Worth mentioning that this review does have spoilers, but only because I don't think I can properly talk about this show without them.
Nanoha StrikerS is such an infuriating mess of a show.
I've debated whether I should write this. I've drafted it several times in my head and then decided against it because I wasn't sure if it could accurately convey what I wanted to get across. I've finally decided after a few months of back and forth that I need to just do it so I can get this damn show out of my system. There are a lot of things I want to say about StrikerS, but I need you to understand before anything else, this show is frustrating.
I've not been able to stop thinking about StrikerS in the time since I watched it with a friend. It's a show that I'm constantly in two minds about. An unfocused mess of a season that is trying hard to balance far too many spinning plates and fails at keeping a lot of them up. It's as long as the first two seasons of Nanoha put together, but somehow feels like it needs even more episodes than it has. At the same time, it also needs to be scaled back significantly because there's a lot of extraneous elements that are far too underdeveloped.
Where do I start? The cast bloat seems like as good a place as any. The show is ostensibly about Subaru and Tia, the two new leads who are taking over now that Nanoha and Fate have slipped into mentor roles. It quickly moves into more of an ensemble piece as their squad grows to include Erio and Caro, and then the cast just... keeps getting bigger. It doesn't stop. By the time the show finishes, there have been no less than 20 different named antagonists, returning characters from season 1 and A's, the secret villainous organisation that is operating in a similar vein to SEELE in Evangelion. There's prototype Dr Ver from Symphogear. There's bureaucracy. There's Vivio. There's Lutecia, I guess? It's ridiculous. I couldn't tell you who the protagonist is because everyone has their moments and they almost all have some degree of importance even if those important moments fall well short of what the series is capable of.
Then there's the new setting. It's worth mentioning that I don't really care for the sci-fi elements of Nanoha that much. They served as interesting window dressing in season 1. A nice way to add some texture to this world beyond Nanoha collecting magical macguffins. In A's they went from that to intrusive, getting in the way of the things that really mattered in that season - Hayate's relationship with the Wolkenritter - and here, they're just boring. StrikerS doesn't take place on Earth, it takes place in Midchilda, a somewhat generic fantasy setting with dull worldbuilding that cements that Nanoha was better off with this very fimly in the background. At the very least it could pretend it was more interesting that way.
Ultimately, I think the only reason why Midchilda exists in the way that it does is to try and justify why it is that Nanoha, Fate and Hayate spend almost the entirety of the show nerfed below what they're capable of. The conflict of the story hinges on the premise that they can't use their full power due to bureaucratic restrictions because otherwise, the show would be over in half the time. (Likely for the better.) It's also why there are so many antagonists, as they can't be everywhere at once. It's silly, but I was willing to accept it provided the rest of the show was good enough to make up for that.
This is a good way to lead into the next issue, which is that the Time and Space Administration Bureau (hereon referred to as the TSAB) are a bad organisation, but StrikerS is unwilling to commit on the why. There's a moment about halfway through the season when Hayate feels like she has to try and prove herself to the TSAB and show that she's more than someone they deemed a criminal. This is nonsense because Hayate never actually did anything wrong and was made into a scapegoat for the TSAB by forces she wasn't even aware existed at the time. That she feels that she's under any obligation to prove herself doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and it's to the point that later on they rewrote what happened in A's to try and justify it. You could make the argument that the TSAB is twisting the truth to suit their own purposes, but that isn't what's happening here. You have characters like Gaiz, who are presented as hyper conservative warhawks who serve as little more than obnoxious roadblocks. This is the crux of the issue: the series is vaguely aware that the TSAB are a bad organisation but is unwilling to condemn them. Characters like Gaiz are meant to be the exception, not the rule, and the majority of the authority figures are meant to be more reasonable than he is. But if you've watched through till StrikerS at this point, then you'll know that this isn't the case. They had absolutely no qualms with labeling Fate as a criminal in the first season and even less qualms with scapegoating Hayate in A's.
If you really did want to try and give them the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that Fate being marked as a criminal is because she's working on the behalf of a much larger criminal element who is after dangerous magical artifacts. It's a stretch, but at the very least I can see the logic. The same cannot be said for Hayate, who, again, was made into a scapegoat by forces she wasn't aware existed, by someone who was intending for her to die anyway. She spent most of A's completely in the dark about what was really going on! There was definitely a rewrite between A's and Strikers to try and justify this, but it's one that only ends up hurting the show rather than helping it. It also, again, avoids the issue that the TSAB are a corrupt institution that are absolutely fine with labeling kids as criminals if it suits their purposes, even ones that didn't do anything wrong.
There's another story beat later on in the show that has also stuck with me involving Fate and Dr Scaglietti. StrikerS has a very cheap, tacky twist about how Fate was actually one of the clones that Dr Scaglietti made in an attempt to tie things back to season 1. It's a redundant reveal that doesn't actually do anything for her character, and Dr Scaglietti's villainous speech about the whole thing is embarrassing. It's the classic villain speech about about it is how they're not so different, and how all the bonds she's created with people are weak and how they're all tools she can use.
Had this happened just after the end of season 1, I could probably buy into it. Fate was in a uniquely vulnerable position then, having just started to form friendships with people after having escaped a very abusive mother/daughter relationship. One thing I think is interesting about season 1 of Nanoha is that Nanoha and Fate don't really properly break the ice until after the conflict is resolved and it's clear the latter isn't completely comfortable about things yet. A's takes place about half a year after so I could absolutely see it working there. At this point in the story? Definitely not. Fate has spent the past decade doing everything she can to make a happy family for herself. She's surrounded by people who love and care about her deeply and for its many faults, StrikerS never fails to show that this is the case. Nanoha and Hayate both love Fate, and Eriol and Caro adore her, so the notion that what Dr Scaglietti is saying here can get under her skin is completely amateurish.
