What do you think of when the Fantasy genre is mentioned? I suppose it probably depends on the context, but most people probably have a picture of something at least vaguely reminiscent of period Europe. Knights, wizards, elves, dwarves – all that stuff made popular by JRR Tolkien and E. Gary Gygax. Even today, huge swaths of the fantasy genre evoke that very general setting and its themes.
And yet, there’s another extremely famous and resonant pillar of the genre that doesn’t fit, and more likely gets sort of regarded as its own thing: The Arabian Nights, a collection of stories with their own themes and conventions that are very much fantasy (depicting a world of magic, monsters, and the like) in a sort of timeless setting, but not one that’s really like the typical European fare. There are a few excellent examples of films, shows, or other retellings centered around the Arabian Nights, but they’re certainly less common.
And, given that the Arabian Nights setting doesn’t really get its due in the West, its particularly fascinating to seen it done justice in anime, here in the Magi series. You may recognize the names, but the story is something new or at least newer.
We open with Alibaba, a poor laborer who dreams of some day capturing a dungeon. In this world, “Dungeons” are mystical spaces created by a powerful entity (namely one of the titular Magi), which hold deadly trials and, for the one able to pass through them all to the end, the “Metal Vessel” that holds a djinn. Once someone completes the dungeon, it vanishes, but despite the rewards drawing people in they’re such deadly and dangerous places that they can stay around for years, waiting for the right person to claim their prize.
Alibaba encounters Aladdin, a strange little boy who starts off as a persistent pest, but who eventually reveals without realizing what a big deal it is that the flute he carries is a Metal Vessel holding his djinn friend, Ugo. They encounter a slave girl, Morgiana, and also deal with Alibaba’s cruel boss. After a nasty break with the boss, Alibaba and Aladdin enter the Dungeon in Aladdin’s town with nothing else to lose (at least not for Alibaba).
However, the local lord, who is Morgianna’s master, enters shortly after them, bringing his slaves with him in order to help him clear the dungeon. He catches up to Aladdin and Alibaba while Aladdin is in a bad way, and ends up using Alibaba as trap bait before attempting to suck up to Aladdin, who he recognizes as probably being a Magi. Alibaba, however, escaped his apparent death (having figured out the truth of the trap and using it to fake his demise) and gets Aladdin away from the lord. Morgiana, who turns out to be a member of an extremely powerful warrior race called Fanalis, and the hulking silent slave fighter Goltas, make matters harder for the duo, and it turns into something of a race for the treasure vault.
Alibaba, however, manages to out-sword-fight the lord, who recognizes his style of swordplay as one belonging to royalty. Alibaba, then, is able to claim the Metal Vessel of the Djinn Amon. The dungeon begins to collapse in on itself, and Aladdin and Alibaba begin to leave, along with (after something like the fifth friendship and freedom speech given to her, the last straw being the one from the otherwise-silent Goltas) Morgiana. However, the magical teleport out deposits Alibaba and Morgiana back to the down they came from, but Aladdin somewhere very far away.
Following Aladdin, he seems to have been deposited on Mongolia-like steppes, among a group of locals called the Kouga clan. Where, it turns out, the weirdly eloquent and insightful Goltas was from, long ago. Aladdin bonds with several members of the tribe, most especially the old lady, Baba, who serves as their leader. Aladdin is at first at home, and even starts to learn about magic (including his own) but finds that they’re in quite a pickle.
The Kouga tribesfolk are being approached by a force known as the Kou Empire, which wants to integrate the tribe into their number. The Kou princess leading the effort, Hakuei, seems earnestly good and interested in a relationship of mutual benefit and honorable behavior (and Aladdin’s supernaturally good people-sense suggests she’s a good person), but the general that supposedly serves her and most of his subordinates would rather raid and enslave the Kouga, and aren’t above assassinating their own royalty in order to get it. Aladdin brokers a peaceful arrangement between Hakuei and Baba, but the general betrays both sides, having troops assassinate Baba and mutiny en masse against Hakuei when she seems to be getting control of the situation.
