Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha

So some interesting news. In addition to having previously licensed ViViD Strike for English streaming, Amazon has now also licensed the original series, A's, and Strikers for English streaming. This is the first time that Strikers has ever been licensed in English.

At the moment, all 4 of those are still only available on Amazon Prime UK, but they have confirmed that ViViD Strike will come to Amazon Prime US in the future, so the other will probably come too.

Also there will be three ovas for Vivid strike that will come on the volumes 2,3 and 4 of the blu-rays:

• BD 2: episode 5.5 - Rio and Corona's mixed magic tournament
• BD 3: episode 5.75 - details about the relationship between Victoria and Rinne, Nove and Jill
• BD 4: episode 13 - Summer Time Vacation

edited 4th Dec '16 2:42:32 PM by APN

WHERE DID THIS INFO COME FROM?

I want that first one!

Excellent.

edited 4th Dec '16 2:46:02 PM by Deadbeatloser22

Episode titles for the ovas are on the official website http://vivid-strike.com/dvd/

And summaries are from the recent magazine interview.

edited 4th Dec '16 2:57:24 PM by APN

Man, that's two pieces of awesome news. I'm definitely interested in seeing the mixed magic league, and licensed Nanoha is always good. I'm not generally the sort of guy who prefers subtitles over dubs, but man I really hope that Amazon has TOS and A's subbed, because the dub was terrible. And I say that as a guy who will happily watch dubs that most people consider terrible.

All 4 series on Amazon are currently subtitles only.

I agree on the dubs not being very good. Then again, there are only a handful of anime with good dubs. Still, good news for all of us.

I've done some poking around the internet and haven't been able to find anything about Vivid being licensed. TOS, A's, and Strikers are already up on Amazon UK, and Vivid Strike has been simulcast since it started airing, but for Vivid itself I'm coming up dry. Anyone have a source for Amazon picking up Vivid as well?

No info on that yet, but the ViViD anime was done by A1 Pictures instead of Seven Arcs, because it was only the manga's magazine that wanted it animated.

That means that the licensing involved is completely different. It might get licensed whenever the season 2 of it comes out though.

Oh, whoops, I misread your original post because "Vivid" was bluelinked and "Strike" wasn't. My bad, that makes sense.

Yeah, the automatic blue links can be pretty annoying in the forums.

That's Rinne's problem basically. She really doesn't see that there are people who care for her. Hell, she puts so much crap on herself for the fact that she wasn't able to be with her grandfather's deathbed that she fails to see that her parents do not even blame her for what happened. Maybe she has that bad dream about her grandfather not smiling at her because he's sad that her adopted granddaughter blames herself for what happened. So, yeah, if anybody needs to be befriended hard, it's Rinne.

I think it's self-loathing, mostly. She knows, intellectually, that there are people that care for her — she just keeps pushing them away because she thinks she doesn't deserve them. She really just needs someone to beat her senseless and then give her a damn hug. Luckily, Fuka seems to be up for the job.

Double post, but after watching the first episode of A's, I decided I might as well go back and start with the original series and rewatch the whole franchise. TOS doesn't have nice timestamps from the start like A's does, but you can still follow a rough timeline.

• Episode 3 says it's been a week since Nanoha first met Yuuno, and it's on a Sunday. Episode 4 is on her next day off, so presumably a week later, next Sunday.
• Episode 5 has the Takamachis (plus Arisa, Suzuka, and Suzuka's maids) going to a hot spring for "vacation season", but it's not clear which holiday (if any) they're referring to, or how much time has passed between episodes 4 and 5.
• Episode 6 has Nanoha's friends and family worried about her, since they've noticed something bothering her lately but she refuses to talk about it, and ends as Nanoha and Fate manage to blow up a Jewel Seed by trying to seal it simultaneously. Episode 7 picks up on the same scene, and does have a timestamp — April 26th. The next day (when Chrono shows up) is also timestamped, April 27th. Episode 8 has lots of TSAB exposition and Lindy tells Nanoha and Yuuno to sleep on it before making a decision. Later (presumably the next day, April 28th), they call Lindy and tell her they've decided to help finish collecting the Jewel Seeds.
• In episode 9, Nanoha mentions that it's been ten days since they boarded the Arthra, which would make it May 8th. Lindy repeats the "ten days" thing to Nanoha's family in episode 10, and Nanoha spends that night and the next day (May 9th) at home. The next morning (May 10th), she returns to the Arthra in order to help the TSAB arrest Precia. That day lasts through all three remaining episodes (11, 12, and 13) in the series.
• The last episode says that after Precia blows herself up, they spend "several days" on the Arthra riding out the dimensional effects of the jewel seeds going off, then Nanoha spends another "several days" at home before she gets to see Fate one last time (for now).

