The New Garage Chronicles

*suffering noise about how I'm torn on Formula Eltria*

Like on the one hand, it's basically an artifial Linker Core, and the limitations it has (being painful and damaging on bodies that don't come from high-gravity planets and aren't already particularly resilient) make it a good fit with the other magic systems and the version of it we see is clearly a bit of a prototype because it's only used by three people and was apparently created from a single prototype

but at the same time, why did it have to be nanomachines

why can it be used like Meister Arts?

Can the nanomachines manipulate mana in other things than the body they're inserted in and if yes -- does that have any limits? Contact? Mana amount??? And how does it interact when someone using it actually has a Linker Core, like Nanoha???

I used to think that the movie version of A's did a better job with Reinforce than the original series, because it gave so much more of the interaction between her and the knights and established a good internal dynamic for them, but after my most recent rewatch I actually prefer the way it's handled in the original series.

Having the defense program be a self-contained malicious entity injected into the book instead of being a corrupted part of Reinforce herself loses the subtext of Reinforce being traumatised by being used for evil for countless millenia. Instead of having her blithedly accept that she's just "bad and destructive", and bound to only cause pain, it externalises the change from The Book Of The Night Sky to the Book of Darkness.

I wish I could have half-and-half, really. Her self-loathing and denial of her own feelings just resonates a lot more with me now.