Mahouka 1
I just can't.
It's a shame, because it seems like Madhouse is actually doing a decent job of things. The first part may be slow-paced or inefficient, but I like the feeling of the school's airy blues and whites, and the fight in the dojo is undeniably excellent. There's very little cheating in terms of showing what's happening, and even the little way they keep it going in the background during Miyuki's conversation with the teacher is clever. If the material were decent I'd at least stick around for a while.
The problem is that the story is standard light novel dreck, down to the overpowered "stoic" protagonist, the absurd discrimination that goes almost without comment in the school, and particularly Miyuki, who I absolutely can't stand. Even if they weren't siblings, she'd still represent all the things I hate about this kind of story.
Personally, unless a tale sweeps me off my feet with a grand display of sincerity, absurdity, and hot-blooded machismo (see: Jojo, Ben-to, Giant Robo), I like it when stories are about
people. They can be in any kind of world, and we can learn a lot from the setting, but the characters are what take us from a story's beginning to its end, and I feel I can draw more from tales about characters that act like humans than not. Humans are complicated, sometimes contradictory, subtle, imperfect, and interesting. When I watch how characters in a good story act in situations I've never experienced, I learn a little more about the world. They don't waste my time.
In stories like Mahouka, I don't feel like I'm dealing with people. The characters are flat types, and they exist so someone can draw them and sell merchandise with their face on it. The stories have complicated and unusual settings so Cool Things can happen to the Awesome Protagonist that men want to be and girls want to be with. But those cool things don't matter because nothing in the entire world of the story has anything to do with how humans act.
Like, what the hell is with Miyuki? Even though her brother is the picture of stoic apathy, she's like a whimpering child whenever he's around, hanging off his every word for scraps of affection, immediately deferring to anything he says. That's not love; it's subservience. Are we expected to believe her prologue justifies it? It's
creepy, and it's just the worst example of how every single one-note character in this episode behaves.
Not for me. I'm done.
Edit: How do I make an image smaller?
If you're a better person than I am, you resize them in the image editor of your choice before uploading, but I just stick them inside quote tags.