Nanoha is mahou shoujo, or magical girl. For most people, that’s enough to repel them away from the show. There were two things that managed to pique my interest in it enough to actually watch it. The first was the surprising amount of praise that it got and the promise of lasers and GAR that it actually contained. The second was Masaaki Endoh’s cover of ETERNAL BLAZE, the OP for Nanoha A’s.

The story starts fairly typical of these types of things. Nanoha’s a girl in the third grade and runs into magical creature that bestows amazing magical powers to her and she goes around collecting macguffins and sealing evil away. Most people will tell you that the typical-ness of the show goes away by about halfway through the first season.

So what is so great about Nanoha? Once we get past the ‘mahou shoujo’ parts of the show and into the second half, the plot becomes more like shounen. Nanoha’s awesome rival, Fate, is introduced, and they fight it out. Much like Naruto, Nanoha makes friends by beating them into submission. Unlike Naruto, Nanoha does it through superior and excessive firepower. The shounen themes and motifs are accentuated even more in Nanoha A’s.

And firepower. The magic and weapons in Nanoha are like something out of DBZ or Bleach. Crazy weapons, giant lasers, flashes of colour, and huge explosions. I’d heard somewhere that each character in Nanoha is supposed to be derived from some sort of mecha, with Nanoha being the RX-78-2.

Also awesome are the weapons themselves. Nanoha’s Raising Heart is the most awesome, because of its specialty for ridiculously large lasers and its hilarious Engrish: “LET’S SHOOT IT STARLIGHT BREAKER. I CAN BE SHOT. I BELIEVE MASTER. TRUST ME, MY MASTER.” In fact, all the protagonists’ weapons (in A’s) have awesome Engrish, while the antagonists all have awesome German. Other than that, the weapons are just plain cool, with their very mechanical design and operation.

Basically, nine year old girls manage to beat a number of shounen protagonists at being awesome and just wrecking stuff. How long did it take for Naruto or Ichigo to become competent? And how long did it take for Nanoha to be blowing stuff up? That’s what I thought.

Tags: Anime, nanoha

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 4:46 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.