Kimberly Magic Academy is a world-renowned school for training mages, known to both magical and nonmagical people alike, but it’s equally well-known that not every student survives their time there. Oliver Horn is a new student at Kimberly and soon he falls in with a group of other first-year students: some from magical families like himself, some from non-magical families, and even one girl from “Azia” in the far east.
While the group ends up naturally sticking together, with Oliver and another experienced student spending their time trying to keep the rest of the group safe from dangers like the labyrinth, the teachers, and other students, might prove an even greater threat to their safety than their classes.
To address the elephant in the room, Reign of the Seven Spellblades is the most heavily inspired-by-Harry-Potter series I have seen since the aughts and I say that as someone who has read a lot of Western YA that was also clearly inspired by it (although the idea of mages becoming so fully engrossed in the pursuit of magic that it’s the norm for it to completely wrap their morals does remind me more of the Fate/ franchise). It goes beyond the easy, immediately obvious comparisons with Harry Potter, “oh look, it’s a magical and dangerous school for high schoolers in fantasy England!” to details that seem almost like blatant rip-offs, like how one member of Oliver’s friend group is a girl with long, curly brown hair and an ardent supporter of demi-human rights to the confusion and dismay of 99% of society, exactly like Hermione.
But even those surface-level similarities are more blatant than they first appear; while I haven’t read many “magical high school” light novels, I have read quite a bit of English-language children’s fiction surrounding magical schools, published both before and after HP, and it’s pretty clear that HP itself was inspired by other works. JKR has never named specific inspirations for her writing but Ursula K. Le Guin noted that it clearly followed in the tradition of “school novels” in British children’s literature, Diana Wynne Jones saw elements of her own Chrestomanci series in HP, and I’ve always been fairly certain that Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch series was was another influence on JKR.
Being familiar with all of these books and more, I can confidently say that Reign of the Seven Spellblades wasn’t drawing upon an anagram of English-language children’s literature largely from post-WWII like JKR was or even from the many fantasy works that sprang up post circa the mid-90s when HP gained popularity (there is a distinctive, stylistic change across the board in how authors approached fantasy and magic after JKR): it’s pretty clear that Spellblade’s main source of inspiration was HP and HP alone. As a result, the first volume of Spellblades feels shallower for it, in that sense it reminded me of the many magical girl webcomics I have stumbled across online where it’s clear that the creators have seen exactly one magical girl series (always Sailor Moon) and have decided to make their own, flatter take on the genre as a result.
I did have a strange thought however: a character like Nanao, another member of Oliver’s friend group, could not have been written by a white author and could only appear in a light novel. I’m not saying it’s impossible to write a character like her but, if a white author (or potentially anyone who wasn’t born and raised in Asia) wrote a character who feels like an old-fashioned, Orientalist stereotype of a samurai, from her more formal speech to her expressed desire to live and die by the blade (not to mention scenes like “ha-ha, the naïve foreigner doesn’t know to not use a public water feature to perform ablutions!”), I’m pretty sure the entire English-language publishing industry would have to publicly cut ties with said hypothetical author. It always feels strange to come across “Orientalist” stereotypes in Japanese works — Kosame from Appare-Ranman! is one to a degree — since they’re thankfully much rarer in Western works now!
Perhaps fortunately, while Nanao has a very large role in the first volume (she’s set up as being Oliver’s foil in both swordplay and morality, and potentially in a friends-to-lovers/enemies situation), her “quirkiness” is toned down in the second volume and she has a smaller role in general while Oliver’s roommate (and another member of the friend group) Pete has a larger role instead. I’m not sure if this will be a trend in the series, giving extra focus to one side character in particular in each volume, but if it is then it’s not a bad way to flesh out the side characters since they all have interesting aspects, although each of them also has a fair number of clichés.
I’m fairly confident that this series will get an anime adaptation at some point (since it seems to be fairly popular and Japanese publisher Kadokawa has vowed to make a ridiculous number of anime each year) and I’m a little concerned how people will react to Pete’s, uh, magically-induced, uncontrollable sex changes (I wouldn’t call him “magically gender-queer” but it does sound like a terrible, magical version of a period). Although, if we continue with the HP comparisons, while Pete is not thrilled in the slightest by this turn in events, the series is much more positive about characters outside the usual gender binary than JFK ever has been!
Frankly, the farther this story branches out the more interesting it gets. The magical world (that even non-magicals are aware of) is a messy, thorny one and it’s interesting to see these characters who are new to the world contrasted with the older characters who have already seen how disgusting it can be. Unfortunately, despite being a draw for the series, the sword fights in these two volumes so far have been rather dumb. I’m still a bit skeptical behind the reasoning of “the sword is faster than the spell so you must know how to use both” and the fights are pretty hard to follow in text alone (in one early example, a fight happens, and then a character recaps what happens to the rest of the cast in near-identical wording). I do hope this series gets adapted into an anime since it should be far easier to follow the fights in motion and they might even appear less dumb in the process!
Reign of the Seven Spellblades feels as if it could go on for awhile (if someone survives all the way to the end of Kimberly it’s six years and these two volumes only cover Oliver and company’s first year) but I think I’m okay with that. I would also like the pacing to be a bit more consistent; I’ll admit that one thing I always enjoyed about the HP books was how it felt like events were evenly spaced out over the school year where here it feels more like “feast or famine” in terms of things happening, but that’s more a personal preference than anything else. I did find myself rolling my eyes at some points in these two books but when I finished with the second one I was ready to pick up the third volume and keep going. There are many little elements like that which keep the story from being “great” but at the same time Bokuto Uno has written a story that keeps pulling you back in in the oddest of ways.