Mahouka Koukou no Yuutousei Episode 6 Discussion

Farabeuf said:
Was Honoka always so bountifully blessed? I cannot remember her being this stacked in the main series. Is it LN canon?

SideCharacterKal said:
Hopefully the final fight will be the same. Chadsuya vs The Crimson King. One of the best fights I've seen.

malMaxi said:

Seeing as how a week passed and no post happened, let me just say that you don't need to make it massive and you don't even need to justify your position :). Just make a list - however short - of things you'd like to keep in Mahouka because you believe they actually work.

malMaxi said:
I like the notion that the thing that makes a book good as specifically a book is that which can't be translated to other media. That being said, this seems to have little import in our discussion. In the end, the reverse is also true - what makes visual or auditory media good is that which can't be translated into other media (say, novelized).

Regarding the imagination bit, do note that i didn't use the term "imaginative" (which, indeed, has more to do with the author), but rather the term "evocative", which is specifically aimed at the reader/viewer. The most enjoyable thing about Mahouka to me at this point is not its overt text and visuals, but rather the things these make me think about. I enjoy the same effect from a great deal of other shows (currently ongoing examples being Realist Hero and Idaten).

Do remember that this entire discussion has been evoked by Mahouka :D

malMaxi said:
I agree with all of the above, including the notion that written text is much more capable of delivering explicit meaning than visuals or audio. I also agree that the current market trends put a premium on texts that attempt delivering not explicit meaning, but rather rather crude emotion, which inevitably robs writing of its true advantage over visual and sound media.

Our only difference is that what you call "recent" i have observed since the 1990s. And what you view as the influence of markets, i view as a rather direct consequence of a significant shift in ideas that power the writing medium.

malMaxi said:
I feel that the resolution of Cold War was the result, among other things, of USSR being unprepared for the digital age. Or rather, not specifically digital age, but more broadly the age of non-text media. Culturally speaking, USSR was already over in the 86, when every more-or-less well-to-do Soviet family necessarily had a video player with a collection of the best Hollywood VHS tapes (and also a few tapes with decent russian cartoons and movies, which only served to underscore the relative volume and quality of Hollywood's output). The specific way this happened is a completely fascinating story in itself and just goes to show how you don't need digital to have virus media (as well as how actually lethal that virus can be).

malMaxi said:
We have mostly agreed here, right down to Miyuki's character being held back by the apparently bad plan of the author.

The salient difference is this: you seem to think that a bad plan has doomed the character from the start, whereas i'm of the opinion that no plan survives contact with the enemy (or, in case of writing, interaction with the reader) and therefore a plan is only as good as the execution it is given.

I agree that it is incredibly hard to have good execution without a plan, so there is certainly a symbiotic relationship between the two. I also agree that the approach where you first have a plan and then pursue impact, as opposed to other way around, has a higher rate of success. However, another thing i observe is that you often run out of plans with none of them working. And then, trying out random impact scenes until something smells like a new plan is the only way forward.

Here is a youtube channel, where the big initial plan was: have one animation a day, no matter what. It is fun to observe various plans (and characters) emerge and get tossed aside in that process: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-mZuuKlKM&list=PLpS_5nOXN3i5Xr2usffaKYTlqVwt2E-N3

malMaxi said:

Idaten confused me for the first two episodes. Or rather, i couldn't believe that something exhibiting this much audio and visual style could be so empty idea-wise or so formulaic. I enjoyed the spectacle, but i can't say i enjoyed the story.

Episode three was when it clicked for me. The story of Nickel wrapped into the story of Rin wrapped into the story of God-Human-Demon relationship is fascinating. The character of Nickel is an extremely well executed, serving as an amazing vehicle for everyone's characterization. Among other things, Nickel facilitates the outright trascendent character development for Rin. As far as i'm concerned, episode 3 completely bridges the gap between the experience of being an Idaten and our mundane human experience, making not just Rin, but also everyone in the show completely relatable on a human level.

Episode 4, in that regard, is actually kind of disappointing, but I'm sort of hoping they are building towards a next new high.

malMaxi said:

What Uru-chan needs is something like an agent, i guess. Someone that would push her forward in terms of business opportunities and connections while she is focusing on her craft.

theGodde said:
There's one scene that triggers me to this day, and it is a scene from season 2 where they are explaining how this super tall tower manages to stay upright, and they claim to use two massive gyroscopes to maintain the level of the building. Now first of all, a gyroscope ...

