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  • Saintly Church: Played with in Misora's focus chapter after Mahorafest. She pretends to be a kindly old priest in the confessional, but she is actually very mischievious and sometimes downright sneaky.
  • Sand in My Eyes: Used by both Konoka and Yue.
  • Sapient Cetaceans: Dolphin-men are one of the many denizens found in the Magic World. One of them works as a trucker who pilots an airship.
  • Say It with Hearts: Almost always used ironically; sometimes Konoka will fall into it, though.
  • Scenery Porn: Done with CG models of the environments, many of which are ridiculously detailed and have huge polygon counts.
  • Scooby-Dooby Doors
  • Schedule Slip:
    • "Negima will be taking a break next week" "Negima will be taking a break next week" "Shonen Magazine (which Negima is in) will not be sold next week" "Negima will be taking a break next week" Repeat ad infinitum.
    • The scanlations can be even worse given that the translators are unpaid, and tend to be students with exams and suchlike.
  • Schematized Prop: Logistifying Chiu's artifact.
  • School Festival: Quite possibly the largest one in fiction. It runs for about a week and takes in several million dollars.
  • Science Destroys Magic: Side material adds in the interesting fact that the ability to use magic is based on a certain way of thinking the world works, such as the four classical elements. As science advances and disproves these theories, the number of magic users dwindles.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: Waking up a legendary demon was the motivation for the villains during the Kansai arc. Also, Eva technically qualifies; although she was sealed less for her evil (which was, if you believe her, considerable) and more because Nagi couldn't get her to leave him alone. Ironically, the protagonists defeat the first abovementioned Sealed Evil by temporarily breaking the seal on the other one.
  • Sensei-chan: Negi is a rare male version.
  • Serial Escalation: Negi vs. Rakan. Negi reveals that he isn't left-handed at least five times before the match is over, culminating in a spell that definitely deserves the name "Titan Slayer". And Rakan still stands up like nothing happened.
  • Serious Business: A tense meeting between Fate and Negi derails for one page into a heated argument over coffee and tea — Negi is British, after all. Negi prefers milk tea and refers to coffee as "muddy water". Fate drinks seven cups of black coffee every day, and occasionally lemon tea.
  • Seiza Squirm: During the Claim Negi's Lips Tournament Asakura organizes in Kyoto, almost everyone gets caught and made to seiza by Nitta-sensei.
  • Sexy Secretary: In Chapter 337, Evangeline tells Chachamaru to become this to Negi as he's working himself to death (apparently enough to literally kill a normal human), even mentioning that she is the only one of the girls who can really help him this way. After confronting him directly about it and telling him that she truly wants to be there to help him, it looks like Chachamaru is in fact going to be Negi's new secretary.
    • Naturally there is also a hilarious daydream before that where Chachamaru envisioned herself working in this role starting with simple help, moving into what might be several years in the future where they've gotten quite familiar, and ending with Negi insisting on winding up Chachamaru to show his thanks for her help...right before Asakura and Negi himself walk up to her. Cue Did I Just Say That Out Loud?.
  • Sex Slave: Averted in the Magical World. Slaves may not have many rights but they are protected from being used as sex slaves.
  • Shipper on Deck:
    • Everyone Ships Konoka and Setsuna.
    • Jack Rakan ships Chisame/Negi.
    • The ENTIRE Ala Rubra ships Nagi/Arika.
    • Evangeline sometimes ships Negi/Chachamaru and derives endless amusement from poor Chachamaru's plight, though deep down she really is quite supportive.
  • Ship Sinking: Possibly the only real one in the series since Negi/Konoka and Negi/Setsuna; In Chapter 353, Negi tells Asuna, extra space just to mess with your head which girl he likes. Her reaction makes it clear that A, it's not her, and B, she has no problem with that.
    • Chapter 355 makes it a point to sink virtually every major ship involving Negi.
  • Ship Tease: So much that it is impossible make any truly definitive declarations as to which girl will "win" until one of them actually does.
  • Shirtless Scene: In-universe, on the poster advertising Negi's and Rakan's fight, and in the fight itself.
  • Shock Collar: Applied to the girls under slavery in the magical world.
  • Shoot the Medic First:
    • During the Gateport Incident, Fate uses the confusion caused by nailing Negi through the back with a stone spear to try to petrify Konoka.
    • A variation happens when Fate's subordinate Koyomi targets Ako over other low-tier fighters, although Ako is not a healer but a support-type.
  • Shotacon: Poor Negi is such a Chick Magnet that half of his fourteen-year-old class is outright discussing how to confess their love for him within days of his arrival. It's made somewhat less squicky by the fact that at least a few of them are more concerned with how badass he's going to be in a few years, but at least one girl is very happy to have herself a yummy little ten year old — although to be fair it's less about sex and more about replacing a baby brother who died at birth.
