Cruel Angel Theses

Late Nanoha fan here. Think it was the beginning of this year or around November last, when I kept on seeing a recurring face among the posts of /a/. Some hushed whispers about it being QUALITY, and there was all manner of Photoshopped pictures on blogs everywhere. After awhile I couldn’t stand it and decided to get the two seasons to see what the fuss was all about. It reminded me of Cardcaptor Sakura, what with the magical staffs and all.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nanoha is the type of series that comes along ever so often and reinvents the genre wheel. The tag “post-mahoushoujo” comes to mind, because, like Touhou, the stigma that once came along with adoration of little girls with magical powers — it’s all gone now. Well, maybe the little girl part still is stigmatized, but it’s generally okay nowadays for a young adolescent male to go about singing praises of an anime rooted in the series.

Was rather apprehensive about how the first episode was going to turn out, seeing how Triad released their subs in blasted .mp4 containers and I had to pry my dad’s laptop from his fingers in order to watch it, and also how summaries everywhere didn’t really go into the episode as in-depth as I’d have liked.

So I fire up the episode. There’s a whole lot of distracting things on the screen: aside from the subtitles and kanji ones — at least they’re not karaoke — and aside from Nanoha and Fate we’ve got now got their prot�g�s on screen hogging valuable space. My take on how the series is going to go about pacing the story is that they’ll spend the first 13 episodes training the new recruits, after which the other 13 are going to be spent saving the world, again. Pretty much like how Nanoha and Nanoha A’s was. Maybe. Or they’ll go about it through a by-the-book RPG style and after the little ‘uns level up, they’ll have them fighttwo bosses, one per season to do battle with.

The fire scene at the beginning. At first I was all “meh, this is so typical, I don’t expect her to die or anything” but then after Nanoha came in, did her Divine Busting, and flew off with Subaru I had a lump in my throat, which remained there until she left after leaving Subaru with the ambulance. It’s probably been like under half a year since I last saw the series, but I had a lump in my throat, like a father would at his daughter’s wedding seeing her all grown up and stuff.

Then the rest of the episode went on and it wasn’t as bad as I’d have thought. You know a series is good when they make you sit up in your chair and cheer (not literally) on two rookies going about their rank advancement test under safe and controlled conditions. The chemistry between Subaru and Tea was definitely something, and though I’m sufficiently irritated at how generic Tea’s character design in that I keep on thinking of Asuna when I look at her, the display of new and awesome weaponry made up for that.

“Mage-B, Tea, or me?”

The two systems under one team — Midchilda and Velka — was a nice touch, in particular the stolen-from-GITS invisiblity and the Narutoesque Tea clones. What made it even better was that there wasn’t any simmering sexual tension like we had from Nanoha and Fate , where you knew they were going to break down in each other’s arms during Fate’s departure. Maybe the creators were aware of this because during the obligatory emotional moment where Tea asked Subaru to go on without her and they argued, instead of breaking down into tears like I expected her to do when her jacket was being grabbed, Subaru instead gave a sort-of want gar look.

Noteworthy mention: I understand Subaru’s a close-combat mage like Velka types are, and her team dynamics/chemistry with Tea was simply amazing. Aside from the “nice timing!” bit, we’ve got a whole lot more intelligent fighting going on that isn’t huge laser beams being shot at from one end of the set to the other, inexperienced brute force overwhelming experience, or high-speed power battles going on (yet). The spells I mentioned earlier were put to good use and great effect, and it’s nice to see mages running around for a change, because I prefer ground fights to aerial ones, which remind me of Dragon Ball.

And it ended on a high note. This is pretty weird because I didn’t shed a tear throughout two whole seasons of Nanoha bar season one’s finale, yet I found my eyes welling up along with Subaru’s at the end. I think it was touching how Nanoha remembered Subaru despite Subaru being so sure that she wouldn’t. It could have also been tears of relief, and anger, and disbelief at Triad for taking so bloody long with it — they subbed Bokurano first instead of this?! Now that the first episode’s all done with I want them to hurry up with the next. Bokurano can kiss my ass with their dark “mysterious” angst mecha story viral marketing — give me StrikerS any day.