Symons1m said:


I'd like to correct the things that you misunderstood, misremember, or need to keep in mind:

1)There's 360 floors aboveground and 36 floors underground
2) It's supported by four gigantic pillars
3) Each pillar stands erect due to the gyroscopic effect of the flywheels which have been installed on the 36th underground floor and on every 60th floor, starting with the first underground floor
4)As the series is set nearly 80 years in the future from now, multiple advancements in the field of architecture and technology could have happened that successfully deal with several issues that we can't at present
5)It was not only the first hyperbuilding in Japan, it was also the first one to employ the service of magicians (and so, it could be an experimental project for all we know)

I should also add that the last mini-arc was anime-original content that doesn't exist in the source material. It was written by the author just for the sake of the last anime arc of Season 2, so it'd not be surprising if they didn't do enough research beforehand.

Last but not least, I don't see why you've to be so unnecessarily critical of the author. It's something that's quite apparent by the way you repeatedly talk them down. For example, what exactly implies that the author think they're an expert on science? You have no idea how humble and self-aware the author is. If you haven't read the source material where you get to know their thoughts, stop making such self-convinced assumptions about them. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but when you start to lean towards destructive criticism, your words will lose any worth after a certain point. Unfortunately, you seem to be making the same mistake repeatedly.

theGodde said:
Although I try and distance criticism of the story from criticism of the author, I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't the first time I've gone too far. You are correct, I was certainly a fair bit beyond critical, there are just some things that affect people differently and this one scene happens to be one of my most hated scenes in all of anime. I'm not pretending to be rational when I make this criticism, this is something that affects me personally.

I also have a negative personal connection to Mahouka in general that I won't get into for obvious privacy reasons. The fact is that I do have a personal bias against Mahouka on top of it being rather easy to criticise due to other aspects like poor production and screenwriting. I suppose it would have been fairer to you to have made this bias clear from the start so you could filter it out of my posts when it does creep in.
It does hurt when you see people unfairly criticizing something you like - I know that feeling and I'm sorry to have brought it upon you. I'll try to separate my personal issues from the relatively unbiased criticism more clearly in future.

Symons1m said:
Having bias due to personal reasons is understandable. I appreciate you for understanding my point and honestly accepting your mistake. Henceforth, I'll try to overlook everything that seems like personal attack towards the author and over-criticism of the series, as it'd be just your personal bias talking.

I don't know whether this would be of any help, but if the major reason behind your bias is the portrayal of a certain alliance in Mahouka, do know that the author shows it clearly that many people from the 'home ground' aren't any better, so it's not like they're making the people of the said alliance look worse or anything. The alliance has also been given understandable reasons for doing what it does, so it's not playing the enemy role just for the sake of it. Not to mention, we also get to see some interaction later on that reinforces the point that the people from their side are not meant to be just a bunch of bad guys, and it's just the organization/s behind them that make them do the 'questionable' things, and that too due to realistic reasons that we can understand. (the same logic applies to many people of the 'home ground' who do 'questionable' things because of the orders from their respective organizations. It doesn't, in any way, make the people of the 'home ground' that aren't involved in such things bad or evil)
As the world is set in an AU of 'our reality', and the series deals with international struggles, the said alliance just happened to be the right candidate for the enemy role when considering their global standing and location. It'd not have happened if the representative of the alliance wasn't as powerful as it is in reality, and/or located further away, in which case some other alliance or nation would have been picked for the role. , so the author isn't really targeting a particular nation here. Also, it's just a work of fiction, so one shouldn't take it so seriously that they end up feeling as offended as you are. (assuming my speculation about your 'reason' is correct, as it's the only thing that makes the most sense behind a personal bias like yours)

In any case, I always look forward to positive discussions, so regardless of whether my explanation above helps you in better understanding the actual situation, I hope to see less negativity if possible.

theGodde said:
sorry to make you write all that, my personal bias is not quite that robust, it's honestly incredibly petty and in order to explain it I'd have to give away personal info. But basically, it's not even Mahouka's fault, it's just my personal context surrounding my interaction with Mahouka that causes me to view it unfairly.

