There's a big problem in the logic in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's which made me subliminally uncomfortable on the first watching, and really became evident later. It's about the "masked man" and discussion of it is necessarily a huge spoiler, so it's below the fold.

(By the way, please remember to use spoiler tags in comments when discussing this.)

It's eventually revealed that there are two masked men. One of them is particularly good at hand-to-hand combat and the other is very good at magic. That's one of the clues that leads Chrono to figure out who they really are. When he traps them both and removes the transformations, he isn't surprised to see that it's Lotte and Aria; it was what he expected.

All well and good on that part. But while they were playing the part of the masked man, it seems to me that Aria demonstrated abilities which she really shouldn't have had. For one thing, she stopped one of Nanoha's top energy blasts very easily, with no apparent distress. She also managed to do a bind on Nanoha from an unreasonably long distance away. (This was when Nanoha engaged Vita on the desert planet.)

The evidence from the series is that familiars gain their magic power from their masters. Their abilities may not be the same (e.g. Arf can do teleports; Fate cannot) but the energy comes from the master. If Aria really is that strong, then Admiral Gil must be titanic. That's not logically impossible in terms of the way the series is set up, but if he really were that strong I would have expected us to hear about it, perhaps as some sort of throwaway comment by Amy or Chrono.

More serious and difficult to explain is that on the rooftop after the hospital encounter, one of the masked men had the book and used it to absorb the linker cores from the knights. How did they get the book? Why did the book obey their commands to do the absorption?

The book should only obey orders from the book's master Hayate, or the knights as her proxies. That was stated explicitly at one point. It should have ignored Lotte entirely. (She was the one using it, because Aria was holding a bind on everyone.)

But it doesn't even make sense that they should have had the book, let alone that they should be able to use it.

It's unfortunate. That is one of the most important events in the story, and it shouldn't have been possible based on what we were told about the book and how it behaves.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 11:36 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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