天下制覇

 

Now that we’ve pretty much reached the halfway, and seemingly, the turning point, I feel like making a few observations.

I originally meant to post this tomorrow once we reach the actual halfway point, but something about having a plane to catch at 6:45 am tends to make you try to do anything but sleep. By the way, bonus otaku points if you recognize who Nanoha is sparring with in the above pic.

First off, StrikerS is getting a new OP, assumably when the second half starts in a week. The song title is “Massive Wonders” and to the surprise of nobody, Nana Mizuki is at the helm. I’m not a huge fan of Secret Ambition, so I welcome the change, especially as the focus of the series appears to be shifting from the TSAB Administration to the Numbers versus the TSAB vs Lutecia’s Knights. And on a related note, eight of nine people I relayed this information to opted for a boob joke in response. The ninth person thought I was talking about an entirely different show. It’s also getting a new ED at some point too, but I never really expect much from EDs.

   

For the most part, I’m pretty happy with how the show’s been progressing. The art occasionally looks a little sloppy, but then I remember that I’m usually watching things in 320×240 and I just sigh and curse at Sunday Nanoha. The attempts at drama during mock battles and training has been pretty silly, but they still managed to fashion that nice Teana arc out of it. The main problem here is that they’ve really only given us a pair of cliffhanger endings to get us excited for the next week.

While it’s entertaining when Subaru tears shit up, sticking it at the front of the episode is a poor way to string your audience along. Compared to… let’s say… A’s, where we had the first episode ending with Fate and Vita about to throw down, the second with Nanoha spitted by Shamal, the fifth with a 3 on 3 fight about to start, the seventh with Fate spitted by the masked man… you get where I’m going here. StrikerS has had… Teana getting gunned down in eight and combatus interruptus in ten, and that’s really about it.

  

That said, this season is showing that Nanoha remains very evolutionary and as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of its strengths. It is continually reinventing itself and staying out of the rut that other long running series fall into. Some things, like the limiters, are a bit silly, but seeing more squad combat and team battle instead of everybody being sharply divided against their opponents is a new step. With how the Numbers have been presented so far, that really seems to be the impetus going into the second half, as opposed to the usual bad shonen habit of finding some excuse to split up and force every person to face off one on one. The day Nanoha has a tournament arc is the day it unarguably jumps the shark with a vengeance born of hell’s fury.

And as a final reminder, I’m on a plane to head across the country tomorrow and again the Sunday after. I’ll be in well before the raw comes up, but I’m not about to tell my family “oh, sorry, there’s this show about magical girls, and well… people need to know.” It’ll stil be up at some point Sunday (well… PST Sunday), just probably a couple hours later than normal. Worry not though, I have left you with various things to amuse yourselves. Take a gander at a portion of my image collection and here’s the entire set of the Nanoha Nano A’s and StrikerS comics that have been penned and translated up to a day or two ago. Don’t blow them all at once.