This was inspired by the slew of StrikerS episodes (18-24) that yesy decided to release this whole month. Naturally, the idea for a dialogue came to mind due to the mind-blowing, epic quality of said episodes, so I got introspect of transientem and Roxas of a stone and a small ripple to talk about our favourite White Devil.

There should be two other dialogue threads by both Roxas and introspect after this one; part of why I wanted to do this dialogue thing was the lack of attention and/or bad publicity that StrikerS has been getting from the anime blogosphere as a whole. The only blogs talking about them are the episode summary ones, and not a lot of them at that.

I hope to get people thinking with this series of dialogues: are the reasons they’re disliking StrikerS reasonable or sound by any definition? What is the Nanoha series all about? Has the latest instalment in the series really been sucking, or is it just the obtuse English-speaking anime fanbase and their kneejerk reaction to something new? With regards to the last question, I’ve always regarded the latter as being the case, but I digress. On with the discussion.

The Nanoha StrikerS Dialogues - Training and Definition

yes, “discussions” on StrikerS everywhere have left me in despair

Owen: StrikerS, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. It’s been the black sheep of the Spring seasons for as far as I can remember, when people started dropping for reasons like “training sucks”, “it’s boring”, “it’s not like the previous seasons”. Naturally, people were upset, one subbing group even going to the extent of dropping it altogether despite subbing the previous two seasons in the series.

I, on the other hand, have never understood all the fuss and where the detractors came from. Of course, I could always pretend and say nod in fake agreement when they say “nothing’s happening”, leaving superficial niceties when yet another blogger fell to the scourge (and I did, surprisingly enough), but deep down inside I always knew that StrikerS was destined for greatness, and if the recent slew of episodes are anything to go by, vindication is sweet.

With that in mind, I’ve got two points to make:

1) From what I can make of the current trend towards a “TRAINING HAPPENS” structure where the protagonist(s), instead of becoming almighty and powerful a.k.a the proverbial super newbie, go through the necessary annoyances to become more powerful. We’ve had StrikerS, and more recently Sky Girls demonstrating this.

Is training a necessary evil? Does it detract from this precarious genre hybrid known as mecha-musume (in Sky Girls’ case) or, in the Nanoha franchise’s case, shounen-mahou shoujo?

Personally, I think that we’re onto a good start with this. Evangelion’s one of the earliest examples I’ve personally viewed that I can cite; our dear old Shinji, ever the angst-ridden and cowardly child, piloting 001 on his first try. Or Vandread, where Hibiki manages to drive a Vanguard despite being a lowly engineer caste.

This “training” seems to be a step in the right direction for that case alone. Unhealthy precedents have been set where we seem to think that anyone and everyone can and will pilot a mecha or kick ass from the get-go, yet we seem to forget the trials and tribulations that Nanoha had to go through to get to Fate and Hayate respectively. Or was it due to her VR, hax training cum multitasking ability that we expected every new character to be the same like her?

introspect: Is training a necessary evil? Yes.

Do I have to see it? Not really.

Looking back a bit, from the scenes that I can recall (I don’t have episodes immediately on hand), it’s not even that really get to see it. In large part we get to see:

1) Their day to day activities, things they do when *not* training
2) Pep/smack talk before a mock battle
3) Bruised/bummed out trainees after a mock battle
4) Some brief snippets of individuals training (Teana’s arc)

Would the real mock battle please…ah forget it. Early on there was the qualifying course. The next significantly rendered training battle was Teana + Subaru vs Nanoha in which Teana got taken out. The latest one, if you can call it significantly rendered, was Ginga vs Subaru, which was mostly commentary while coloured orbs collided with each other.

So I don’t think that the main gripe is TRAINING HAPPENS. It’s more like:

Audience: What’s up?
Writers: They’re training
Audience: So are we going to see new abilities being tested out? Formations? Mixed arms?
Writers: Uh…it’s a black box really. Have a tease of political intrigue and character bonding instead.

