Sea Slugs! Anime Blog

It’s almost finals time and everyone is studying except the academically challenged girls of class 2-A. Asuna informs Negi that their school is an “escalator school” and that 2-A has ranked as the worst class for two years straight. Considering that they ranked last on the midterm, things don’t look like they’ll change anytime soon. Unfortunately for Negi, the principal lays down the stipulation that if 2-A comes in last again this year, Negi will have to leave his teaching post. Kamo thinks it should be easy to come in second to last, especially since 2-A has 3 of the top 5 students, including top scorer Chao Rinshen (the other martial arts girl who also happens to be in the Quantum Mechanics Society…) and number 2 scorer Satomi Hakase (robotics specialist who can’t even operate a laptop). Kamo fails to realize the devastating effect of the Baka Rangers on the class rank, however.

At first Negi wants to use his magic to make Asuna smart (although the side effect is that after 3 days of intelligence, she’ll lose about a million brain cells T_T), but Asuna tells him not to rely solely on magic. Negi is inspired and so seals his magic for 3 days. Even though he decides not to use his own magic to save the day, he OK’s the idea to search for a magic book that will make the Baka Rangers smart. Yue tells them of this legendary book that’s hidden deep within Library Island, and so everyone sets off with the Library Exploration club. Naturally there are a lot of ridiculous booby traps everywhere, but fortunately the Baka Rangers are all gifted athletically, with the exception of Yue. At the end of the challenges is a goofy rock golem that forces them to play naughty engrish twister. Just when it looks like they’ll win, Asuna messes up and they fall through the floor into a foresty lake island thing.

I didn’t think too much of the Library Island arc in the manga, but I enjoyed this episode much more than I thought I would. The animation wasn’t anything special this time, and I noticed that both of Asuna’s eyes were the same color several times during the episode. I like all of the Baka Rangers, so even though the plot was silly, the characters make up for it. Poor Asuna is dumb like plankton, though; I was dying when Negi saw her scores and cried out, “Ah! Scores aren’t supposed to be so low!” Sadly, they didn’t expound on how Makie developed her awesome ribbon technique (from being lazy and grabbing oranges from far away baskets without getting up).