So, UQ Holder continues to do pretty much the impossible – skipping wholesale chunks of material and condensing the rest while still being both coherent and vastly entertaining.  I’m actually starting to see some begrudging respect and even admiration from disgruntled fans (which I’m not seeing with Shoukoku no Altair, interestingly) who no doubt expected the worst (which as Negima fans is totally understandable).  I still have no idea what the plan is with only 6 episodes to go, mind you – even with the changes we’re seeing no obvious endgame presents itself.  But so far, certainly, so good.

Sakurame Kirie is in many ways a microcosm of the UQ Holder anime for me, in that there’s every reason for me not to like her but I do anyway.  Frankly they don’t get much more textbook tsundere than she is – hell, she literally tells Touta to bark like a dog and tries to step on his face when they meet for the (his) first time.  Maybe it helps that she’s not voiced by Kugimiya Rie (I have other reasons why I might want to talk about her in this post, but I’d better not), or that she is voiced by Kayano Ai.  But I liked her in the manga too – eventually – so I guess there’s something intrinsic to the character that makes Kirie appealing.

She’s another one that’s tough to talk about without getting into spoiler territory here, but I think it’s safe to say that Kirie’s immortality is one of the most interesting in UQ Holder.  As Ikkuu notes, immortals try not to share the secret of their immortality if avoidable for obvious reasons – but it seems to me that Kirie’s is an especially difficult one to keep to yourself.  For the same reasons she’s forced to tell Touta here, she’d surely have to tell others too – but Kirie avoids this for the most part by never leaving her room.  She bears a heavy burden on her own by her own design (and hey – dying hurts), and maybe that’s one of the things that makes her so relatable.

The other major “new” player here is Fate Averruncus, who should be familiar to even the most casual Negima reader or viewer.  Fate is an awfully important character in the original series, and his character made the arc from villain to ally.  Now, it seems, he’s come full circle to villain again – or so Kirie and Evangeline believe, anyway.  He’s apparently come to the capital to kidnap Touta and if he succeeds, Kirie says, everyone is screwed.  So she and Kitty hatch a plan to use Touta as bait and entrap Fate in Kirie’s “save point” ability, transporting him to the underground caves of UQ Holder in the process.

The full implications of Kirie’s ability – such as what happens to the people in the timelines she leaves behind when she resets (I always imagined them as abandoned meanders in a river, oxbow lakes in time) – are still unexplained here.  So is Fate’s motivation for doing what she says he’s doing.  But the mention of Fate’s friendship with his grandfather is certainly enough to set the head of Touta – a boy full of questions with no ready answers – to spinning.   Worlds are colliding here, there’s no question about it – and given all the changes we’ve already seen, it’s hard not to worry for independent George…