So, tldr, episode 4 is two weeks from the beginning of the series, it's not entirely clear how long it is between episodes 4 and 5 or 5 and 6, but from there we can follow exact dates until the main action of the series series wraps up on May 10th. Assuming that there's a week each for episodes 5 and 6, like there are for 3 and 4, and another week for the epilogue at the end, then the first episode would be somewhere near the end of March, and the epilogue takes place in mid May. I'd be tempted to call it 11 weeks, as that works out to one week per episode except a couple of two-parters (episodes 1 and 2, plus 11 and 12) where time doesn't advance much during or between those episodes. As I mentioned earlier, the Book of Darkness first activates few weeks later (at the stroke of midnight on June 4th, Hayate's ninth birthday), but A's proper doesn't start until the beginning of December.

Incidentally, Nanoha has the most understanding mother ever. In episode 8, Nanoha tells her that she needs to leave home for a while in order to do something dangerous, but doesn't explain what or why, because she doesn't want to tell her about magic. Nanoha's mom agrees to this. Talk about Free-Range Children.

The craziest part is, Nanoha's mom still wins the Mother of the Year award when you compare her to all the other mothers of nine-year-olds in the show. Precia sends Fate to find and collect dangerous artifacts on an unknown world with no supervision except her familiar (and then whips her bloody for not getting results fast enough). Lindy sends Chrono into battle as a TSAB Enforcer. Yuuno mentions in episode 9 that he's an orphan^note technically, he says that he "didn't have parents", which isn't necessarily the same thing as "was an orphan" in a setting with Artificial Humans... , but the entire Scrya clan is conspicuously absent despite the fact that Yuuno nearly dies in the first episode.

I'd forgotten the bit about Yuuno being an orphan, though. It's left ambiguous whether he was born into the Scrya clan or they adopted him after his parents died, and the Nanoha wiki doesn't know either. Add that to the list of "things we don't know about Yuuno", I guess — alongside "where did he get Raising Heart in the first place?" and "why does he respond to nearly dying by turning himself into a ferret, anyway?"

Other random thoughts after rewatching the series:

Nanoha is an absurdly mature child. She notes in the very first episode that she's kind of a third wheel in her own family (her parents are a couple, obviously, and still "act like newlyweds" in her words, while her older siblings are both in their late teens and practice swordsmanship together with their dad, so they're closer to each other than either is to Nanoha, the nine-year-old who claims to be bad at physical activities like sports), and in episode 9 she tells Yuuno that she spent a lot of time at home alone when she was young, because her dad was seriously hurt not long after they opened the family cafe, so her mother and brother would work at the restaurant, her sister took care of their dad, and Nanoha was largely left to fend for herself "until recently". (Baby Nanoha is even more adorable◊ than nine-year-old Nanoha, incidentally. Sitting at home, by herself, drinking her juice.)

You know how it's said that magic in Nanoha is As Lethal as It Needs to Be? Well, that doesn't actually come up in the original series. Magic is presented pretty much exactly as if they were shooting giant laser cannons at each other. The only reason no one dies is because no one takes a hit that they can't defend against. (Precia does fry a bunch of TSAB Red Shirts when they try to arrest her, but they're all evacuated back to the Arthra and you see the main cast doing first aid on them later, so they're presumably knocked out rather than killed.) While they're fighting Precia's guard robots in episode 12, Nanoha even comments "then there's nothing to worry about" after Chrono tells her that they're just machines, which seems to suggest that she was worried about hurting someone accidentally during the fight. Nanoha just hasn't learned how to pull her punches yet, or Early-Installment Weirdness? (Probably the latter, but the former makes a good Watsonian explanation.)

One of the very last things that Fate says to Nanoha in the series is that since they're friends now, if Nanoha is ever in trouble, Fate will save her instead of the other way around. Definitely makes a great callback when Fate pulls a Big Damn Heroes to save Nanoha from Vita (and insisting that they're friends, not just allies) in the first episode of A's.