  • Shout-Out: Has its own page
  • Showgirl Skirt
  • Shown Their Work: Shown mainly in the compiled volume extras and magazines, which give descriptions on both in-universe physics and real world data, such as the use of surprisingly good Latin... And Greek. And Sanskrit. Other examples are the Hakkyokuken, Negi and Ku-Fei's martial arts style and the physics behind Negi's Raisoku Shundo. And the geography of Mundus Magicus, which appears to be Mars with oceans — which is finally pointed out by one of the characters in a July 2009 installment. And Chisame's battle against a TCP tuna swarm; she repels it setting up a bucket filter, even using the correct sentence to implement it in iptables!
  • Show Within a Show: Mahou Shojou Biblion, a Magical Girl Warrior series.
  • Shrines and Temples: Mana is ostensibly the Miko of Tatsumiya Shrine, near Mahora.
  • Single-Stroke Battle
  • Skilled but Naive:
    • Negi is an incredibly skilled mage, but he's still a ten-year-old.
    • In another light, Negi is an incredibly skilled (natural) Chick Magnet nicknamed the Thousand Pimpster by some of the fans, but he's still a ten-year-old.
  • Skinship Grope: Chichigami-sama is a serial groper to the point of Unfortunate Implications. See Psycho Lesbian above.
  • Sleep Cute:
    • Happened to Ako & Makie, Konoka & Setsuna, and Negi & Asuna. Kazumi & Ayaka, and Haruna & Yue were close...
    • The credits of Negima! (Awww...)
  • Smoke Shield
  • Sneezing: Negi used to be affected by frequent bouts of clothing shredding sneezes in the early volumes of the manga. The sneezing decreased when the story grew more serious, the Fan Service didn't: Notably, sneezing mostly occurs in the downtime between major, action-filled arcs.
  • Snot Bubble
  • Snow Means Death:
    • The destruction of Negi's village.
    • Nearly literal when Eva strands Asuna on a blizzard-wracked mountain as part of her training. Asuna freezes solid while sleeping, then wakes up dead. Ask any doctor. Being Asuna, however, this is not sufficient to keep her down. Evangeline later hits her with an insta-kill freeze spell; once again this is insufficient, although in this case her ability to cancel magic may have helped. She was still stuck in an ice crystal long enough to suffocate.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Evil
  • Sparkling Stream of Tears
  • Spell Construction
  • Spider Tank: Literally. Lampshaded to hell and back during Mahorafest, when Misora finds the Martian Army stashed in the sewers.
  • Spit Take
  • Spot of Tea: Negi takes tea with Fate, and each criticizes the other's tastes in a truly epic bout of passive-aggressiveness.
  • Spotting the Thread: Yue figuring out that Takahata was an illusion in Chapter 143.
  • Squeaky Eyes
  • Stable Time Loop: The three days of Mahorafest. Done inconsistently, though: Their week-long jump back does end up changing the past, but it ends up being stable due to it being consistent with Chao's timeline. Basically it's a sort of destiny thing, otherwise there would be like a huge paradox, and if they hadn't succeeded, Chao would never come back in time to do it.
  • Strip English Lesson
  • Summoning Ritual: Typically, these invoke Valkyries, Undines or Salamanders, or other types of spirits, for offensive spells.
  • Summon Magic
  • Super-Deformed: Infrequently, and usually only when characters are under stress. Except Misora. She does it more often.
  • Super-Powered Evil Side: What happens when Negi's Black Magic gets out of his control.
  • Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: Chachamaru serves tea. She also has a BFG, Kung Fu skills, and transforming blade arms.
  • Superpower Lottery: Pactios act as this, giving a artifact with a different ability depending the individual's personality. Some are good for fighting, some are stuff outside of fighting. During Negi's fight with Rakan, he entered a pactio that allowed him to use the artifacts of anybody he entered a pactio with, which he canceled after the fight.
  • Super Speed: Raiten Taisou. Koyomi's artifact ability. Also one of the effects of Ako's artifact.
  • Supporting Harem: At least it started out as such, lately it's more of a Balanced Harem.
  • The Sweat Drop
  • Swirling Dust
  • Synchronization: Haruna's golems have a slight version of this since when one is used to defend from an actual attack, it gives her a Psychic Nosebleed and knocks her out but doesn't pass on the full damage from the attack.
  • Take a Third Option:
    • After the group realizes that the Asuna with the group might be a fake, Tatsumiya attempts to unmask the impostor using a magic bullet. Negi, however, doesn't want to see her hurt, impostor or not. Faced with the option of either allowing a spy to run free or hurting a real Asuna (despite assurances from Tatsumiya that the bullet would be harmless in this case), he instead forms a Pactio with the impostor, with the added side-effect of stripping away the disguise.