Though Hakuei is a dungeon capturer with her own Djinn, it does take Aladdin helping out to turn the tide and allow her to gain control over the army again. Guided by the dying Baba and seeing that the princess herself is extremely honorable, the Kouga agree to her terms and enter her service, while Aladdin gets his bearings and sets along the very long road back to where he last saw Alibaba.
On the other side, we briefly follow Morgiana. We find out that Alibaba bought out and freed all the slaves in the city (including her) with some of that mountain of gold he extracted from the Dungeon, but soon after left on a personal mission. Morgiana wants to return to her ancestral homeland, but first she wants to find Alibaba and thank him properly for everything he did, leading her on a slightly roundabout road. Along the way she has a run-in with some really nasty slavers, and meets Aladdin in their dungeon. They bust out, deal with the bandits, and then press on to their next destination together: the city of Balbadd.
Balbadd (an obvious analog to Baghdad, which is pretty much the center of civilization in Arabian Nights tales but which is also often troubled) was once a wealthy kingdom, but it’s fallen on bad times: its wealth and influence have waned thanks to colossal mismanagement, greed and crime are everywhere, and the hope of the people now lies in a band of Robin Hood style brigands called the Fog Troop. And the leader of the Fog Troop is said to be a man called Alibaba the Wondrous.
While Aladdin and Morgiana are making their way into Balbadd, they run into a man named Sinbad. He’s a legendary badass who captured seven dungeons and became king by his own hand, but when they find him he’s been robbed of all his Metal Vessels and even the clothes on his back, so he won’t be quite up to his usual levels of ass-kicking this arc. Sinbad does at least have a colorful group of advisors/party members and his political clout. He’s here to help stabilize Balbadd, in part as a favor to its late king who was a personal friend. The current king, however, has just one request of Sinbad: stop the Fog Troop.
Now, before tearing into it, a word about the Balbadd arc: it’s long. We’re in this location for a lot of movements, and by the end it really does start to drag. I dare say, the sheer mass of Balbadd costs the show quite a lot, especially when the core plot threads probably could have been handled in a less tangled way.
Because of that, I’m going to address Balbadd by topic, rather than strictly chronologically.
First, Alibaba. Surprising absolutely no viewers, he is the same Alibaba as the one who leads the Fog Troop. It turns out he grew up in the slums of Balbadd, as the son of a prostitute, until the old king recognized Alibaba as his son and took him into the palace to groom as an heir, owing the utterly odious nature of his eldest, Ahbmad (now king) and the completely spineless nature of his younger legitimate son, Sahbmad. Alibaba took to it well, but a friend of his from the slums, Cassim, took advantage of his good nature to pillage the palace, and in the process the old king ended up dead. Alibaba, back then, fled in disgrace, and he’d been hoping to reclaim both his right and his honor ever since. Seeing the vast injustices in Balbadd, which were bad before and have only gotten worse under Ahbmad, Alibaba took the reins of the Fog Troop, once again working with his old friend Cassim, who is more or less the true leader of the Troop, being its founder and most charismatic member, to whom the others owe their true loyalty.
Speaking of the troubles in Balbadd, it seems that it’s not just Ahbmad’s idiocy driving them. That’s the weakness that allows the attack, of course, but the problems really got going when a banker from the Kou empire joined his court. The banker convinced Ahbmad to start using Kou paper money, which got a lot of trade done for the rich, but fluctuation in the price of Kou bills has left Balbadd in deep debt to the Kou, and borrowing more bills, which couldn’t be spent externally, in order to cover it. The situation has gotten so bad that Ahbmad has a two-pronged strategy to solve it: on one side, he aims to start liquidizing the human rights of Balbadd’s citizens, selling its poor into slavery (since he’s given up just about everything else, resource-wise), and he’s looking towards an alliance marriage with a Kou princess, which would basically see Balbadd absorbed into the Empire as a tributary state.