If they wanted to go down that route, I’d think that they would have been pretty successful, although potentially at the cost of alienating the core audience. But they tried to do too many things at once, split up their resources. And from episode 21, we see that bad things happen when trying to split resources (Nanoha/Vita, the recruits)

Owen: You bring up valid points, introspect, but I’d rather justify it this way: TRAINING HAPPENS here isn’t so much about the training per se as it is revealing facets of a character to us, i.e. development. This is where we learn about Teana’s retarded convictions — a cliched shounen trope if used during the heat of battle, surely, but sensible in the midst of training; a controlled, if conflict-prone environment.

Another reason why I’ve been so supportive of training is how it separates development and fighting. For the typical shounen anime, the two go hand in hand; you learn about a protagonist’s motivations during the battle itself, where they’re usually called back from the brink of death for yet another round of fight porn after calling on The Strength Within�. This is why the Claymore anime-only episodes have sucked immensely, IMO. Deviating from the strength of the manga to morph into a Dragon Ball-sque orgy isn’t something that’s sat well with me.

Notice how fights that get all the messy emotions out of the way before battles are usually the best? I’d attribute that to knowing beforehand that you’re not going to encounter eye-roll inducing speeches or scenes where the antagonist taunts the protagonist who’s lying prone on the ground; said protagonist will then remember what or who they were fighting for, or something in that vein, and then tap into a vein of backup power to rise up again. Cue Round 2.

The Nanoha series has set great precedents, and I’d like to think that we’re seeing the effect of it in Sky Girls and other shounen series yet to come. Leave all those motivational internal monologues out of my battles, will you? Give me that knowledge in advance, so that I can relish my non-stop, furious, well-choreographed battles knowing full well what they’re doing it for. Or, as Elvis would say, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

Roxas: While your claim that training lets fights be fights without all kinds of unnecessary interruptions is certainly potentially valid, one issue with StrikerS is that they didn’t take advantage of this at all. Instead seeing a series of cool fights since all of the development had already been accomplished elsewhere, we got what is little more than a glorified clip show that didn’t really have very much as far as intense and entertaining battles go (at least up through episode 24).

introspect: I second that. The battle from episodes 19 to 23 have largely been a hidden 3-hour war.

But as for training, I’m not claiming that training is bad. They just went about it poorly. When Sky Girls goes training, time is taken to show a good chunk of a rehearsed operation, not just the result or not just the motions.

Stepping away from just a training for fighting context, Nodame Cantabile was rehearsal done well. Although there was little in the way of actual instrument playing, the whole series is centred around group rehearsal and the inevitable character conflicts that go with it.

especially where Fate’s concerned

Owen: 2) What exactly is it that defines Nanoha as a series? I’ve been disgusted at the general reaction which insists that Nanoha has always been about “the epic battles”; how’s that any different from any other generic shounen show out there? Naruto, the last time I heard, has epic battles. Does this mean that the two shows are equals in that sense?

I’m of the opinion that what truly separates Nanoha from the rest is the strong emotional undercurrent which supports it. A far cry from the fight porn that shounen series tend to veer into ever so often, each character actually has a deeply personal reason to fight. While this would be the case for every anime with conflict in it, Nanoha rises above the rest by ensuring that heartstrings are pulled whenever a battle takes place.

This is made apparent through the second OP animation that changes somewhere mid-season. Everyone, from Vita, whose past visions of a bloodied and tattered Nanoha still haunt her, to Subaru, who’s seen her sister beaten unconscious and brainwashed into an enemy, to Nanoha herself, who, having Vivio taken away from her, is nothing short of livid.

