Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Shinobu Ohtaka
Translation & English Adaptation: John Werry
Touch-Up Art & Lettering: Stephen Dutro
Editor: Mike Montesa
What They Say:
Aladdin and his friends face the powerful and diabolical pirate queen Madaura, who uses a strange magical item called the Holy Mother Halo Fan to enrapture her captives and make them her slaves. A fierce battle looms, and if Aladdin cannot release his companions from Madaura’s grip, he may find himself fighting against them!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
It feels a bit weird to have a training bit this far into a series, but here we are in Magi volume 14 and Aladdin finds himself at Magnoshutatt learning magic in a formal classroom setting for the first time. From the beginning of Magi, Aladdin has just been using his own natural ability as a magi and the assistance of the rukh to cast spells. Usually, these spells have only consisted of concentrated magoi flung at opponents who were simply overwhelmed by the blast of magoi. Along the way, he learned he could manipulate fire and that’s where his Blazing Palms move came in, which he honed while training with Yamraiha.
In Magnoshutatt, with his affinity to the rukh suppressed, he can barely produce a spark. Here’s where there’s a bunch of info dumping without really feeling like info dumping even though it’s totally info dumping…Anyway, Aladdin is in a classroom setting and he doesn’t really know any of this stuff. So he’s being taught the ways of magic and magoi manipulation by his teacher, Myers (big breasted and scantily clad…sigh…). She embeds into him a strong base of physical strength and, once the remaining five students are sufficiently strong, the basics of magic. Like that Aladdin really does have an affinity for fire magic. And despite Yamraiha’s best efforts, the water magic she was trying to teach is his 0most difficult to learn. Wait, is this Naruto?
Given his natural affinity to magic and his already great skills without his limiters, he picks up the basics of magic quickly and goes from kodor-1 (lowest) to kodor-6 (highest) after the first exam.
The others have taken their separate paths…
The ending of the pirate arc gives the biggest representation of where everyone is right now, with Hakuryu not only in the worst place, but also squarely on the outskirts of the circle. After the previous volume, Aladdin is able to snap both Alibaba and Morgiana out of Madaura’s spell, but not Hakuryu. It’s a testament to both Hakuryu’s mental state and their connection with each other. Hakuryu was betrayed by his own mother and, while he says he trusts everyone else, he’s having trouble coming to terms with it on a subconscious level. That kind of betrayal can’t just be healed overnight.
Though that’s not for a lack of trying. He seems to have legitimately fallen in love with Morgiana, but I’m not sure about his actions. There’s a mutual care for both of them, but Morgiana still has an inferiority complex from years as a slave. She doesn’t deserve to have one planted on her out of nowhere, but she’s not unhappy with it either. Hakuryu and Morgiana are probably the two most broken characters in the story, or at least in the core four, and they play well off each other. They’re the lesser—“lesser”—of the pairs with Alibaba’s soon-to-be leadership of Balbadd and Aladdin’s status as a magi.
But while Morgiana has accepted Aladdin and Alibaba, and more importantly herself, Hakuryu has hardly done the same. His heart is filled with anger over the death of his father and older brother at the hands of…Al-Thamen and his own mother, who wed herself off to the next king of Kou. The very motherly feeling Madaura was trying to bring out in Hakuryu backfired; he wants nothing more than to kill his mother.
Elsewhere, Alibaba begins his journey toward the northwest to Leamano, the capital of Leam, and Morgiana south to Katarg, where she can take a ship to her home continent. They journeys, just started, have not started yet.
In Summary:
There were a few other important points (Koha and Sphintus), but both barely got page time compared to everyone else and, truly, their key moments happen later if the anime is to be believed. This was a weird volume because everything that I was drudging through in volumes 10, 11ish are happening here again, but they don’t feel as sluggish. Everyone is moving forward now, without looking back. Magi’s dynamic has been between everyone on the same team, but that’s no longer the case. It’ll be interesting to see how they do, now separated.
Content Grade: B+
Art Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Viz Media
Release Date: October 13, 2015
MSRP: $9.99