Magic and Technology of MGLN

[Keroko]

Ah yes, the whole 'the TSAB really is a dirty organization' theory, even though every single time something dirty is going on it is done in the deepest of secrets by a mere handful of people and against the wills of the masses.

The whole cradle robbing thing has zero support in the anime, and in fact only has conflicting evidence pointing against it.

[itanshi1]

Cradle robbing? Oo regis/vivio? Makes me think of the cabal patriarch having sex with phage the untouchable (a teenager) and she giving birth to a dark god :P

Oh wait phage is a zombie. ah well

[arkhangelsk]

Originally Posted by Keroko

Ah yes, the whole 'the TSAB really is a dirty organization' theory, even though every single time something dirty is going on it is done in the deepest of secrets by a mere handful of people and against the wills of the masses.

Well, those "mere handful" of people are only the top commanders!

As for the "will of the masses" ... umm ... we hadn't even really seen the masses yet...

The whole cradle robbing thing has zero support in the anime, and in fact only has conflicting evidence pointing against it.

Actually, Nanoha was explicitly an exception, Hayate and Co. were swept up first by "Community Service" and Fate became a contract mage and placed herself under Lindy's command before she set another foot on Earth. Some contradictions!

[darkalpha]

Originally Posted by Keroko

Ah yes, the whole 'the TSAB really is a dirty organization' theory, even though every single time something dirty is going on it is done in the deepest of secrets by a mere handful of people and against the wills of the masses.

The whole cradle robbing thing has zero support in the anime, and in fact only has conflicting evidence pointing against it.

I feel bit conflicted by your response. ^_^;

In a way, that wasn't what I had quite intended to imply, that whole TSAB is a dirty organization or anything like that. But then again I might've been unknowingly heading for that way.

I just wanted to enterain the idea of Nanoha coming home to find some mystery that TSAB's hiding from her because it was something different. One can only stand so many "nanoha and co. vs bad guy of the day" theme that's prevelant in ff.net's nanoha fic section before one gets sick of it. At least that fic inspired by Nanoha BetrayerS was something unique.

Edit: just wanted to clarify, I wasn't intending to portray TSAB as whole to be 'dirty,' although there that doesn't mean some of its individuals can't be (as per StikerS).
Sometimes if you want to see a story concept or premise written but no author has done it, then it may be up to yourself to write about that.

[FRS]

Originally Posted by darkalpha

....

That's pretty much what happened; TSAB simply didn't let Nanoha return home at end of first season, wanted to hold her for couple of months. And guess what happens? BoD pops up in her hometown ala A's and eventually goes berserk when Graham and sisters implements their plans.
...

Been a while but isnt the end of Nanoha and the begining of A's showing Nanoha at school ? wouldnt that contradict the whole "forced recrutement/confinement" thing ?

[Avatar_notADV]

The only real element in favor of "TSAB is mean and evil" is that it keeps showing up as the bad guy, or at least involved with the bad guy - 3 times in 3 seasons. (Though not in SSX, right?) Then again, there's not really an "external enemy" in Nanoha; the TSAB doesn't have a rival organization, just Lost Logia, rogue Middies, and its own internal politics to deal with. Pretty much any plot beyond "stop the crazy person" is eventually going to involve someone associated with the TSAB...

It's more or less a benign organization. Obviously they could be up to all sorts of dirty tricks on Earth, but it's at least implied that they just don't go in for that sort of thing; in a lot of ways, Earth doesn't even matter to them, it's just a planet with no magic and a catalog number. It's evident that it tends to give a lot of discretion to the commander on the scene, and while that can be good (Lindy!) it could at least theoretically be bad. And it has to be said that they have, as an institution, that special kind of callousness which is a survival trait for organizations in contact with infinite realities - the ability to ignore that, somewhere, there are a million terrible things happening that you're not going to do anything about. The TSAB is not on a crusade to make sure horrible things don't happen anywhere, they're just worried about horrible things happening to Mid, or getting out of hand and happening to Mid, and if that means they can stop it happening to some other people too, that's a bonus.

It's not beyond the pale to think that, if Nanoha had said "you know, what I really want to do with my life is bake cakes!", the TSAB would have gone to more of an effort to recruit her. That's not evil or wrong, so long as it's positive inducements. The idea that they would have frog-marched her out of the shop, or threatened to have something terrible happen to her parents if she didn't go... that's not just silly, it's stupid. Would you want to give Nanoha a powerful reason to want to kill you and then years of training on how to go about it? Long-term, not a productive policy.