You know it says something for a series when the pre-battle speech between two people make you swallow hard and blink furiously. Shamal’s brief, yet immensely effective conversation with Vita had me blinking back tears at the end of it, and if a minor exchange could do such a thing to me (likewise Subaru crying in front of Nanoha in Episode 1), why, it’s but a sign of things to come. I’m prepared to shed buckets at the climatic finale that StrikerS has been working its way to bit by bit, and if the last few episode titles are anything to go by, we’re in for plenty of lachrymal moments. And epic fights, of course.

introspect: Nanoha’s fights are well choreographed and sweeping in scope (when not “training”), not to mention infused with a sense of urgency. Part of that urgency is because there is a lot at stake for one side (the opponent is in the way of achieving some grander design), and another is that the combat occurs on a much more personal level compared to the disconnect of fighting in machines.

That urgency is preserved, too. When two characters in Nanoha-verse get into a fight, it can be expected that when they stop fighting, it’s because one side is withdrawing because there are better things to do (like live and collect linker cores). No pause to trash talk each other, to strategize, to deliver a dramatic monologue, to drop juicy bits of information to advance some character’s back story, or otherwise stall for time.

There’s nothing wrong with insisting that Nanoha’s main draw is the epic battles, and it’s hardly fight porn. If nothing else, they’re at least tastefully executed.

Roxas: “Nanoha’s fights are well choreographed and sweeping in scope (when not “training”)”

In the most recent arc of Strikers (19-23 or so), I’d actually have to disagree with this. While the scopes of these battles were certainly pleasing, their choreography and execution in general was in many ways choppy and rushed– in no small part to the sheer number of simultaneous events going on, which as I noted in response to Owen’s last Nanoha commentary, is among the running faults of this series.

These past few episodes of StrikerS had over a half dozen battle scenes visited multiple times, along with a handful more scenes seen once or twice. This is a LOT of stuff to pay attention to, and, again, made these episodes feel rather confused and choppy much of the time. There’s also quite a few instances of obvious cost-cutting shortcuts and omissions (such as what often happened in Gundam Seed [Destiny]).

This isn’t to say that the battles in StrikerS are devoid of redeeming values, though. As Owen said, the emotional elements beneath the surface of the battles makes them highly meaningful rather than just being fight porn, and as intro notes, all in the absence of most of the useless fluff that accompanies most shounen series.

As far as the training thing goes– yes, sure, it does need to happen, and in this series it was also necessary to sufficiently develop the sizable number of new characters being introduced. To their credit, the show’s writers are well aware that the fan base would not tolerate sidelining Nanoha and Fate (if not the rest of the existing characters), but this left them the challenge of simultaneously doing a fairly large number of things: sufficiently presenting new content involving Nanoha and Fate, with little bits for the rest of the existing cast; introducing and making the viewer care about the new trainees; adequately developing both means and motives for a sizable new collection of villains; and weaving an intricate political subplot (which involves trying to develop EVEN MORE characters).

Trying to do all of this while having such long stretches of episode time dedicated to training just doesn’t work. As a counterexample: in the first series, all of Nanoha’s practicing her new skills took up no more than perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes across the entirety of the series. Another comparisoin: Return of the Jedi, often criticized because the later part of the movie had too much going on at once, had only three battles simultaneously occurring.

introspect: True. That statement was made more with the first two seasons in mind. With respect to episodes 19-23, or mostly just 21, 22 (to some extent), and 23, in general no the battles weren’t as good as expected. There’s something tedious destroying robots en masse. Even if they do have their anti-magic edge, an invocation of IDDQD reduces them to typical cannon fodder.

We see a lot of moments. Moments of robots blowing up, a moment where Teana takes on 4(?) cyborgs and wins, a moment where Vita gets stabbed in the back. We get to tune in just in time to see Signum fall out of the sky, Lutecia go arbitrarily (and conveniently) berserk, and Otto get captured. They’re hardly the battles that legends are made of. It kind of goes back to the whole, “Where’s the training?”, but substitute training with battle. We get to see the before and the after.

Where there was a drawn out battle, it was cut up with flashbacks, transitions to other “battles”, and a decent amount of staring the other opponent down. Yeah, I’m referring to the extended conclusion of Ginga vs Subaru.

so maybe we should all chill out and look at the bigger picture

To Be Continued…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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