There’s a particular sort of frustration in watching this adaptation of UQ Holder as a manga reader.  Agony, even.  Because you know, if it sucked this would be a lot easier.  This episode blasted through about ten chapters worth of manga material (though it did so by basically skipping a few of them altogether), and we’re about to get to the point of the story where it appears than an entire subsection of the narrative is going to be cut.  By all rights it should be just another log on the bonfire of a Negima fan’s hopes and dreams.

The problem is, it doesn’t suck.  This show is way better than it has any right to be – in fact it’s probably, edits and all, the best (and most faithful, believe it or not) Negima adaptation anime has seen.  And because UQ Holder is a really good story, way darker and more intricate than even its own publishers want to portray it, that means this anime is pretty good too.  So not only is it hard not to get caught up in it, it’s going to hurt that much more when the sheer weight of cuts causes it to jump the shark (which as a Negima fan accustomed to failure, I fully expect it to do).

One thing UQ Holder isn’t skipping is the character exposition – in fact it’s often dosing it out earlier than the manga does.  So it is with Karin, who’s revealed to have lived in a European village in the 15th Century (no matter what the subs say) and survived being burned at the stake as a witch, a fact that the third immortal hunter (Ohsaka Ryouta) – he has a name but I shouldn’t give it yet – is well aware of.  This dude is a piece of work, a real deviant (I suspect he enjoyed the last part of their encounter as much as the first part) but in the end Karin is too much for him.

One thing you’ll have noticed by now is that immortality in the Negima-verse isn’t an either/or, you have it or you don’t thing – it’s a spectrum.  Every immortal’s immortality is different, and at this point I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that’s obviously important.  Kaito has assumed Touta’s immortality to be standard vampire, more or less – but clearly, it’s not.  And when Ruki (Kokuryu Sachi) makes a foolish but courageous effort to save the fallen Touta and Kuromaru, Touta shows himself to be stronger than Kaito’s bind.  The reason?  Magia Erebea, the forbidden dark magic which should be deeply familiar to any Negima fan.  By rights there should only be two Magia Erebea users in the world, Evangeline and one other – but Touta has a way of upsetting the math.

I like Touta, both as a character and as a kid.  He’s straightforward and bold in a way Negi (who I’m not knocking, mind you) never was – he has a way of cutting through the BS and getting right to the heart of the matter.  And in this timeline, injustice and cruelty are such an accepted part of the world that folks like that are sorely needed.  Even these men here to burn the homes of children are merely hired guns, bought and paid for by the wealthy who reside elsewhere but still keep places like this under their thumb.

Frustrating is really the right word, because seeing how good UQ Holder can be as an anime in its present form is a reminder of how amazing it could have been if it been given an adaptation that was thorough as well as superficially faithful.  This is just a really good story, full of interesting and quite distinct characters, and all it needed was a linear adaptation handled competently to be excellent.  But that’s something Negima fans have seen before, and we’ve built up a lot of scar tissue by now.  That may dull the pain a little, but it doesn’t make it go away.