[darkalpha]

As its already clear that we're off topic here, I took the liberty of contiuning the fanfic talk in the fanfiction thread:
http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...ostcount=14329

Hopefully that post will clear up what I'm aiming for in the story. If you want to contiune disucssion of the story, lets so it in fic thread. Sorry for being offtopic for while here.

[Wild Goose]

Avatar_notADV: Seems to work for the Chinese, at any rate. *shrug*

Then again the Malaysian government is pretty oppressive and racist as well, it just tends to be somewhat more subtle about it. (The current prime minister is involved in a case involving a political analyst, a mongolian intepreter, and two SWAT cops killing the interpreter and blowing up her body with C4. And, as usual, the SWAT brass, when asked, had no fucking clue what happens in their units.)

[FRS]

Originally Posted by Wild Goose

Avatar_notADV: Seems to work for the Chinese, at any rate. *shrug*

Then again the Malaysian government is pretty oppressive and racist as well, it just tends to be somewhat more subtle about it. (The current prime minister is involved in a case involving a political analyst, a mongolian intepreter, and two SWAT cops killing the interpreter and blowing up her body with C4. And, as usual, the SWAT brass, when asked, had no fucking clue what happens in their units.)

that's something

[itanshi1]

Ah, the art of implausible deniability. Would be humorous if anyone stood up against gross incompetence.

Anyways, I have a questions. Where exactly does el hazard lay, what would it take to travel there, what would travel be like going there? I'll just make up the rest.

[Wild Goose]

Originally Posted by FRS

that's something

Yep. The political analyst had ties to the PM, who at that time was the deputy prime minister. The analyst was on trial for supposedly masterminding the Mongolian's murder, and the SWAT cops were the guys who did the deed and used C4 to dispose of the body.

Rumors have been surfacing that the Mongolian (who was very hot, before her death) and the PM were in fact linked. IT's been more or less confirmed that the analyst was her lover as well, but how it all ties in nobody is really sure yet.

Oh, and in this country, if you aren't Malay, you can't expect to go further. The government loves all things malay. The current educational plan for the next 6 years? It's called "Glorifying Malay."

[DezoPenguin]

Honestly? The real problem with deciding what the TSAB is, what it does, and what its attitudes are is that we see jack-all nothing of the actual functioning of the Bureau.

For example, who serves as its executive, legislative, and judiciary authority? We know that there's a Council, but what does this Council do? Is it a legislative body? An executive body? Both? An advisory committee? Clearly there aren't Council term limits since the brains-in-a-jar had been heading it forever, but hey, the Canadian Senate has terms-for-life too. Is the TSAB government democratically elected? Appointed? Is it run by Mid-Childans only? Or do various "administrated worlds" get a voice?

How does the military structure function? Who do they fight with that military? Do they just keep it as a defensive force to deal with crazy Lost Logia and if any external threat gets belligerent? Or do they function proactively?

How does the judicial system work? Does the "you only get a trial if you surrender freely when arrested" thing represent an abuse of power, allowing people to be incarcerated on the whim of the authorities? Or is it the reverse--the judiciary is so fundamentally honest that to curb their power is actually to oppose the fair administration of justice? What rights do citizens have? Is there freedom of speech? Of religion? Of the press? Against unlawful search and seizure?

What defines an "administered world" versus a "non-administered world"? Are there worlds that do not fall within either category? Are there rivals to the TSAB's existence? Or does it encompass all the worlds in the "known" dimensional sea?

The bottom line here is that we only get quick, sidealong glimpses at the inner workings of the TSAB. Worse, those inner workings get developed as new plots for ongoing seasons come along (you can't tell me, for example, that anyone on the production staff had any idea at the time the Arthra first appeared in MGLN that there was such a thing as Jail Scaglietti, even though he was apparently responsible for the initial research Precia turned into Fate, or that the TSAB government was backing him in a black-budgeted defense research project). The heroes of the story are all shiny, happy, enthusiastic optimists straight out of, well, a magical-girl series, so that tends to throw shadows onto the "gray" workings of villains.

So ultimately, some of us see nearly everyone in senior government who's not a family member of the main characters presented as a villain, and we see that as evidence of the TSAB as a whole as a fundamentally corrupt organization, no better than and probably worse than current Earth superpowers. Others of us see that these corrupt villains are all operating in the shadows and concealing what they're up to and assume that there's something that they have to be hiding from, and therefore extrapolate that the TSAB must be a fundamentally decent group representative of the high standards that the main characters hold. But in reality, there's simply not enough evidence to prove the case either way, because the franchise spends nearly all of its time on the stories that it tells and not on world-building the universe in which it tells them.