theGodde said:
Mahouka certainly gets me thinking, but it's often more hypotheticals of "how would I do this scene better" or "just how did the author get the real world science so horribly wrong".
There's one scene that triggers me to this day, and it is a scene from season 2 where they are explaining how this super tall tower manages to stay upright, and they claim to use two massive gyroscopes to maintain the level of the building. Now first of all, a gyroscope does not in fact seek gravitational stability, but true stability. It will not rotate around the axis from which it is spinning regardless of gravity. Therefore if you got two gigantic flywheels and stuck them in a skyscraper, then they would in fact remain in their position despite the earth's rotation and lean away from the direction the earth is spinning. A gyroscopic skyscraper is inherently dangerous.
Then you've gotta consider the rotational force the massive gyroscope is exerting upon the building. That alone would put more stress on its construction than natural elements such as wind and rain or gravity itself. Running two gyroscopes spinning opposite each other hundreds of metres in the air on a building would cause it to sheer apart.
There's a reason why writers avoid real science - because they don't know enough about the science, and even if they did there is a chance that the scientific world will shift away from whatever sci-fi theories they are using. It's like the guy took a single high school physics class and thinks he's an expert on science.

Anyway that rant was kind of off topic for this actual subject, just had to get that off my chest, been keeping it to myself since that episode first dropped in season 2 lmao.

so back to the original topic, while being evocative is good, I would argue it is not necessary or even worth striving for over other aspects of making a good story. Sure it's the icing on top of the cake, but what's the point of making the audience think if you didn't take the time to think your story into being properly in the first place?

well suffice to say I wasn't exactly capable of media criticism during the 90s, so I don't really feel like there's much I can really say to this. It's a different matter entirely to retroactively trace storytelling trends backwards in time than it is to live through them. I suppose I'll take your word for it.

while I would agree that in Russia this change certainly was drastic and worthy of being called a massive cultural shift, it is probably more similar to what you were saying about Hollywood beginning to follow the same trends as the Japanese anime industry - that is you Russkis were merely catching up to the rest of us :D
The main shift (that I at least can feel looking back through Hollywood trends) is a massive reduction in cold war paranoia based stories. Sure there were a few that were made in the same spirit that simply shifted the enemy to somewhere else, but overall that kind of story lost its appeal. The loss of a cultural enemy certainly did change the way many stories were being told. Vietnam gave platform for a lot of filmmakers to explore the inner demons of the national interest, however I would say that these kind of stories became more popular once the USSR collapsed. We hit a golden age of action cinema in the 90s, with some of te best hollyood action shows being released (if you're so inclined to conspiracy theorise, perhaps the CIA meddling with hollywood was toned down now there was no longer the threat of WW3 hanging over their heads)

I would disagree about the digital age bringing about the end of the USSR, as there were many, many influences such as crippling financial debt that had been racking up since the end of the second world war, however it was certainly a major contributor. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of the true social situation of the west certainly impacted soviet culture in a very drastic way. I'm sure you would have a lot more to say about that.

what you need to understand is that in the situation you demonstrated the story and characters evolved together. There is an inherent flexibility to that kind of style of writing that cannot apply to the kind of focused storytelling mahouka is trying to pull off. I don't see how you could easily "run out of plans" so to say at all. I know at least for me the issue isn't that I don't have enough plans, but that I don't have enough time and dedication to flesh them all out into full stories. However as a kid I used to jump straight into a story with only a sense of inspiration. In that case then it can be hard to build a plan once you've already begun. I learnt this the hard way - my latest story was only half-planned when I began writing it, and I've had to rewrite the first 10 or so chapters so many times because I keep changing it to support thematic and character-based material further down the line. While of course execution is essential for a good story, I have yet to hear of a good story that didn't have good planning behind it.

The best place to see this clearly illustrated is with Shounen Jump's biggest manga. You can clearly see famous manga like One Piece were planned thoroughly from the start, but also had many other smaller plans develop during its long run. However the vast majority of Oda's plans for One Piece were fully realised by the time he began them. Whenever he introduced a new character or plotline he knew where it was going to end up.
Contrast this to the other "big 3", Naruto and Bleach, and you can see that they weren't properly planned out at all. Naruto was planned out thoroughly till around the end of the Chunin exam, but once that finished the story really began to fall apart, the world and characters did not ever truly recover. However Kishimoto did manage to scamble together a plan that he hadn't originally conceived of at the beginning - which was the Akatsuki. For me the Akatsuki climaxed in the Pain arc, (with an honourable mention to the resolution of the Itachi side arc), but past that the themes and ideas the Akatsuki had explored seemed to be placed on the wayside and instead we got a series of asspulls for the completion of the show.

