trivialization | Application: History / Synopsis

The wiki’s terrible and doesn’t address anything from UQ Holder so I’m submitting a synopsis. Note: while UQ Holder is generally framed as the continuation of the 'discarded' timeline from which Evangeline retrieved Asuna in the Negima epilogue and for this reason I am combining timelines, UQ Holder references some events that could be considered retcons or deviations from Negima so it could also be considered an AU.

Evangeline was born in medieval France as a thoroughly ordinary girl, but due to her poor health she was given by her family into the care of a mage who ruled or worked for the ruler of her land for treatment. When she was ten the mage used magic to grant her immortality as a vampire and bearer of the true dark magic. Evangeline believed the mage had experimented on her in hopes of gaining immortality and vengefully attacked and killed her. However the mage was in fact the godlike creator of the magical world known as the Lifemaker, who already possessed her own form of immortality and survived. She discovered her parents had been slain in some conflict and struggled across a Europe ravaged by war for a few years until she was abducted by the old-as-dirt 'original' vampires who apparently felt a late addition to their ranks merited education so as not to embarrass them or something. She was given to one of their number, Dana, for this poorly-explained purpose.

While in Dana’s timeless residence she met Touta, a clone she would have a hand in creating many centuries hence, who was shocked by the difference between the cool and confident ‘Yukihime’ he knew and the suicidal young Evangeline and attempted to cheer her up by telling her about her future self. Evangeline initially accepted these assurances, but once out in the world on her own was swept up in an endless cycle of escalating violence after destroying a group of mages who were tyrannizing the land. Marked as an enemy by the organized magical world, hunted by bounty hunters and avengers of those she’d slain, she lived by her own description in alternating periods of peaceful anonymity and brutal violence according to how well she hid herself. While still relatively young, around the age of 100, she fought Ish Karin Orte, a woman who believes herself to be the prototype of the biblical Judas Iscariot (though she admits she is so old it's possible it's simply a delusion she's invented to account for her immortality). The seemingly half-mad and at this point antitheistic Evangeline nonetheless convinced Karin that her absolute immortality, which prevents any harm but allows her to feel pain as though she were harmed, was a gift given out of love and not the curse laid by God for her betrayal she had always taken it as, as a result of which 'Karin' is jealously devoted to and infatuated with her, though she only appears in UQ Holder.

In the 1980s she was ‘saved’ from some minor accident or another by Nagi Springfield, the legendary heroic mage of Magical World (an artificial alternate dimension overlaid on the surface of Mars where lots of magical crap lives) and grew infatuated with him. Nagi eventually tired of her stalking and after what was (if Evangeline’s nightmares can be believed) a farcical battle involving a giant bowl of soup, cast the School Hell curse on her, condemning her to attend school at Mahora Academy (a boarding school conveniently infiltrated by a number of magical factions) until released. Then he forgot about her, went off to fight the Lifemaker, who was also his nemesis, and as far as the world knew died. Evangeline reached an understanding with the headmaster of the school and leader of the Kanto magic association, working for him around the school in an unofficial capacity, but also forged links to the school’s other major internal threat, the time-traveling revolutionary Chao Lingshen, and cooperated with her to create the golem/robot hybrid Chachamaru.

Negima begins in 2003 when Nagi’s son, Negi Springfield, is assigned for his apprenticeship by the English magic association to teach at Mahora in a class suspiciously stocked with just about every secretly magical kid in the school, Evangeline included. Evangeline initially antagonizes him quite a bit, claiming she wants to drain his blood as part of a ritual to free herself from the curse, but he ultimately passes all of her little tests and wins some regard from her by telling her that he met his father after the supposed date of his death. Evangeline sees this as a chance to pick up the trail and find Nagi again and gives Negi some clues that lead him to the first major conflict of the series in Kyoto. Faced with a disciple of the Lifemaker (and series-long antagonist, deuteragonist, and generally important personage), Fate Averruncus and the demon god Ryomen Sukuna-no-Kami, the protagonists survive only because Evangeline is dispatched to crush the opposition. Having seen her true power Negi begs to become her apprentice and she eventually accepts.

Evangeline’s mentor role continues for most of the series, gradually expanding to encompass more and more of the cast as the non-magical students inevitably accidentally find out what’s going on and she grows more tolerant of them. A lot of her personality is established Mahora Festival arc, where she uses the martial arts tournament as an opportunity to force one of the magical students, Setsuna, to make some hard decisions about her life (and do a lot of extra unnecessary mouth-running). Similarly, she gives Chao Lingshen free hand in her plot to end the concealment of magic from the world in hopes of averting some of the conflicts in the future she hails from and gives her full use of Chachamaru, seeing opposing her as an important test of both Negi’s magical abilities and his moral fortitude in the face of a virtuous opponent. She also meets Albireo Imma and suffers for it.