I'm not sure why Fate was the one who Tsuzuki decided this needed to happen to, as there are already so many new characters in StrikerS that any of the new cast probably would have been a better fit. Lutecia comes to mind, actually. Her story arc is a very dull retread of similar story beats in season 1. I'd even go so far as to say that she's a Diet Fate, almost. Her story could have easily been reworked so that she was somehow related to the clones instead, which I think would have been more interesting than what she does get here. How much more interesting I couldn't actually say, but the bar was already very low with her, so the only way it could really go was up.
God, what else... I think talking about episode 17 would be good. I think It's emblematic of both the best and worst elements of StrikerS condensed into one episode. It has what is easily the emotional beat that lands the hardest, involving Subaru actually being a robot. It's very heavily foreshadowed to the point that I'm even sure it's explicitly stated prior to this, but it really, really works. It's a rather visceral moment, helped by Chiwa Saitou screaming her head off. I was invested. It's the sort of character writing that made me like the first two seasons on full display here. It also managed to make me invested in a minor character, Vice, the pilot. I'm not exaggerating when I say that a character whose name I forgot about three times had a better subplot than most of the "main" characters of the show. He's a traumatised pilot who freezes up when he tries to pull the trigger thanks to a rescue operation gone wrong. Made even worse by the person he shot by mistake being his little sister who was a child at the time. It's a well-directed scene that managed to be incredibly effective at making me care about a guy whose name I kept forgetting. Did it come out of nowhere? Yes, and it probably would have also been better served on a character who the show spends more time with, but the key thing here is that it worked.
Those are the good parts of that episode, the bad parts being that firstly, this is the episode in which Fate being one of Dr Scaglietti's clones is revealed, and secondly, Erio's trauma having absolutely nothing to do with the conflict at hand. This is treated with the same emotional weight as everything else, but it's another fumble on the show's part. Erio is supposed to have some kind of trauma from having been kidnapped as a child, which is why he's intent on stopping the antagonists from kidnapping Vivio. (Obviously he also just wants to prevent this from happening in general.) But the trigger for his trauma isn't really something that makes a whole lot of sense in the moment other than the understandable notion of wanting to prevent this from happening. This in conjunction with Caro losing it and summoning her ultra-powerful dragon summon just make the second half of this episode a complete mess that only undercuts all the good stuff that had happened in the first half. (For the record, I think that Caro's dragon summon is something that could have worked better if she was allowed her own big moment as it's something that was previously established, but it's lost in how much gets smashed together here.)
If I've not made it clear here, I do think that StrikerS has some good stuff in it. Any moment involving Vita is almost always guaranteed to be great as she manages to be effortlessly cool in just about every scene she's in. She's one of the only returning characters from A's who isn't actually done dirty by the show - sorry Zafira and Shamal - and definitely gets one of the best moments in the climax of the season. The actual ending of the show is good, too. Agito and Zest also deserve special mention for managing to, for me at least, be the emotional core of a show that was sorely lacking in that for a long time.
Actually, let me elaborate on that. There are a lot of things in StrikerS that had the potential to be the emotional core of it. Nanoha and A's were shows that had central pillars that the entirety of the season was built around. In Nanoha's case, it was the relationship between Nanoha and Fate. In the case of A's, it's Hayate's relationship with the Wolkenritter. Whatever else can be said about them, I do think it's very easy to get invested in those elements. They're what carry the shows and in A's case especially because the majority of the action is just not at all interesting to look at. StrikerS has so many things that could have been the "emotional core" of the show. There's Subaru's relationship with Tia. There's Tia trying to do what she can to overcome her inferiority complex when she's surrounded by people who are all just that much stronger than her. There's Nanoha trying to become an adoptive parent to Vivio - as an aside, Nanoha is a bad parent. She's got a very bad mentality towards how to raise kids that is borderline abusive and shouldn't be doing this. Erio and Caro had something at one point but that gets tossed aside. Lutecia's story is boring for the reasons I mentioned above but that also had the potential. I don't want to add Fate's story to the list but I could begrudgingly put it there if it wasn't just tripe.
No, in the end, the thing I latched on to the most was Agito and Zest. Two minor antagonists who are ride or die for each other. In a show that is full to bursting, they manage to be refreshingly uncomplicated in their motivations. They're similar to Vita, actually. They're not complicated because they don't need to be. They only ever want what's best for each other and the resolution to their story is one of the most satisfying moments in the show because it feels totally earned. It's another example of Nanoha's writing at its best. When everyone's motivations are clear and there's nothing to add unneeded interruptions to them, the writing of Nanoha really lands.
If it sounds like I don't like this show, it's because I don't, but only because it's such a frustrating watch. I liked the first two seasons of Nanoha quite a bit - far more than I was expecting for a series that wasn't really on my radar - and I really, really wanted to like this more than I did. If it sounds as though I'm underselling the good parts of the show, that might be the case, but that isn't the intention because it's more that the parts that fall short really fall short in a way that tends to overshadow them. There is good stuff in StrikerS, but it's a show that needed far more editorial oversight than it got. Tsuzuki feels like the kind of writer who works best when he's under limitations so that the show isn't bursting at the seams. I don't know if right now there's more that I want to say about StrikerS. There might be a point when I eventually come back, edit this with more thoughts and decide that that's my lot. I don't know if I want that to be the case because I'd like to be able to move on entirely from this show. It didn't kill my interest in Nanoha completely - that was Vivid - but it did leave me completely bewildered.
Anyway, that was StrikerS, and hopefully I'm done now.
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