And this time, the Princess in question is not so kind and honorable as Hakuei. Her name is Kougyoku, and while she stays in the show enough to soften the impression she gives (to the point where by the time the show’s second season ends she seems like more of a good person), during the Balbadd arc she comes off as a violent psychopath. She’s here to marry the king of Balbadd (who she’s never met), and secure an alliance (that she doesn’t care about), and importantly she’s come with both her own considerable power as a dungeon capturer and a group of powerful retainers. Most notable among her group is Judar, a sadistic and manipulative Magi aligned with the Kou empire.
Speaking of Magi, what exactly is a Magi? The explanation comes out very slowly in the show overall, but it’s in encountering Judar that we get the first real picture of the answer. The magi are three (there are always three) sorcerers who are, uniquely, beloved by the Rukh. Rukh, meanwhile, is the energy that pervades all life and the universe and which allows magic (basically like The Force or any similar concept), usually visualized as little butterflies made of white-gold light. Most mages can only use the Rukh inside themselves, but Magi, in addition to being endlessly reincarnated wise men, can utilize the Rukh in the environment, making them drastically more powerful than any mortal spell-caster. Aladdin himself seems to be a Magi, except he’s not one of the reincarnated three, he’s something new and different.
In any case, Sinbad sees the hell Balbadd is becoming and, after getting a chance to talk with Alibaba, hopes to support him in reforming the nation rather than Ahbmad in crushing dissent. Alibaba, meanwhile, gets lots of talkings-to from Aladdin and Morgiana about his more short-sighted choices, but the three of them ultimately make up. They encounter Judar, who in addition to being attended by weird black Ruhk that set Aladdin on edge manages to deliver vicious wounds to Ugo and Aladdin before getting owned. Kougyoku picks up Judar, Cassim slinks off, and Sinbad brokers a talk/confrontation between Alibaba and his half-brother.
That doesn’t go so well, sending Alibaba back having an existential crisis about what to do when asking nicely isn’t enough, and ultimately everyone gets turned around enough for Alibaba to lead a mob (initially, at least, peaceful) to the Palace in order to demand rather than asking.
At the palace, everything goes to hell, Ahbmad has some terrifyingly powerful retainers (gifted to him by the Kou) who fight Alibaba, and Cassim also shows up. Cassim… is not doing so well. Manipulated by some dark sorcerers who seem to be aligned with the Kou, or who are also manipulating the Kou, he turns into an evil black Djinn and fights Alibaba and friends as well.
Aladdin recovers from being rendered unconscious and shows up at the critical moment, having been granted better access to some of his Magi powers by Ugo, who then vanished from the Metal Vessel that Aladdin carried. Once Dark Djinn Cassim is subdued, Aladdin is able to use his new power, Solomon’s Wisdom, to confront the darkness in Cassim’s heart and give us a long, long emotional catharsis and goodbye for the dying character.
In my opinion, you’re generally going to either love the Solomon’s Wisdom scenes or hate them. On one hand, they give you some honestly good insight into the characters they’re for, they let us explore the past and inner feelings of people we otherwise wouldn’t see the perspective of, and they fit Magi’s theme that people are essentially good at heart and that it’s bad experiences that darken them. On the other hand, they tend to be quite long, often swallowing entire episodes worrying about a character who, in most cases, is either essentially dead or about to be. The show basically stops for them, and they’re not always worth it. For my part, well, I put one of them, from the second season, on my Top 10 Sad Moments list, but I have to admit that it was far and away the best one, both because there was actually something at stake when the Solomon’s Wisdom was performed, and because the conflict expressed was something that already existed in the show, rather than being largely introduced and resolved through the scene. So I guess I’m more on the side of thinking they’re weak, or at least weaker than they could be.
Anyway, Cassim is brought peace, he says goodbye to Alibaba, and then he expires. The whole chaotic situation leaves Ahbmad (and Sahbmad, who was at least a decent person funneling intel to Alibaba) deposed, but the new republic is still potentially under Kou’s thumb while Aladdin, Alibaba, and Morgiana flee with Sinbad (who got his stuff back in time to take out one of the shadowy conspirator-sorcerers) to his kingdom, the island nation of Sindria. There, we meet Sinbad’s crew, get everybody some training and gear improvements, and learn something about our enemy.
