.

She attends Tokiwadai Middle School, a famous girls' school for the rich and elite psychics and one of the five elite schools of Academy City. To most people, she is considered a proper lady, but in reality, she has a short-tempered, prideful, and improper attitude with some tomboyish tendencies and insecurities, a fact few other characters know. She is fond of cute, childish things, such as flowery pajamas and Gekota, the popular frog mascot franchise. She has a strong sense of morals and hates injustice, contrary to what she claims. Her power is to generate electricity; she is powerful enough to cause a blackout in the city, make instant railguns by using coins as projectiles, and use electricity to magnetically attract iron particles around her into a chain-sword whip. She can also manipulate electrical objects such as networks and security systems. She has a one-sided rivalry with Touma, who nicknames her "Biribiri" (ビリビリ, relating to the sound of an electric shock), ever since their first meeting before the events of the first novel when he first dissipated her electricity. Since that incident, she is always trying to have a proper match with Touma and defeat him despite his many attempts to avoid conflict with her.

Toaru series Is a really good one. That gets better as the story progress. It follows the normal hero story progression and does great with it . It has tons of episodes and a definite must watch for marathon watchers because you will always want to know what comes next, what the political side has to say and the world building in the story as you discover in this adventure. Watching it is akin to reading a novel given it was adapted from a LN that has been ongoing for 11 years. Be sure to check it out on your streaming service and give it a watch.