From Ani-Nouto:

Watching Index and Railgun, you can't help but get the feeling that not all is right in Academy City. For such an advanced techno-capital, with darned near panoptic observation and super-powered anti-crime units, there still seems to be an awful lot of crime going on. Spoilers below the fold...
There's two kinds of crime in Railgun. The first is your standard street-ganger stuff, except with scattered espers. Usually these guys are low enough power that they're not a threat to the heroines (barring unusual circumstances), but high enough that they take apart "normal" people pretty easily. But there's a lot of them, and they have plenty of areas to hang around in. If Academy City is such a shiny-new urban center, where the heck are these abandoned districts coming from? It's like the whole city is studded with chunks of Detroit.

The other kind of crime is the kind fueled by insiders, related to the structure of psychics. The distribution of Level Upper, and of Capacity Down, are direct examples where a "rogue" researcher is using punk gangs to conduct research on the nature of psychic phenomena (or, more accurately, direct military applications of the same). For that matter, the whole incident that touched off Level Upper was itself inhumane human experimentation. If Crowley and the rest of the Academy City administration isn't directly implicated in these repeated incidents, then they're incompetent to the point of gross criminality.

But you can't hand-wave away Accelerator versus the Misakas as just failure of oversight. Accelerator's chewed his way through ten thousand Misakas - not just killing inert victims, but in combat situations, even if they're not really enough to risk his life. Really? Ten thousand? In a city with, supposedly, the most advanced network for monitoring criminal activity by psychics? That passes beyond belief. It's not that nobody's noticing Accelerator's and Misaka's shadow war, it's that they're noticing and being prevented from looking into it... which means that the Academy City administration knows exactly what's going on.

Put them all together and it's pretty obvious that Academy City's true goal is to produce powerful psychics by any means possible. Their hands are kept just clean enough that they could deny actual complicity, but the occurrence of such incidents is obviously calculated to provide opportunities for psychics to fight each other.

Why? Is it just that Crowley's an evil man who wants psychic underlings to do his dirty work? I... don't think that's it. Remember, unlike anyone from Railgun, and the "normal" characters from Index, Crowley knows about the existence of magic and something about the powers involved there. Just in the time that was contained in Index, the world was nearly destroyed (and not even in one of the good story arcs); Index is more about magic intruding on Academy City than psychics intruding on anywhere else. Magic is powerful and dangerous, and routinely mis-used by conventional standards of morality; powerful, evil supernatural entities exist as well.

Overall, it's a terrible situation if you don't happen to have magic of your own handy (and even if you do, Armageddon wouldn't leave you out either). It's not a stretch for a "normal" human, who found out about what was really going on, to think along the following lines... "Magic is too dangerous and unpredictable to be allowed to run unchecked. Nothing is more important than the creation of a counter-weight - humans with magic-like power, but without the ties to the traditional, useless magical organizations, or the malevolent beings they ineffectively oppose. If we learn how to create such humans, especially if we learn how such that we can create a lot of them, then we can oppose them, possibly even defeat them, even if they band together against us."

In that context, Touma is a lot more important to the long-term plans of Academy City than Makoto ever was... if they can figure out the secret of producing anti-psychics, Level 0s invulnerable to psychic power or magic, then Crowley has already won his battle.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 05:56 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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