Tuesday 10 June 2014

KNOW YOUR RAILDEX: A CERTAIN SCIENTIFTIC TERMINOLOGY!

Know more about Academy City and it's weird fascination with weird institution titles...


One of the very few things I found irritating about A Certain Scientific Railgun and A Certain Magical Index was the non-stop use of acronyms and one word organization titles. Mostly because a lot of these names don't get explained. Seriously! You kind of have to follow and put it together yourself. Academy City is full of them. You can't just have something like ACPD (Academy City Police Department), you have to give it a weird name like JUDGEMENT or ANTI-SKILL. In preparation for the English dub release of A Certain Scientific Railgun S, here's some general need-to-know stuff involving said acronyms and one worded organizations:

JUDGEMENT

Kuroko and Uiharu are members of JUDGEMENT, Academy City's student-based disciplinary committee. JUDGEMENT's task is to maintain peace and order within the school system.That usually includes subduing delinquents misusing their powers along with other offenders and protect students. Although only ANTI-SKILL can take someone into custody, JUDGEMENT officers can still make arrests. Basically JUDGEMENT is the low level beat cops or civilian officers while ANTI-SKILL are SWAT.

ANTI-SKILL

Academy City's official police and security force. Yes! The SWAT guys! When things proof too much for JUDGEMENT, such as engaging terrorists, hostage situations or even stabilizing dangerous areas, ANTI-SKILL steps in. Even though ANTI-SKILL on occasion help JUDGEMENT out in mediocre tasks such as directing traffic or helping lost people, ANTI-SKILL usually handle the big threats like organized crime and stuff like that. In a lot of ways, they operate like a standard military in a pseudo-reality world comprised of ridiculously powerful people.

MEMBER
Another Academy City based organization that answers directly to General Superintendent Aleister Crowley. Crowley is the de facto leader of the Science Side of Academy City. His main goal is to subvert the magic side of things. So basically, MEMBER is just the personal grunt organization of Crowley. They do his dirty work directly and report back to him - also directly you could say.

STUDY

Masquerading as a medical technology company, STUDY is in reality dealing in shady business with the dark side of Academy City, as well as conducting unethical experiments. 

BLOCK
BLOCK is an Academy City based organization tasked with keeping a lookout for any suspicious activity from institutions situated outside Academy City. They also have to make sure that any and all institutions situated outside Academy City cooperates with it.

ITEM 

A kind of black ops group within Academy City whose primary function is to monitor the upper class of Academy City, including the Board of Directors and prevent them from gaining too much power. However, they are also a mercenary group that take on missions designed to eliminate threats within Academy City such as Mikoto Misaka when she learns and tries to prevent the Level-6 experiments from happening. 

MAR

Stands for Multi Active Response. MAR is an emergency response organization whose primary duty is to prevent/control the involvement of civilians in dangerous situations or if possible to prevent dangerous events from occurring all together. They also rescue victims and control the vary levels of escalation of casualties in high-risk situations. Basically they do crowd control for Anti-Skill, but like JUDGEMENT, they are also deployed to clean up areas, but only if it's too dangerous or too difficult for any of the other groups handle.

Now you can avoid getting confused by all these weird names. In retrospect though, almost every one of these sound much cooler than a lame title like ACPD.

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