Considering her father and brother are already badasses themselves being a Ninja and Samurai respectively and actually hinted at having magical abilities, her mom is just going with the flow as her daughter is doing the same thing.

I knew that her dad was an assassin or something in the original Triangle Heart games, but I didn't realize that any of her family was supposedly magic, as well. Though that would raise questions as to why it was Nanoha that heard and answered Yuuno, rather than anyone else in her family.

They were out of range?

She obviously has a much better aptitude when it comes to magic, her brother is a much better swordsman. Also age is a major factor on magic aptitude, if you do not learn magic early your magic power goes down dramatically, training can help you keep most of your power but only so much. Hence why ages of the cast are so low.

Nanoha was the perfect target really she was just getting into the age and natural ability to pick it up.

edited 7th Dec '16 9:01:30 AM by Memers

I They were out of range?

Probably not, because how else would Fate and Arf communicate with each other even if they were kilometers apart, or in the Wolkenritter's case, literally worlds apart. The simplest answer is that none of Nanoha's siblings have magical aptitude. After all, it has been stated in multiple side materials that Earth has "no magic culture" and Earthlings who have natural magic aptitude like Gil Graham and Nanoha are very very rare.

Anyway, on to the task at hand...

Vivid Strike 11- The outcome of Befriending

• Really, do I have to tell you guys if this thing succeeds? We all know what is bound to happen at the end. After all, this is verified science.
• The most impressive thing about this episode is Rinne's first "real" punch, as in a punch executed using the things that she learned throughout her martial arts training, I was actually very impressed when Rinne sent Fuka flying with a perfectly executed punch. Really, this is but a glimpse of Rinne's true potential as a fighter.
• Of course, similar to how Nanoha managed to withstand Fate's attack in season 1, Fuka comes back and the rest of the fight turns into a brawl.
• Well, we'll never get to see Einhart vs Rinne, that's for sure.
• Next episode: The finale, where everybody joins the Nakajima Gym, and Vivio's harem increases.

Yep, not much else to say about this one. I don't think anyone actually expected befriending to fail. That said, they did legitimately keep the outcome of the fight in suspense — I could have seen it going either way right up until the conclusion. It was interesting to see Rinne's training finally "click", and she was able to throw a perfect punch with technique and power behind it. If she'd been doing that from the beginning, then no one in U15 except maybe Einhard would have stood a chance. Of course, this is Nanoha, so she had to get the shit kicked out of her before she could get her head on straight.

I was honestly a bit surprised to see Fuka pull off a win. Once the Befriending had taken hold, she'd done what she came there for, so the outcome of the fight no longer really mattered. Then it just devolved into a brawl, where Rinne's superior strength seemed like it would have the edge over Fuka's better technique. Maybe they did it that way just to avoid having to deal with the promised Rinne vs Einhard fight if Rinne won. The only explanation I can come up with is that after things had proceeded to the point of Combat Breakdown, Rinne was in new territory for her, while Fuka was right at home. Basically all of Rinne's fights ended with decisive knockout blows, so she wasn't used to going through fights that ended when one side's body just gives out rather than when someone landed a conclusive hit. Fuka, on the other hand, was used to getting her ass kicked by people who were stronger than her, so she was better able to keep going even as she took hits than Rinne was.

One more episode to wrap up the series. It's a pity there's not enough time left to see the Fuka vs Einhard finals, but that was never the focus of Vivid Strike anyway. I don't think we've seen Einhard fight at all, now that I think about it.

I wonder if Fuka and Rinne would learn that Vivio and Einhart have similar situations as they have, specifically, Vivio being an adopted girl like Rinne and Einhart having basically no parents like Fuka. I think it would be interesting to see their reactions and how their assumptions of Vivio and Einhart's lives are ultimately proven wrong.

That and the fact that her mother won't hesitate to blow you the fuck up cool your head if you annoy her.

Now I want to see an AU Vivid Strike where Rinne is adopted by TSAB combat mages instead of fashion designers. Then they reverse roles, where Fuka joins the professional Strike Arts circuit in order to make a living, and Rinne has to Befriend her to snap her out of her "must win or go back to being a starving orphan forever" mindset.

...who do we know in the secondary or tertiary cast who would adopt a kid?

Hayate would probably do it and could lead to some interesting personality quirks in the kid.