[Keroko]

Originally Posted by darkalpha

I feel bit conflicted by your response. ^_^;

In a way, that wasn't what I had quite intended to imply, that whole TSAB is a dirty organization or anything like that. But then again I might've been unknowingly heading for that way.

Ah, sorry about that then.

Originally Posted by darkalpha

I just wanted to enterain the idea of Nanoha coming home to find some mystery that TSAB's hiding from her because it was something different. One can only stand so many "nanoha and co. vs bad guy of the day" theme that's prevelant in ff.net's nanoha fic section before one gets sick of it. At least that fic inspired by Nanoha BetrayerS was something unique.

Edit: just wanted to clarify, I wasn't intending to portray TSAB as whole to be 'dirty,' although there that doesn't mean some of its individuals can't be (as per StikerS).
Sometimes if you want to see a story concept or premise written but no author has done it, then it may be up to yourself to write about that.

Well, sure. Go ahead. A's and StrikerS already had a few darker individuals after all.

Originally Posted by arkhangelsk

Well, those "mere handful" of people are only the top commanders!

As for the "will of the masses" ... umm ... we hadn't even really seen the masses yet...

Right. Well, basically everyone else besides those handful. You'll note Graham getting shoved out of the bureau, and had the brains and Regius not been killed, they'd have faced charges as well. Proof of this is Auris, the lone survivor of the bunch, who was arrested. This is blatant proof that what they were doing was not condoned by the TSAB, regardless of rank.

Originally Posted by arkhangelsk

Actually, Nanoha was explicitly an exception, Hayate and Co. were swept up first by "Community Service" and Fate became a contract mage and placed herself under Lindy's command before she set another foot on Earth. Some contradictions!

'I can live on a peaceful little wildlife reserve planet with virtually no surveillance' Caro comes to mind. Oh, and then of course there is the point where nobody made a fuss when they gave Nanoha a blatant choice of whether or not she wanted to get involved or resume her normal life. Seriously? They very casually make a huge breach in protocol and nobody gives as much as a squeak? Honestly?

And finally, in the anime the TSAB has been displayed as nothing less than extremely humanitarian, and anyone we've seen being less so was either discharged or arrested (I'm purposely not counting the killed ones, since the TSAB really didn't have much to do with Due offing the High Council and Regius). Having a cradle robbing rule in place is a blatant contradiction to this.

[Kikaifan]

Was the High Council even an official part of the government or did they just manipulate it? It kind of felt like no one actually knew they existed; unless my memory is faulty there wasn't some gigantic 'high council assassinated!' headline and associated uproar after Due killed them.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

As far as I could tell, they were SEELE clones... right down to the epic monolith screens they talked to Regius with.

[Rising Dragon]

Originally Posted by AdmiralTigerclaw

As far as I could tell, they were SEELE clones... right down to the epic monolith screens they talked to Regius with.

But not EXACT clones. SEELE, at least, still had semi-functional bodies behind their scary monoliths. The Three Admirals, um, didn't.

[DezoPenguin]

Originally Posted by Rising Dragon

But not EXACT clones. SEELE, at least, still had semi-functional bodies behind their scary monoliths. The Three Admirals, um, didn't.

Careful, there; The Three Admirals are not the Brains; the Three Admirals are heroes from the age of the founding of the TSAB who still wield plenty of power and influence in the Bureau; they're among the most significant of Hayate's supporters in founding RF6 alongside the Church. The President of the Council (and his two lackeys, whose titles I do not recall) are different entities altogether.

[Rising Dragon]

Originally Posted by DezoPenguin

Careful, there; The Three Admirals are not the Brains; the Three Admirals are heroes from the age of the founding of the TSAB who still wield plenty of power and influence in the Bureau; they're among the most significant of Hayate's supporters in founding RF6 alongside the Church. The President of the Council (and his two lackeys, whose titles I do not recall) are different entities altogether.

*sighs* Too many terms and not enough brainpower on my part. I better go rewatch the series, more carefully this time around.

[DezoPenguin]

Originally Posted by Rising Dragon

*sighs* Too many terms and not enough brainpower on my part. I better go rewatch the series, more carefully this time around.

Tell me about it. I hate the fact that not only do I have to remember all those details (which I mess up often), but in addition there's also so much additional information out there that's All There In The Manual, except it's a manual I don't own written in a language I don't speak.

[RadiantBeam]

Were the Brains ever given any official titles? I know they're members of the Council (I think they are, anyway), but beyond that I can't remember them being called anything else that would hold weight or power in the Nanoha world.