Contrast Naruto with Bleach, and it's clear that flexible planning and adaptability is more important than strong mid-term planning. IMO Bleach was going strong until the end of the Soul Society Arc, which felt well-realised and carefully planned out. However the Arrancar arc was essentially a repeat of the Soul Society Arc but with hollows - clearly demonstrating that Kubo hadn't carefully planned beyond Soul society. This becomes crystal clear in the final battle with Aizen, where there was never really a relationship between Aizen and Ichigo aside from the fact that one was the big bad, and the other was the strongest good. From there it was clear that Kubo had no roadmap, and wasn't able to reinvent Bleach on the fly like Kishimoto managed with Naruto in Shippuden, and ended Bleach prematurely with a final arc that has yet to be animated (and therefore I have yet to see :D).
If we compare One Piece with Naruto, and Bleach, it's clear that thorough planning (but also flexibility) can be the deciding factor in the quality of a story. You simply cannot get away with making things up on the fly. Even when you succeed (such as the case with Naruto), you will never be able to achieve the same quality of storytelling you had before.

I wouldn't exactly call it a simbiotic relationship, as this states both rely on one another. Instead I would say a story is like a house. Your plans are your foundation, and the execution is build upon those plans. No matter how good the execution, if the plans aren't good enough the house will be unstable and no one will want to live in it. In the same way, if you have the greatest possible foundation, if you don't build anything upon that foundation it's just a big slab of concrete.

so you were most attracted by the philosophical and more thought provoking aspects of Idaten? As much as I hope that continues to be developed in the story, I am thoroughly convinced that the main focus will be on the fights and general plot, so it's hard to say how much thematic material will fit in.

well, I ranted quite a bit here. Not a lot of it was to do with Mahouka lmao, but perhaps I now have the energy and organisation to pull some of that analysis off in the next few days...

malMaxi said:
The answer is that, ultimately, the value of the craftsman's work is judged by the ones putting that work to use and building upon it, not himself. An incomplete work that gets people thinking is just as valuable as any complete work. In some cases, more so.

To begin with, what's the standart for how much thinking a writer needs to do before the work can be "properly" released? Does one have to write a whole Silmarillion every time before cooking up a Hobbit? I don't think so.

Going even further, which do you think LotR needed more - Silmarillion, or all the impacts created by Hobbit? Let me remind you, that impacts of Hobbit gave Tolkien, among other things: the little ring of invisibility, the specific character of the hobbit that found it, as well as the specific character of the wizard that questioned its nature. And that it was entirely against the logic of Silmarillion and purely on the strength of specific characterization that Gandalf left the One Ring in Frodo's hands.

Heck, i even recall reading that Tolkien wrote like half of LotR with Gandalf carrying the ring before he had to scrap it all because it didn't work. Do you think yourself (or anyone) a better story planner than Tolkien?

malMaxi said:
I agree with your observations regarding the impact of collapse of USSR on writing through a significant decrease in general tension in stories. The point i'm trying to make is that this decrease in tension was the natural result of the specific way the Cold War was won, in which the shift from primarily text-based culture to multimedia culture played a massive part.

malMaxi said:
Also, you can't really plan "flexibility". You can plan characters all dancing in the palm of a much larger hand (and the story can be flexible within the constraints of a larger plan), but if you allow the characters to affect the hand they are dancing in (which is what "flexibility" means), all plans are out of the window. Ultimately, the only kind of plan that offers real flexibility seems to be a plan to constantly address a rather broad theme. Such plan, however, is simply not specific enough to be called a "plan".

malMaxi said:
Oda's current direction is significantly different from where he started. The only direct throughline between early chapters of One Piece and current stories are the themes of "acquired family" and "freedom", as well as Marine-Pirate opposition. I can totally buy the notion that he envisioned the Grand Line and the conflict between government and pirates from the start, but something like Poneglyphs absolutely smells like a late-stage alteration to the plan - something that came up in the process of Oda writing the Arabasta arc. And so do Tenryibito, for that matter.

malMaxi said:
Naruto was strong as long as it hit on teams of "duty", "effort" and "friendship". In terms of meaningful narrative, the whole thing fell apart the instant the writer decided to let Sasuke's defection stand, positioning Sasuke in open defiance of all three core themes.

malMaxi said:
Bleach's plan seemed to be little more than "cool visuals and fights all the way down". It succeeded on the sheer visual talent of the manga author and failed when the author's imagination and the adapting studio's ability ran out of steam.

malMaxi said:
I am always attracted to philosophical and thought-provoking aspects of literally everything :D. Idaten is not really special in that regard. I am just not above looking for these aspects in any sort of trash, regardless of whether the author even planned for these aspects to exist to begin with :).
, so you can certainly look forward to the dumpster fire :D

malMaxi said:
If you want to make it a whole analysis - you are welcome to try, of course. But i reiterate that - if your aim is to find an improvement on Mahouka - than what will be most helpful at this junction is not analysis, but rather a simple expression of any raw positive emotion you have or had with respect to Mahouka.

