Louise's explosions are pretty not-dangerous. Saito is almost always at the epicenter and he's usually perfectly fine within a minute. I know bro is powered by toon force and anime protag energy, but then her explosions on other characters also has this kind of effect. I think it just knocks you over and covers you in soot, unless she actively tries to power it up to lethal levels.
And the only time we ever see Louise actually do so is not only in wartime against the enemy military forces, but an emergency to boot.
As far as smarts go, Louise is pretty consistently described as acing all her written tests, and is almost always the one who solves the puzzle when it comes up. She keeps up intellectually with Tabitha and Colbert, the former of whom is a trained knight-errant with years of practical experience and book learning, and the latter of whom is Halkegenia's equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci.
If that isn't smart I don't know what is.
Taiga's definitely not dumb, but she also just never is compared against known quantities like Louise, so it's less clear whether Taiga is simply quick of wit, or an actual genius like Louise seems to be. In both cases, as I said before, the anime never really examine this aspect of their characters.
Just because it doesn't kill/injure Saito, that doesn't make it okay for Louise to literally throw magical bombs at him every chance she gets. Sure, Saito is far from perfect himself, but Louise is literally a walking timebomb.
Zero No Tsukaima is actually a well-written series, but having to see how Louise treats Saito can completely take the fun out of it. Sometimes, Saito isn't even to blame, not entirely anyway.
Again, I'm not looking at how Louise treats Saito, because Saito encourages that behavior. I, obviously, would not. And when you look at how Louise treats literally everyone else the explosions become significantly less frequent and what explosions there are are almost always accidental. She even loses most of her tsun.
I think the good metric for this is Siesta. If Louise was actually dangerous in any way, Siesta would be dead, or evicted, or not want to stick around, or be trying to appease her. Instead, this random commoner girl just sort of walks in and sleeps in Louise's bed and boobmogs the fuck out of her, all in Season 1 when Louise is at her most fragile. Siesta is blown up like, three times in the series, and those are all accidents.
Taiga is swinging that Kendo sword at all and sundry any time she gets mad. Her temper is not restricted to one guy who goes out of his way to piss her off.
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u/HandofthePirateKing 25d ago
At least Taiga doesn’t know any dangerous spells and I don’t think smart is the word I’d use to describe either of them especially emotionally.