For those less familiar with this series, I believe it will help
tremendously to know about its origin. I learned much of this by reading
Yamada-sensei's afterword section in the novel volume 2.
It all started with Yamada-sensei. She came up with the story for a
movie scenario contest. It got rejected. To be honest, it's not
really that surprising. If you read my review of both the manga and
the anime, you'd know how I feel about the story. It has an
extremeley promising premise, but neither the manga, nor the anime,
takes the story to anywhere near its full potential. Well, manga did
have wonderful art, thanks to Yoshidzuki-sensei's beautiful drawings
;^)
Anyway, despite being rejected as a movie scenario, Yamada-sensei
showed it to a producer she has known for a long time
(Tsunokawa-san?), who suggested making it into an anime series. The
rest is... not quite history yet. Well, you should all know that the
concept turned into an anime series, manga, and even audio dramas.
As luck would have it, Kareno-sensei, who is a professional writer, took
notice of this series and asked to write a series of novels using the
same premise. That's how the novels came to be.
I think the novels are wonderfully done, especially the first two
volumes. Has it reached its full potential? Is it the end? That's
impossible. And I'll get into that a bit more later. A young magic
user from a countryside.... It seems like such a simple a premise,
but it really is not. The magic described in the world of
"Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto" is extremely powerful yet extremely
limited. It's a delicate balance. You can either break that balance
and come up with a one-time flashy story, or write stories that
maintain the delicate balance.
Obviously, the first would be easier, but then, if that had happened,
I wouldn't be writing about the series right now.
It's hard to describe, so let's do some math. What's the decimal
number of 1/3? It doesn't have an end. How about pi? It's kind of
like that. I don't think it's possible to write a definitive
black/white, left/right, or right/wrong kind of story for this
premise. It's the unsatisfiable nature of the story that makes this
series special and I hope more people will try to understand that.
From what I see on internet forums and what not, I don't believe many
people understand this, at least not in this country.
One more thing. Somehow, I am sure fan-fiction and doujishi exist
for this series. And I bet there are some really good ones out
there. Too bad I don't know about them.
