No time for lollygagging folks, we’re at the final battle! Nanoha’s uniquely meditative pacing and familial focus have offered me plenty of interesting stuff to talk about throughout these writeups, but it’s finally time to kick Fate’s mom’s ass, and I am very here for that. Last episode saw Nanoha and Fate clashing in a battle that was just as satisfying as I’d hoped, leading into the reveal that Fate was never truly Precia’s daughter at all. Designed as a substitute for Precia’s actual daughter Alicia, Fate basically never had a shot at earning Precia’s love – she was pining for a past that didn’t even apply to her, an emphatic underlining of how trying to meet your abuser’s demands will never truly satisfy them. And now, just having watched this terrible woman mock Fate to her face, it’s time for Nanoha to kick some ass. My only real regret at this point is that unlike her spiritual successor Hibiki, Nanoha fights with laser attacks and not fists – I’d seriously like to see Nanoha personally deck this woman. But that’s a minor quibble, and on the whole, I’m very excited to see this unusual and very compelling show come to a close. Let’s burn down another episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha!

Episode 12

“Even if your feelings have been shattered, even if your wishes are far away… please don’t forget the kindness of those nearby.” Nanoha’s opening monologue now framed as a direct plea to Fate, once again underlining the show’s overall belief in found families. Fate and Arf are both fairly ideal avatars for this sort of narrative, because neither of them actually possess what you’d consider a “birth family” at this point

Ooh, I love this shot of our heroes rushing down the hall with Fate in Arf’s arms. Leaning into Shinbo’s aggressive color work is basically always a welcome choice

More dramatic shots as they run into Chrono. The ship has been reduced to blaring red light and dark shadows; with Precia having already begun her attack, this is no longer supposed to feel like a bastion of safety in a chaotic world

The prominent use of foreground objects to create a sense of depth now moves into even more abstract territory; the foreground objects are simply shades and shadows, gesturing towards vents or mechanical equipment, but intended mostly to create a sense of disarray and entrapment

“The Time of the Sealing of our Fates”

I hope Arf isn’t permanently stuck pining for Fate from now on, but I guess she’s a lot safer on their ship than with the action squad

Lots of heavy shadows for the team’s approach, as Nanoha once again tries and fails to make Chrono seem cool or necessary

I wonder if Chrono himself was a sort of concession to this show’s assumed male audience, a more traditional “alternate protagonist” for them to hang on

Hot damn, some beautiful animation for Chrono’s “Stinger Snipe” attack. The show leans even more heavily into shadow for this cut, allowing everything outside of Chrono’s beam of light to become an evocative blur of movement

This all feels fairly videogame-esque, though. The design of Precia’s house was always A Lot, and these generic robot defenders don’t help

I imagine this episode feels like a pretty awesome payoff to people who are here for the action, though. Boss rushes rarely make for compelling fictional drama, but certain audiences still adore them

“I’m just going to help them a bit. I’ll be right back.” No Arf, NO NO NO. THAT IS THE WORST THING YOU COULD SAY. THAT IS A “Just one more day until retirement”-TIER DEATH CUE. PLEASE DON’T

Placing a bunch of monitors screening of the ongoing attack inside Fate’s recovery room feels like an odd choice

“Even though she’s so clearly abandoned me now… I’m… still clinging to her.” She can’t help it. Fate built her sense of self and purpose around being useful to her mother, and it’s not easy to simply jump from that to finding your own reason to live

Still, with the direct hope of her mother’s love absent, Fate is now able to see how she’s been supported by the other people around her. She at last feels not just affection for Arf, but guilt at how her actions made her close friend suffer

Fate realizes she is loved in spite of it all, and it’s a genuinely painful realization. This scene is great – the dialogue’s a bit on the nose, but the sentiment is excellent, and the visual direction is just minimalist enough to work

“For us, nothing has begun yet.” Fate echoes one of Nanoha’s favorite lines. It’s like a little charm

“I wonder if that’s true. Maybe I… haven’t even begun yet?” I like it. It possesses little inherent meaning, but it’s basically an expression of faith. When things seem at their darkest, you must believe there is a whole new story waiting to begin

“I can’t just let things with you end like this, right, Bardiche?” And if you think something is hopelessly broken, you have to believe that you haven’t reached its real ending

More gestures to giant robot storytelling, with Fate sharing such a personal moment with her wand

“Nothing has even begun between us yet,” she repeats one more time. I like her adoption of this phrase in particular – you rarely see a character so inspired by the words of another that they take those words as their own mantra. But at this point, Fate desperately needs someone or something to believe in

There’s something inherently funny about Nanoha scowling as she lasers down rows of robots. Smol girl HATES robots

Wonderful pair of expressions for their reunion here. Nanoha literally glowing with how happy she is to see Fate, and Fate actually looking insecure, unsure if she’s allowed to be here

Nanoha at this point dispensing with any pretensions of not secretly being a giant robot show, as Nanoha and Fate literally team up to fight a giant robot

Wonderfully melodramatic character animation for both our leads powering up their combined attack. Once again, Nanoha’s animation is most often applied to prep and effects flourishes over actual back-and-forth, giving what could easily be static beam battles some sense of drama

Could a purer expression of love exist than joining your powers for a combo laser attack

The way their wands always vent after a big attack feels so satisfying in a tactile way. Sometimes I actually can understand the appeal of giant robot shows, and mechanical animation in general

As we pan over Nanoha’s friends back home, it occurs to me that anime is uniquely well-suited to this sort of secret world-shaking drama because in Japan, you can always handwave this stuff with “an earthquake did it”

“I’ll take care of our defense.” When you have done anything else, Yuuno

“You’ve always been by my side, protecting me.” Trust Nanoha to put a more positive spin on it

Oh dang, it’s Nice Mom’s turn to fight. GO NICE MOM!

Precia believes the route to Alhazred is “the space between dimensions,” meaning she’s going to shatter all dimensions and that will unlock her pathway. I can see why her funding got cut back in the day

As the episode continues, it feels like Nanoha lets itself embrace visual abstraction more and more. I love it – I don’t need to see the consistent architectural motifs of this place to believe it exists, I’m fine embracing evocative color palettes and fanciful, geometrically wild backgrounds. I mean, I do enjoy SHAFT shows

“I will reclaim it. The past and future that belong to me and Alicia!” Precia’s goals are a direct corruption of Nanoha, and now Fate’s, mantra. While Nanoha and Fate find strength in accepting there are still stories yet to come, Precia is determined to rewrite the world and revise the past into the story she wanted

“It was never meant to be this way.” “The world… is full of things that were never meant to be!” Chrono with an actually great line for once, and the perfect counter to Precia’s whining

“Do you plan to run away from a reality that was never meant to be? Or will you face it!?”

Fate declares her own identity to Precia, but Precia isn’t really interested in her feelings at all

And off Precia goes, tumbling into a dimensional wormhole with her daughter in a tube. Seems about right

And Done

Whoof, that sure was an action-packed episode. After a first half that saw us witnessing Fate’s long-awaited and nicely executed character turn, it was lasers and explosions from there to the end, as our heroes blew the living shit out of Precia’s secret base. My own favorite part was unsurprisingly that quiet confessional talk Fate had with herself, but the fights were as well-executed as ever, if a little wasted on generic robot enemies. And with a full episode somehow left, I imagine the time for shooting lasers at robots has ended – if Precia’s somehow still alive, Fate is going to have to come to peace with her antagonism, and laser Shitty Mom for good.

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