The Black Rukh, it seems, is associated with “The Organization”, also known as Al-Thamen, a secretive cult-like group with uncertain but vaguely world-domination-adjacent goals along with generally causing chaos and darkness and evil and all the like. Al-Thamen seems to have a strong influence in the Kou Empire, including control over Judar.
Speaking of the Kou empire, they soon show up in Sindria, albeit making a social call. The delegation includes Kougyoku (now showing some of her better side, as well as an affection that in her time in Sindria is initially directed at Sinbad before slowly seeming to turn to Alibaba as they talk with each other and bond fairly legitimately), her wormy but seemingly not really evil advisor, and Prince Zuko.
Zuko, here, is technically named Hakuryuu. However, he’s a prince from an evil conquoring ambiguously East Asian empire like Zuko, a brooding loner like Zuko, obsessed with personal and national honor like Zuko, at odds with a particularly wicked and tyrannical parent like Zuko, has a burn scar over half his face and particularly one eye like Zuko… you get the idea. I don’t know who voices him in the dub, but if they didn’t get Dante Basco there was a missed opportunity. He is one crazy awesome uncle and evil manipulative sister (I don’t count Kougyoku) short of Nickelodeon suing something. I don’t know if the author of Magi was aware of Avatar: the Last Airbender – A:tLA debuted in 2005 while Magi first saw print in 2009, but there is a large culture and audience gulf despite the animeesque nature of Avatar, so it’s conceivable that the similarities between the two works are more a case of convergent evolution than inspiration.
Speaking of which, if you’re familiar with Avatar, there is actually a lot of very deep similarity between the works. Aladdin, a little boy who is the reincarnation of a unique mystical thing and has to learn to grow and control his powers while grappling with being a sometimes overly kind person in a world with deep shadows, is very much like Aang, and thus carries in some similar themes. Alibaba and Morgiana are fairly unique to Magi, but then Hakuryuu is Zuko’s visual and character doppelganger, adding in more vaguely familiar pieces. Both shows have worlds that are objectively in a lot of trouble, where terrible things happen (genocide in Avatar, slavery in Magi), but that have an optimistic core, like things can get better if good people work at it.
In any case, Zuko – er, Hakuryuu – is here to learn from Sinbad so he can grow stronger and “destroy the Kou empire” or more like, on further explanation, cleanse it of the Al-Thamen infection that’s driving the heavy and morally dubious expansion of the Kou.
After Hakuryuu and Alibaba bond a little, Al Thamen makes an attack, using a spell placed on Alibaba back in Balbadd to curse both him and Sinbad with some evil blood that will cause their Rukh to blacken and their souls to fall into darkness if it’s not treated.
Luckily, Sinbad knows of a nearby dungeon that hasn’t been captured, where the Djinn of the dungeon, Zagan, is rumored to have the power to heal any ailment. Unfortunately, Sinbad and the members of his household (adventuring party, who are able to be lent the powers of his Djinn) can no longer enter dungeons, seeing as the powers that be decided that, at seven, he had enough.
Everybody else, though, is still eligible, resulting in Alibaba, Aladdin, Morgiana, and Hakuryuu heading off to the dungeon of Zagan with something of a tight timer. Compared to the previous Dungeon (Alibaba’s Amon), Zagan is a bit more of a jerk. He actually appears outside the treasure room, taunts the party, and makes much about having local islanders as captives.
While that’s going on, Judar shows at Sindria (destroying its magical protective barrier) to have important talks with Sinbad about the mysteries going on. He seems like something of a rogue agent, and tips off Sinbad that Al Thamen is not resting on their laurels, revealing that there’s both an Al Thamen kill team in Zagan and an Al Thamen army headed to Sindria.