"Analysis" is, by basic semantics of the word, dissociation and deconstruction. Improving things is the opposite of dissociation and deconstruction. It may feature - as a small aspect - deconstruction of withered, rotten or otherwise failed aspects, but the fundamental approach needs to be constructive.

I agree a creator does not ultimately judge their work - instead it is judged by the customer/consumer and society in general. However I would also say this has little bearing on the conclusion you have drawn. A creator may hate his creation and see only its flaws (as Tolkien did) and yet it will be beloved by many. Conversely a creator may believe his creation perfect, and yet it is abhorred by many more. I would say it is certainly a window into the creative psyche behind the creation, however it has little relation to the value of a work.

While I would not urge every writer to create their own Silmarillion before beginning their story, I would still say there is a basic level of planning that is required. A story without a plan is going to become an unguided mess. Simply an incoherent ramble. Take for instance the transformers franchise. Say what you want about them but the first and third transformers movies are coherent and on a rather basic level, entertaining. However the second transformers movie (Revenge of the Fallen)'s script was written by Micheal Bay and a few other non-writers as there was a writer's strike during that period in time. They ended up creating a movie without a properly planned script and the result is an barely coherent mess of colour and sound.
take another example - James Bond: Quantum of Solace. That was another film written during a writer's strike. Daniel Craig and the director wrote the script themselves, and the movie is barely coherent. It has a plot (which is more than can be said of Revenge of the Fallen), and the individual elements such as the action scenes and dialogue is done competently in the same way as the other Craig Bond films, however the character arcs make no sense, and the villain's motivation is nonsensical, along with the entire spy conspiracy plot. The plot elements that define a good James Bond movie were warped and mangled by poor writing and planning.
These are all good examples of what happens when someone without a plan or a roadmap writes a story. It's harder than you think, writing a plan. Because not only does it have to be tight enough to form the backbone of the entire story, but it also has to have room for improvisation and improvement down the line. This is a talent that takes years to master - hence why we have university degrees in the art of screenwriting and just creative writing in general.

I can see that. Visual media is quite possibly the strongest form of propaganda. I've been looking into how the CIA has interfered with Hollywood trends, and it's honestly quite scary how effective their interference was in changing their public image (for context during the 90s, the CIA commissioned several influential filmmakers to make films that depicted the CIA in a positive light. Movies such as Tom Clancy's The Hunt for the Red October and Jason Bourne were incredibly successful in shaping the public perception of the CIA as this cool spy organisation that fights evil terrorists and does secret missions). Movies and cinema can topple nations, and it wouldn't surprise me that that would be the "straw that broke the camel's back" for the USSR.

Certainly there is a danger to too much flexibility, however I would define flexibility as a situation where you have a character with a specified beginning and ending (and perhaps several development beats to be executed down the line) and then you create this character in your mind's eye - they become as real to you as a living person, and you stand alongside them as the story evolves and guide them down the right path. That's a best case scenario. I know I've heard writers like Rowling talk about having strongly well-realised characters. However that's obviously not always possible. In which case any lack of imagination should be replaced with more planning. Whether or not you consider what I'm calling "planning" as real planning, I hope that I have at least clearly communicated my point - which is that a lack of imagination or "vision" should be made up for with more detailed and concrete groundwork.

there's a lot Oden planned back at the very start. Marineford is one example. The four emperors were planned since Shanks was introduced way back in the first arc. And there's a ton of stuff I don't know of that's been planned from the beginng, as well as a ton of stuff that's yet to happen which has been planned from the beginning. Oda's formula allows him to both plan concretely and flexibly. Separating the world into different islands allows him to have entire massive arcs in which he only has a very minute amount of long term storytelling to incorporate, and has almost complete creative freedom in the moment he approaches that arc to do whatever he wants without having to be constraint by years of planning. Although that's changed with Wano, since it's the second last arc planned for the anime, and so the next two arcs are going to wrap the entire main story up. In around 7-8 years, we'll finally get to see Luffy find the One Piece. Overall there are plenty of minor details that he obviously didn't plan from the beginning, however you have to recognise Oda's incredible vision for the world of One Piece.

