A Certain Scientific Accelerator

Episode 6

Episode 6 leaves me in a quandary. Should I feel even the slightest bit of sympathy for this youth merc squad – which we find out are called the Scavengers – for brutally getting the crap kicked out of them by Accelerator?

While this series belongs to Accelerator, and thus is all about aggrandizing all his cool abilities, I do think at least the option for sympathy toward the Scavenger kids was intended, despite them acting like psychopaths who find wanton killing fun, so it's a tricky proposition. Even the slightest miscue on how these scenes were framed, and it wouldn't have worked, but the series never goes all-in on making them truly terrible people. All of them come across as kids who are just acting like how they imagine evil characters should act. The nonsense they spout about how teachers are evil because they don't have control of the situation, and so should be killed off, is just the rantings of insecure wannabes, much like the girl with the water weapon in the first episode. That doesn't prevent them from killing people and inflicting wanton property damage, but that's all just considered part of their amoral game. Though they might imagine themselves as part of the darkness in Academy City, they have apparently never directly confronted a true (former) force of darkness from the city's dankest underbelly. Accelerator gives them a healthy taste of that kind of fear to remember.

Despite my previous comments about how Accelerator is also just playing at being evil, at least he's much more convincingly wicked than these girls. Because of how annoying the Scavengers' spiels were getting, his actions to soundly put them in their place are quite satisfying, even if that Iron Maiden combo move would have been impressively strong against just about anyone. Huotou, the zombie-like girl, also gets some good moves and seemed surprisingly intact at the end for as much damage she was implied to be taking from that drill; I had expected her arms to be worn down to nubs. (And speaking of her being undead, she seemed to be breathing in one scene. So does that mean that she's technically alive?)

While the technical merits still aren't strong enough to make these truly glorious visual battles, they do at least sufficiently convey the action in a satisfying way. The sound effects are the real star this week, especially in Accelerator's power uses. The one thing that's missing at the end is any clear sense of where the storyline is moving next, though this arc definitely doesn't seem like it's close to finished. As long as the series keeps dishing out power displays, and at the reasonable pace that the series has been maintaining, it should do fine by fans.

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A Certain Scientific Accelerator is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.