In Zagan, Morgianna manages to get everybody else out of the more or less final enemy trap, but nearly kills herself in the process, leading to a struggle where Hakuryuu aims to claim Zagan from the treasure room so Morgiana can be healed while Aladdin and Alibaba fight off the kill team.
That team consists of an Al Thamen wizard, a swordsman called Isaac, and a woman named Dunya. Dunya in particular is the primary threat, as she is able to become/wield a Dark Djinn, similar in nature to Cassim but with greater control and skill. We get a pretty long, engaging battle with her, during which we learn that like Cassim she’s kind of a victim in this, being a former princess who was betrayed, cast down, and just generally kicked while she was down. This ends up being used to eat at Alibaba’s mind, causing the Black Rukh to take hold of him and drive him insane.
In Sindria, we have a fairly satisfying battle against the creatively designed yet character deprived Al Thamen agents and their Pirates of Dark Water goop. Seriously, these enemies have some really loud designs, but we’re never really introduced to any of them, so it’s more of a consolation prize. Everybody helps out fighting them, including Kougyoku, and ultimately Sinbad is able to take out the real body of the one wizard that’s been largely masterminding this whole mess – not Judar, the one who was using Cassim, cursed Sinbad and Alibaba, and also had an avatar with the kill team in Zagan.
Hakuryuu (with Zagan), and a restored Morgianna are able to give Aladdin the chance to do his Wisdom of Solomon thing, and we once again get most of an episode in mindscape. Fixing up Alibaba is the easy part, though it seems he’s got a bit of Cassim in there too, and the last vestige of that sneaky Al Thamen wizard, who is down to that corner of Alibaba’s mind as his last horcrux. He spills the beans about some important background lore, albeit in a way that raises more questions than answers. His story seems to indicate that both Al Thamen and the Magi (particularly King Solomon, who might be the past life of Aladdin) come from another, destroyed world, and that Al Thamen is causing chaos in order to get this one destroyed too, because they’re pretty much Azathoth cultists. Aladdin manages to bring the guy inner peace and forgiveness, and sees his soul off into the Light Rukh.
With that, Sindria is safe, Zagan is claimed, Aladdin and his friends are fine, Sinbad is fine, Dunya is shockingly still alive to give us more plot hooks, and thus ends the first (25-episode) season of Magi. In places, it can be a little draggy, but it’s got good action and good characters as well as a general sense of high adventure that doesn’t get overly mired in the dark stuff.
In particular, on the character side of things, now seems a good time to point out Morgiana’s character arc that carries through the first season.
Morgiana is, critically, a slave. Former slave, as the show progresses, but a slave all the same, and it leaves its mark on her. This was an element that was handled well enough with Raphtalia, but Morgiana’s portrayal blows that out of the water. I think the most critical and interesting part of that, consistent with both the subject matter and the themes of the show, is that just breaking her physical chains is nothing near freeing Morgiana.
In fact, Aladdin snaps her leg cuffs open when they meet briefly in the market, before even entering Amon’s dungeon, and she’s utterly unwilling to use that in order to get away, despite the fact that she, as a Fanalis, is extremely capable and could probably kick to death anyone who came after her. Aladdin himself notes that there remain, unbroken, chains around her heart. In Amon’s dungeon, Morgiana fights zealously for her master, a master who abuses and torments her and who she clearly hates as a person. But, because her spirit is downtrodden, she can’t bring herself to disobey no matter how many perfect opportunities she gets to backstab him or even just walk away. It’s not loyalty, and it’s not exactly fear either: she’s broken, and it takes a lot more than a single friendship speech for her to be put back together again. Even after the time skip, when she goes up against the slavers on the road to Balbadd, some of her former traumas come out, and threaten to hamstring her. And, later, when she’s acting as a member of Alibaba’s “household” adventuring party and has come far enough to have the remnants of her former shackles turned into new weapons, she still worries about the value she might have and where she owes her loyalty.
