Occasionally when it comes to Nanoha the opinion is expressed that the first movie which redoes the plot of season 1 is the superior improved version of that story. I have to strongly disagree.
It certainly seems plausible for a 1 cour show with a pretty basic plot and arguably some filler to be refined into a movie, I feel like you could probably fan-edit season 1 into a decent movie. But the official Movie remake we got choose to add some stuff it shouldn't have and made some unfortunate choices in what to cut.
What was added was a fully dramatized backstory for Precia Tstarossa, Fate's mother. Why Precia is doing what she's doing and is the way she is was perfectly inferred in the original show, the movie feeling the need to flashback to all of it is exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate "Show don't Tell". In this context it distracts from the fact that this story isn't about Precia, it's about Fate as a victim of Precia's abuse, it confuses the emotional resonance of the story to make us sympathize with her too much.
Lily Orchard has a YouTube video on Zuco of Avatar The Last Airbender where her thesis is that Zuco was never actually a villain who needed to be redeemed of anything, his nominally fighting for the bad guys is a product of the abuse he was subject to, and so she hates the way most people talk about Zuco. Thing is even this interpretation of Zuco is something actual Anime had already done far better, because he was basically just Fate Testarossa's story from season 1 of Nanoha, Fate is never actually a bad person, just in a bad situation, she never seeks to hurt anyone, she's just seeking the Jewel Seeds without even knowing what her mother plans to use them for.
Lily also expresses the opinion that it would be fundamentally problematic to write a story where a victim becomes an abuser themselves, I'm not sure I agree with that entirely but Fate's story would meet her standards, in Arf she had someone she has authority over she could have abused and she did not. But Lily would hate the movie version because she hates when a show or movie asks us to sympathize with an abuser's sob story.
Now as far what the movie cut from season 1, the only thing I really miss is the removal of Nanoha's family.
Nanoha began as an AU spin off of a Visual Novel where Nanoha herself was just the Imouto character. So I imagine when making the movie it was easy to assume including the other characters of that VN were just Easter eggs for it's fans and not relevant to the story at hand, but that assumption was wrong.
In Clearandsweet's video on the first episode of Madoka Magica, Nanoha's pilot is one of the older Magical Girl pilots he makes comparison to, after all they are directly connected by Shinbo. One point he makes is that the lead Magical Girl in a show usually comes form a pretty stable healthy family while the supporting characters tend to have less ideal family situations, then the lead provides them with the family they need by essentially adopting them into hers.
And so that's why these two complaints I have about the Nanoha movie go together, Nanoha's good family situation is supposed to be a stark contrast to Fate's horrific one.
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