    • Both Cosmo Entelecheia (the secret society/terrorist group) and Zazie's sister believe that the inhabitants of Mundus Magicus must either be sealed in Cosmo Entelecheia (the Lotus Eater Machine) or die/end up in a desperate war with Earth when their home dimension inevitably collapses. Chao Lingshen tried (or claimed to be trying) to reveal magic to the inhabitants of Earth at large so as to make the latter option less disastrous, given that the former apparently didn't happen. Negi, on the other hand, has an idea to prevent the collapse.
  • Taken for Granite: Adds to the horror feel of the series, without too much Squick.
  • Taking the Bullet: Several times, including a 'defendee-tossing-would-be-defender-out-of-the-way-to-take-the-hit' subversion.
  • Talking in Your Sleep: "No way, lady, I can't smoke that..."
  • Talking to Himself: The American dubs.
  • Taste the Rainbow: Here's the class roster. And that's only the starting point.
  • Tele Frag
  • Telepathy
  • Teleporters and Transporters
  • Tempting Fate: Ayaka says that she has a bad feeling about going to the Magic World and Asuna claims that Ayaka's premonitions are usually wrong. Guess what happens to Ala Alba.
  • Terraform: Negi's ultimate plan to save the Magic World as revealed in Chapter 338. His theory: Magic/Mana is fueled by life, and because Mars as it is is a dead world, it's the main reason for the ultimate collapse of the Magic World. By Terraforming Mars and making it Earth-like, the Magic world can eventually thrive there without problems. The immense size and cost of this project is also why Ayaka and Chizuru are now sponsoring it. Also, given how long it would take (Negi estimates between 30 and 100 years), it explains how busy Negi's become and how it could be a "lifetime" project.
  • That Didn't Happen: Twice. Both times involve Forceful Kisses from Negi.
  • There Are No Therapists:
    • And Negi, from what Nodoka's diary showed us, needs one badly.
    • Subverted early on, however, when Negi gets cheered up by Satsuki during Mahorafest.
  • There Is Only One Bed: Weirdly inverted — the girls understand and accept that no matter how many beds are present, Negi is likely to crawl into one a girl is already occupying. (Especially Asuna.) They even turn it into a game of Keep-Away on one occasion, fighting over who gets him. The one girl who doesn't want him there, of course. Of course, it's debatable whether she still doesn't...
  • Thirty Second Blackout
  • This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself: As of Chapter 285, this seems to be Fake Eva-chin's preferred method of dealing with Negi's Super-Powered Evil Side.
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • Thundering Herd
  • Time and Relative Dimensions In Space
  • Timeline-Altering MacGuffin: Chao's "ultimate weapon."
  • Time Machine
  • Time Skip: In chapter 350, five months have passed from the "Get Negi to confess" to "Asuna's 'graduation'" seeing as she's going to be sealed again at Mars.
    • And then again in chapter 352, 130 years have passed, as Asuna wakes up late in a future world to find all of the plans succeeded... and to find that Negi has apparently somehow died, in addition to all of her old classmates with the exceptions of Chao and Eva, who bring Asuna back to the original timeline next chapter.
    • And once again in chapter 354, this time 7 years after the original timeline, by which all the girls of Class 3A have long graduated, as shown by Yue who now works as a private investigator involving magical cases. This also introduces a few new characters, such as Maki's younger brother Kagehisa, who by this time is in high school.
  • Time Stands Still
  • Time Travel: Stable Time Loop as Negi starts running into earlier versions of himself...
  • Timey-Wimey Ball:
    • ...until the part where he has to change the future after being sent ahead.
    • And the book Chao left which states Negi's wife is now blank.
    • It was fake.
  • Title Drop: The White Wing initially call themselves the Negima Club until the better name is suggested.
  • To Be a Master
  • To Be Lawful or Good: Negi gets this from time to time, having to choose when to break laws and when to let things slide, often while under threat. He's fairly flexible, coming down on both sides depending on the severity of the issue.
  • Token Girl: Sextum, the Averruncus of water and the only girl in the series.
  • Token Yuri Girls: Setsuna serves as Konoka's protector, and admits it precludes hooking up with anyone else. Naturally, other characters assume this is a complicated way of saying that they are a romantic couple, or will be. Konoka certainly has no problem being her (kissing-activated) partner in their magical contract. It's pretty much just Setsuna who isn't aware of this. Naturally, when Setsuna proved to be a popular character, the overtones became a lot more obvious in the Negima?! remake, with a more knowingly teasing Konoka and a more flusterable Setsuna, to the point of Setsuna stuck between embarrassment and ogling at Konoka in a swimsuit. Considering that in the early manga the way Setsuna acts around Konoka is exactly the same as someone with a really strong crush (complete with blushing and a loss of the ability to speak whenever she's around) makes the subtext already quite strong.
