Maburaho

Teenage Kazuki Shikimori attends Aoi Academy, a school for witches and wizards. But magic is a finite resource, everyone has a limited number of spells they can cast in their lifetime, and Kazuki's limit is a fraction of most other's. With only eight "charges," he has to carefully conserve his spell-casting energy lest he crumble into dust, a plan that falls to pieces when he attracts the lustful attentions of several girls. Another harem show with magical overtones like Negima, Maburaho takes the Harry Potter analogies a little further by making its hero a descendant of famous sorcerers, and hence prime marriage material. Meanwhile, Kazuki ends up wasting a number of his precious charges keeping Yuna, his self-styled "wife" out of trouble, and dodging the attentions of samurai throwback Rin Kamishiro and large-breasted heiress Kuriko Kazetsubaki. Meanwhile, the girls do everything in their power to win him over, or failing that, to get his parents' approval, in an anime that could be taken as a satire of materialist dating customs were it not such a blatant case of cliché reassembly-DNA meets Tenchi Muyo!.

However, Maburaho does attempt to do something new with such outrageously hackneyed raw material. Many situations from the geek-gets-girls sub-genre are deliberately inverted, such as the time-limit lifespan of Mahoromatic or Video Girl Ai, here given to the male protagonist. Nor does the series shy away from following its own internal logic-it establishes that ghosts are part of everyday life, and consequently has no qualms about killing off its hero midway. The inversions of traditional formulae become increasingly obvious, since it is now Kazuki who is the untouchable, unattainable love object, forced to continue school in a phantom state, in the hope that his death can be somehow reversed and his magical mojo recharged. Based on the manga by Toshihiko Tsukuji in Dragon Magazine and Dragon Age monthlies.