It’s interesting because she’s a pretty normal protagonist character in a lot of other ways. She’s even fiery, and will often act on her convictions without asking permission or forgiveness. In Balbadd, for instance, she basically tears off in the middle of the night to more or less kidnap Alibaba and bring him to have a talk with Aladdin. She’s not passive or servile, but the scars her time of bondage left on her run very deep. This makes her feel very real as a survivor of trauma: it’s not her every waking moment, but it is always there.
Morgiana is emblematic of how Magi does most of its character building, and why it’s so effective. Magi, to a fault, has a pacing that takes its sweet time with almost every movement, but that payus off when we’re talking about learning who most of these characters are. It’s more effective with Morgiana, Alibaba, and oddly enough Kougyoku than it is with Mr. Perfect Sinbad, Aladdin, or Hakuryuu, but even Magi’s weaker characters would stand toe to toe with decent characters from shows that are weaker overall.
That said, there are downsides to the show. I’ve mentioned how the pace can work against the show, especially in Balbadd, but in addition to that there are a few other notes. While the Arabian Nights theme is refreshing, things feel a lot more basically Gygax when we get into the actual dungeons.
Then there’s Al Thamen. I am of two minds on Al Thamen. On one side, they’re just kind of evil for the sake of being evil. Right at the end we get a motivation out of them, and it’s still basically an “evil and insane” motivation. This is addressed a lot better in the second season, but that’s a story for another time. That said, as Evil-for-evil’s-sake goes? They’re pretty effective. When you don’t know their end goals, they seem like a decently developed and threatening conspiracy, and either way I love how they use the lost and broken like Cassim and Dunya as their weapons and that there are both the obvious practical and more mystical reasons why this works.
The latter is a topic that’s not really addressed until the end and, like Al Thamen itself, is addressed better in the second season, but it is one that leads to a good discussion. Specifically, we’re told that the “fall” into the Black Rukh is ultimately caused by the person coming to curse Fate. However, what Fate means is something on which Aladdin and Al Thamen strongly disagree. Al Thamen sees (or purports to see) Fate the way you probably would: predestination, or a determined chain of outcomes. This leads characters who have been dealt a bad hand to want to reject and want to fight it. Indeed, the lead characters of other shows often have strong “screw destiny” themes, so it’s easy to empathize with Al Thamen’s pawns when the organization uses that to motivate them. Aladdin, however, sees Fate as more analogous to God or Karma, or even causality. In his view you can absolutely fight against injustices, try to make the world a better place. The problem arises when, instead or making the world better, you see someone curse the world and how it works, denying the responsibility of mortals both good and bad to rage at the heavens. Cassim’s fault was not that he fought against the Balbadd royals, but that his heart became filled with hatred and spite.
That’s the good side. The downside, especially for the climax of this season? Al Thamen works better as secretive, clever tempters, feeding the sadness and anger in the hearts of men in order to induce others to fulfill their goals, leading to morally and emotionally complex conflicts between the heroes and those who have fallen to become Al Thamen’s pawns, with points to be made and sympathy to be had on both sides in the actual conflict. When Al Thamen has to raise an army to attack Sindria with a bunch of evil wizards and a tide of black curse goo and we see all these cackling cartoon villains throwing themselves at our C-team of heroes (in terms of emotional connection; they’re the A-team where power is concerned), it’s not really awesome. Creepy wheelchair Al Thamen guy and all the other mooks that show up there pretty succinctly ruin the dark mystique of Al Thamen, rendering them just another pack of black-clad lunatics. On one side, this goes happen side-by-side with a good showing in the form of Dunya, on the other side this is pretty much the first thing we get after learning of the importance of Al Thamen, so it goes a long way towards defining what they feel like.
All that said, I think the rating I have for Magi: the Labyrinth of Magic is a B+. It is, when you get down to it, a creative and watchable fantasy anime with good characters, and which doesn’t rely on the typical Isekai and Harem tags to build (or fail to build) its world. It very much feels like a timeless story, and even if some of its conventions do have modern touches, and is a show that I’d strongly recommend to viewers with an interest in the fantasy genre. Now, as for the second season, subtitled Kingdom of Magic… that’s a story for another time.