I disagree. Having Sasuke be the antithesis of everything the show stands for had the potential to create a strong narrative. It's obvious at what point Kishimoto reached the end of his main plan because the story takes a massive dive there. I am convinced Orochimaru was originally planned to be the main villain of the entire show, with the amount of screentime he gets and his attachment to the main characters. However Sasuke and Itachi were certainly set up from the very beginning. It's hard to see how much beyond OG Naruto was in his original vision, but I can confidently state that the main plan of the show finished directly after Naruto and Sasuke's duel. (Although the legendary sannin does feel like a bit of a last minute plan). The world building took an immediate dive. Before we had been introduced to what life was like for people outside of the Shinobi business with the bridge arc, and then the Chunin exam arc demonstrated what kind of roles shinobi play in the world, as well as introducing us to the other ninja villages. But after this the show ignores the common non-ninja folk, and the show significantly powercreeps all the jutsu (in the aforementioned bridge arc Kakashi takes around 20 hand signs to create a powerful water dragon jutsu, but by Shippuden such jutsu can be launched with 2/3 hand signs as long as they have a lot of chakra), significantly eroding the previous world building. It also completely ignores the power scaling of the battle after the Chunin exams with Orochimaru and starts introducing villains who casually go beyond that in the first arc of shippuden (the Akatsuki).

while I would agree Bleach isn't particularly deep or insightful, that doesn't mean it didn't have some thorough planning involved. Just look at how the soul society arc was slowly built up with all these different mysterious side plots that climaxed in an epic confrontation where the truth was revealed and Aizen completely stole the show. It really does demonstrate that there was complex planning involved. And by the fact that the arrancar arc is basically a worse version of the soul society arc I suspect that Kubo was unable to adapt under pressure and relied mostly on those plans he had made.

You've gotta keep in mind all these mangakas really came to fame through their aforementioned works. They didn't know whether their manga was going to be popular or not, so there's an element of arrogance to making such long and grand plans as One Piece, assuming you'll still be making manga by the time you get to complete those plans. I suspect that Kubo especially hadn't really planned for Bleach to become as big as it did - or at the very least not thoroughly enough. Whereas Oda is such a genius that I wouldn't be surprised if he took a look at the story he had in the works and just assumed it would be a hit.

While I would agree there's often something to be found even where something isn't intended - such as how The Room demonstrates to us how people with a poor ability to empathise can struggle to see how and why their marriages deteriorate, eventually being forced to conclude that their spouse must have been in some way a terrible person - I personally don't think that that defines a work's value. To me there is a difference between value and usefulness. The room is useful in the regard that it can help us understand in what ways not to screw up when you go about making a film, however that does not make it valuable. In the same way a shovel is useful it is not as valuable as a diamond. To me for a film/series to be valuable it has to be of impressive calibre and quality. There are many anime that I have personally enjoyed but not considered valuable because they lack in many aspects that would define an anime as valuable. There are many still that I do not consider valuable and hate, but find that they have proved useful in my growth and understanding of anime.
That's my opinion anyhow. I feel that animation and storytelling quality really is important. It's not just about flashy visuals, but a medium with which to convey ideas. A pristine sparkling medium is always going to be better than a filthy, dirt-ridden medium. No matter how good those ideas may be, there's not point in even telling them if they weren't conveyed with passion and integrity, using the best tools at one's disposal.

in order to find out what I liked about Mahouka, and what is considered attractive and desirable within Mahouka, I need to disassemble all the story and characters. Analysis is necessary to find out what I liked - and more importantly what people in general come to Mahouka to watch.

theGodde said:
the first major flaw is ...

... animation - not necessarily the quality of the frames themselves, but the fluidity of motion. Fights always tend to play out like a pokemon battle. One side will use their attack, the other will stay still until it's launched and then will either get hit or dodge, in which case it's their turn to attack. The prime example being this episode where the three girls were fighting armed assailants and I don't think they fired a single bullet the entire fight.

the way CADs are used in mahouka is also awful. The fights basically boil down to 17th century musket wars, where two sides line up and take turns activating their CADs at each other. If there was a better mix of quick-activation low damage spells and long activation high damage spells that could easily improve the fluidity and changeability of the combat.
The need to lengthen every CAD battle also can really harm the pacing. Sometimes quickdraw duels can be more entertaining than long and arduous battles (when set up correctly)