An essay on the worldbuilding and creativity of Toaru Majutsu no Index

First, some set-up. A Certain Magical Index is a series about when science crosses paths with magic. Futuristic science is seen as an obvious fact of life in Academy City where the technology is said to be 30 years in the future compared to the rest of the world. Magic is a secretive element of the world that gets introduced as an odd and alien new set of rules to the main character who lives in the city, so the series is technically not a high fantasy. It is a fusion of sci-fi and low fantasy. I think I would have more to say about the characters in the story but since it’s a conversation full of spoilers and someone who is not interested or well-versed in the series would not get much out of it, I’ll focus on talking about the worldbuilding.

So, one of the lowkey most interesting and impressive things about the storytelling in Index is how it establishes its world in a way that makes you forget pre-established tropes and cliches when being shown basic concepts you’ve gotten used to seeing in other shows. Like for example, dragons are cool, right? Everyone knows dragons, so it’s not surprising for a fantasy show to have them. Maybe they’re even tiring to some folk by this point, if not liking dragons is possible. You look at one that gets thrown into a scene in a fantasy show and go “oh look it’s a western dragon that probably breathes fire, is somewhat intelligent, has a crocodile-ish mouth and a long tail and wings, cool” based on the genre-savviness that comes with experience watching a lot of stuff. A show with mediocre worldbuilding and little regard for build-up for a supposedly legendary, wise and powerful creature like a dragon will just shove it into a scene and leave no impact on your neuron activation. Same with demons, angels, gods, etc. They’re just default templates for a fantasy world that you would look at like you’d look at a monkey at the zoo. The most obvious thing in the world. A show with mediocre worldbuilding will just assume you know what a dragon is and doesn’t bother explaining it further because it has nothing interesting to say about it.

There was this anime discussion podcast called KHANTEHNT! I listened to while I was at the gym that I had a good time listening to. It was about Munou na Nana, and Nate, one of the hosts, was explaining the dynamic between the main character and a detective dude trying to catch her as basically identical to the dynamic between Light Yagami and L from Death Note. It made me think a bit since I had recently read the Kaiju #8 manga and thought of it as the most derivative thing in the world, with the first couple chapters setting up a fun hook and the series then immediately falling on lame and unoriginal plot and character tropes that were basically straight ripped from My Hero Academia, Fire Force, and every other successful shounen out there. A lot of shows these days are either gimmick girl/premise shows or some derivative works like Kaiju #8 who compensate for their unoriginality by setting up the one unique hook the series has early on and then filling the rest by shoving as many barely developed and reused concepts into it as fast as possible so that the viewer doesn’t have time to get bored. It’s also a way to avoid the accusations of unoriginality since it’s combining many derivative aspects into a new show.

Here’s what Index does differently. It takes its time introducing and going in-depth with the concepts, it doesn’t riff off mundane established tropes (in regards to the worldbuilding, anyways), and everything has a whole lot more thought put into it than just “ok here’s a dragon because fantasy series have dragon”. Just take influence from outside of anime, as the late great Hidetaka Miyanno once said. Index takes most of its influence from goddamn quantum physics and occult religious literature from the 20th century, and it does wildly interesting things with them.

If we just look at the premises of some science-related arcs in the Railgun spinoff for example, we have: What if there was a song that stimulates all your senses through synesthesia, and it was used to align ten thousand people’s brainwaves to the mastermind’s so they can use the hivemind of the people’s brains to do complex computer calculations, and use all their esper powers while they are unconscious? Alternatively, If you cut a person into two equal pieces and created two cyborg humans that way, which one would be the real person? If you put them back together into a complete human, would the now fully robotic brain have a consciousness, or a soul? The list goes on and on, but they’re hard to boil down and do justice to by just spelling them out. Each of these concepts are given enough breathing room and set-up & pay-off so that they can completely sink in as original and well executed ideas.

The series would be impressive enough if it only focused on scientific concepts, but the name ‘A Certain Magical Index’ makes it clear enough that the focus of the worldbuilding in the main series is actually on the magic side. The establishment of the way magic works in Index is even more impressive than all the science stuff, because applying quantum physics to ESP powers and making them feel unique is quite a bit easier than making a magic system that feels like something you haven’t already seen a million times before, I’d say. Concepts inspired by religions of the occult Thelema and Christianity like the Sephirothic Tree, Idol Worship and The Book of The Law are set up early in the series and their functions, principles and significance stay relevant and consistent through the whole series, spanning dozens of volumes and 3+ spin-offs at this point (everything is authored by the same guy, so there’s no major conflict of creative intent in the worldbuilding). The magic in Index has clear internal rules that are well set up and feel utterly unique, and it is mostly based on real and old literature outside of the sphere of anime. And the most insane thing of all, the series *combines* science and magic into new ideas, adding a third new dimension to the rules of the world. 

An example of this would be, and bear with me here, it’s hard to explain: A similar concept to the earlier mentioned scientifically-created hivemind of ten thousand people, half of them having already died, leading to the remaining half sharing the memory of ten thousand deaths. Then you have a lineage of magicians who have combined the teachings of Thelema that has the Sephirothic Tree as a central concept with the philosophy of Taoism with the cycle of death and rebirth and slowly gaining immortality through that as the other central idea. The goal of modern magicians based in Thelema is basically to climb the Sephirothic Tree to rise to the top level of Keter, which is equivalent to godhood. Combining it with the Taoist principle of death and rebirth you gain the theory that the memories of ten thousand deaths should lead to you gaining immortality, or godhood. The cycle of death and rebirth lets you climb the Sephirothic Tree, and the way to actuate that is to use the memory of ten thousand deaths and implant them scientifically. This is just a single concept from a single arc from the most hated spin-off of Index.

In all, there’s three major ways Index succeeds in its worldbuilding. Number #1: the sheer uniqueness in comparison to most other shows of its ilk, taking influence from occult books (like the Kabbalah) and the Bible in a way that only someone who’s actually properly understood them can (as if most authors using christian mythology motifs have actually read the bible). It also uses established scientific theory including quantum physics to explain its esper power system thoroughly in a way that seems plausible in the world of the story and makes you think of it as a separate entity from most other series that treat ESP as a trope that does not need to be explained. The powers are well-defined and have interesting and unique applications. I doubt Vector Control is an unoriginal power concept, and using it to manipulate the bioelectricity of a person’s brain to destroy a virus is probably not something your average author would come up with. 

Number #2: giving the ideas breathing room. There’s a limit to how many concepts, magical or scientific, get established in one manga arc or a novel volume, the focus is usually just one or two. That’s 15-30+ chapters of a manga and often 300+ pages of a volume, and that’s often not even the extent to which the idea is explored. If you wanted to make some formula for how it works, it would probably go in a way where book one introduces a concept, and book two applies it in a fresh way and also introduces another interesting concept. Sometimes the new concept is a combination of previously established ideas, like the earlier explained combination of Sephirothic Tree, Taoism and a memory hivemind. The series gets massively more interesting and dynamic as it goes along because of the complexity of the world growing exponentially through this repeating cycle of new ideas being introduced and explored further. Number #3: this isn’t even the main focus of the show. The worldbuilding is a tool to support the stories of well-defined main characters and their arcs with as interesting dynamics and ideas as the world. It’s also used effectively as a vehicle to introduce an ever-expanding and colourful cast of supporting characters, all the elements all as a whole making up a goddamn massive series with endless amounts of things to appreciate.