Evangeline passes out of the plot for much of the final super-arc as Negi and many of the magically active or aware students take a field trip to the Magical World where due to the terms of her imprisonment she can’t follow. They run afoul of Fate again, get defeated and scattered to the corners of Mars, and Negi meets an old comrade of his father who just happens to have scroll detailing Evangeline’s original magic, a forbidden spell he claims will allow him to match Fate’s power. Negi eventually is able to attain this power, Magia Erebea, find all his students, and wind up embroiled in a final conflict with Fate, who is attempting to enact the Lifemaker’s plan of erasing the magic-deficit Magical World before it collapses on its own, sending its inhabitants to some sort of illusory dream realm to live out their lives instead of dumping them on the surface of Mars to mostly die horribly.

During all this it comes out that the Lifemaker is in fact the mage who took Evangeline’s humanity from her, as she already possessed her own, different form of immortality, which allows her to take the bodies of others. Nagi had in fact defeated her in their final confrontation, only to be possessed by her spirit, and was sealed away.

Negi being of the opinion that they could terraform their way out of the problem without erasing a few thousand years of history and impinging on the free will of millions of people has his final showdown with Fate, in which he at last convinces Fate to give his approach a try, but the gateport they’re fighting on conveniently links back to Mahora, allowing the Lifemaker to be unsealed and resurrect all of her Disciples she used to fight Nagi and co back in the day, who in turn all get re-destroyed by Evangeline. The Lifemaker herself is cut up a bit by Asuna (an important character I’ve avoided mentioning at all. She’s an amnesiac magical princess sort of thing who inherited the true light magic and is key to the magical world and Evangeline has a love-hate kind of relationship with her) and fucks off in a very abrupt ending.

At the close of the story it is revealed that Asuna will have to sleep for a century as the keystone of the magical world to shore it up. In the epilogue Asuna awakes late and despairs as she realizes everyone she knew has died, but Evangeline and Chao appear and take her back to the moment after she went to sleep, creating a new timeline where she is able to live alongside her friends.

In UQ Holder, which appears to take place in the timeline where Asuna slept, we learn that Negi, Fate and a bunch of other notables got their space development and terraforming plan off the ground, but the Lifemaker, who has a godlike power of empathy that allows her to feel the suffering of every sentient being, wanted to stuff everyone in her dream realm or destroy the world or something anyway. Compared to the timeline with Asuna Negi's group was less successful in managing a trouble-free transition to their magitechnocratic new world order and the economic and political shifts created more instability and slowed their progress, resulting in a later confrontation with a stronger Lifemaker.

In their first battle the Lifemaker defeated the group however in Negi's personal fight with her in the form of his father Nagi he was able to gain enough information on Nagi's magic to break the curse on Evangeline. Having lost many of his comrades and been badly wounded Negi leaned heavily on Evangeline for emotional support. It was also during this time that he developed the plan to create clones inheriting the true magic to use as weapons against the Lifemaker. Though Evangeline was able to join the subsequent attempt to defeat the Lifemaker, she had only grown more powerful and this time absorbed Negi.

Evangeline and Fate then embarked on the plan Negi had outlined to create clones with exotic magical powers that might aid in defeating the Lifemaker. However she had a falling out with Fate - Fate was using the research and the clone children to create supersoldier programs in the wealthy donor nations funding the project, which Evangeline opposed violently, while Evangeline considered killing Negi along with the Lifemaker an unavoidable sacrifice, which Fate opposed violently. In their falling out one of the clones, Touta, was taken away to raised by foster parents who were eventually killed, probably by Fate, but Evangeline saved him and became his guardian as Yukihime. After being attacked by a bounty hunter Evangeline takes Touta with her to rejoin UQ Holder, her secret society of immortals. Most of her development thereafter with regard to Evangeline consists of facts already mentioned in this synopsis being retrospectively revealed when Touta runs into Fate and Dana, and Evangeline and Touta being emotionally incompetent at each other, however they did run afoul of the Lifemaker as Negi and his other absorbed compatriots, resulting in an inconclusive battle. In the aftermath one of the former soldier-clones created by Fate known as Cutlass, who had escaped and come to be a follower of the Lifemaker, attempted to raid UQ Holder's base on her own and was killed by Evangeline. The story has also finally reintroduced its elements of global instability due to the vast wealth inequality created by space development, with Evangeline facing the question of whether her organization should abandon its clandestine modus operandi that does not take responsibility for individual human lives to attempt to blunt the coming revolutionary and anti-revolutionary conflicts.