  • Took a Level In Badass: Pretty much automatic if someone gets an artifact. This includes Negi, though overshadowed by the fact that he had just gained about eight others. Maybe, his artifact could be a Game Breaker because he has so many attendants, he can use all their powers, granted, one at a time, but still it gives him a lot more options than almost anyone. Has been Put on a Bus for a while now.
    • Yue is arguably the queen of this trope, having done this no less than three times. See her character entry for details.
    • Yue's best friend Nodoka is the goddess of this trope.
  • Too Much Information: Asuna gets an earful from Makie during the shower scene: "Negi-kun's you-know-what is touching my you-know-where! ... His you-know-what's getting you-know-what-er!"
  • Torch the Franchise and Run: The series' rather abrupt ending is the result of Akamatsu dropping the series in protest against his publisher's attempt to take ownership and copyright of the series away from him.
  • Total Party Kill: Discussed a few times after they entered the magical world arc as with so many other game tropes, especially when they were separated.
  • Tournament Arc
  • Training From Hell:
    • Lampshaded with Ku Fei's martial arts training, as her trying to create a "quick-powerup" training regimen for Negi based on old manga and kung fu movies fails miserably. She then tries training him conventionally, which works, and teaches him so quickly that she gets depressed about it.
    • Played straight, however, with Evangeline's training methods, which actually seem to work.
  • Transformation Trinket: The pactio cards.
  • Translation Convention: Scenes that take place in Britain are spoken in Japanese. The girls, even the ordinary ones, also have no trouble in the magical world — averted though, in that it was colonized from Earth (Mundus Vetus, "the Old World"), and two of its major languages are "Anglicum" and "Japonense." Interestingly, though, the writing dotted around the Mundus Magicus suggest that the lingua franca is actually Latin.
  • Translation Style Choices: Most fan translations fall into Category 2 or Category 3, while the former official translation was a solid Category 2.
  • Trapped in Another World: The entire plot of the Magic World arc.
  • Triang Relations
  • Troperiffic: Akamatsu seems to be on a quest to use every trope ever. He is disturbingly close to succeeding. Naturally, this leads to...
  • Truce Zone: Megalomesembria's public baths.
  • Truer to the Text: An interesting case. The recent OVA releases have been faithful to the manga, but they're so deep into a story that none of its multiple previous adaptations properly covered, that they won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't read the manga.
  • Two Roads Before You: Father's or the Master's?
  • Two Scenes, One Dialogue: Variation: just as Fate finishes explaining the secret of the Magical World to the captive Asuna and Anya, the next chapter begins with Shiori/Luna confirming the same explanation for Negi and company.
Cquote1

 Fate:Those are his comrades. My prey... You have all just woken up...

Negi:These are my comrades...

Negi&Fate:I won't allow you to lay a finger on them!

Cquote2
  • Two-Teacher School: In the entire Elaborate University High, few teachers are shown other than Negi, Takamichi, Gandolfini, Nitta, Seruhiko, and Shizuna. Justified in that the manga focuses explicitly on the teachers who are also mages.
  • Unblockable Attack
  • Unlimited Wardrobe: When the girls are not attending class, and wearing the Mahora uniform, they each have fair amount of unique casual clothes. It's obvious reading the manga, that Akamatsu and company spent a lot of time coming up with fun looks for all of the girls.
  • The Unmasqued World: Negi and friends pay a brief visit to a "bad" future in which the current antagonist has recently succeeded in revealing the existence of magic, but aside from the excited attentions of some local girls and talk of all mages being recalled to the Magic World, we don't see much of the effects. Magic is revealed for good off-screen during the final timeskip, and more integration between the worlds (including black market trade) is discussed.
  • The Un-Reveal: 355 chapters and we never learn who Negi actually likes or ends up with. He does tell Asuna at one point, but the audience doesn't get to hear it, and her reaction doesn't make it clear who it is- except it doesn't seem to be her.
  • Unsound Effect: "Pettan" for Yue and Nodoka.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Chachamaru uses her booster jets to fetch a little girl's balloon at one point, and nobody comments on it except Asuna and Negi.
  • The Unwanted Harem: Double Subversion: the professor surrounded by 31 female students sure looks like a set up for one of these, but, while the students may find Negi cute, they don't want to go out with him. Except, of course, that several of them do develop romantic feelings for Negi, though nowhere near as much as the premise would lead you to believe.
    • Justified in that they develop romantic feelings for him after he shows how mature, badass or awesome he is, and most of them look at him and realize that the ten year old kid will turn into the epitome of sexy and badass in five years tops.
  • Upgrade Artifact: Literally.
  • Urban Fantasy: Though it's shifted to a more Final Fantasy feel as of the Entry to the Magic World arc.
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