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Baughn comments on Rationality Quotes June 2013 - Less Wrong
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Source? It's pithy, yet not on the usual quote compilations that I checked.
Sounds like Takamachi Nanoha to me.
That's more along the lines of, "I will convert my enemies to friends by STARLIGHT BREAKER TO THE FACE".
Offhand I can't think of a single well-recorded real-life historical instance where this has ever worked.
Substitute "friends" with "trading partners" and the outlook improves though.
Fair, the British were totally befriending their way through history for a while.
"Befriending" by force? Well, post-WWII Japan worked out pretty well for the United States. As for dealing with would-be enemies by actually befriending them, Alexander Nevsky sucked up to the Mongols and ended up getting a much better deal for Russia than many of the other places the Mongols invaded.
That's what her reputation turned out like, and what TSAB propaganda likes to claim. It's not what she actually did. Let me count the befriendings:
Alisa Bannings. The sole "Nanoha-style befriending": Nanoha punched her to make her stop bothering Suzuka, after which they somehow became friends. No starlight breaker, though.
Alicia. Mostly Alicia was the one beating up Nanoha. It's true that Nanoha eventually defeated her in a climactic battle, after first sort-of-befriending her along more normal lines; however, Nanoha's victory in that battle isn't what finally turned Alicia. That's down to the actions of her insane, brain-damaged mother.
Vita. Neither motivation nor loyalty ever wavered.
Reinforce. Decided to work with Nanoha after Hayate asked her to. Nanoha's starlight breaker was helpful for temporarily weakening the defence program, but was not instrumental in the actual motivation change.
Vivio. ...do I really need to go there?
Her reputation for converting enemies is not undeserved, but she's not converting them by defeating them; she's converting and defeating them. Amusingly, the movies (which are officially TSAB propaganda) show marginal causation where there's only correlation.
Oh, and explicitly because people have asked me not to, you're hereby invited to the rizon/#nanoha irc channel. I'm relatively confident you won't show up, which is good - it has a tendency to distract authors when I do this. :P
Did you confuse Alicia with Fate?
No.
I'm just opinionated on the subject.
MAHOU SHOUJO TRANSHUMANIST NANOHA
"Girl," whispered Precia. The little golden-haired girl's eyes were fluttering open, amid the crystal cables connecting the girl's head to the corpse within its stasis field. "Girl, do you remember me?"
It took the girl some time to speak, and when she did, her voice was weak. "Momma...?"
The memories were there.
The brain pattern was there.
Her daughter was there.
"Momma...?" repeated Alicia, her voice a little stronger. "Why are you crying, Momma? Did something happen? Where are we?"
Precia collapsed across her daughter, weeping, as some part of her began to believe that the long, long task was finally over.
So, in case anyone is still confused about the point of the Quantum Physics Sequence, it was to help future mad scientists love their reconstructed daughters properly :)
An Idiot Plot is any plot that goes away if the characters stop being idiots. A Muggle Plot is any plot which dissolves in the presence of transhumanism and polyamory. That exact form is surprisingly common; e.g. from what I've heard, canon!Twilight has two major sources of conflict, Edward's belief that turning Bella into a vampire will remove her soul, and Bella waffling between Edward and Jacob. I didn't realize it until Baughn pointed it out, but S1 Nanoha - not that I've watched it, but I've read fanfictions - counts as a Muggle Plot because the entire story goes away if Precia accepts the pattern theory of identity.
I would find it unhelpful to describe as a "Muggle Plot" any plot that depends on believing one side of an issue where there is serious, legitimate, disagreement.
(Of course, you may argue that there is no serious, legitimate disagreement on theories of identity, if you wish.)
I also find it odd that polyamory counts but not, for instance, plots that fail when you assume other rare preferences of people. Why isn't a plot that assumes that the main characters are heterosexual considered a Muggle Plot just as much as one which assumes they are monogamous? What about a plot that fails if incest is permitted (Star Wars could certainly have gone very differently.) If a plot assumes that the protagonist likes strawberry ice cream, and it turned out that the same percentage of the population hates strawberry ice cream as is polygamous, would that now be a Muggle Plot too?
Re pattern identity theory:
Scott Aaronson in The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.
Nice one. Though one could perhaps recover most of the Nanoha storyline by giving Precia Capgras delusion, unless by "transhumanism" you include the assumption that organic disorders would be trivially fixed (albeit I don't think Precia had anyone around to diagnose her?)
I'm not sure if that would make it more or less tragic.
Does worrying about that sort of thing suggest that Edward actually has a soul?
My personal head-canon says that Precia, who ought to know better, was afflicted with a particular type of brain damage that prevented her from recognizing her own daughter. She was, effectively, insane.
Given that the cause of both Alicia's first death and Precia's insanity were an inadvisable engineering experiment that she is explicitly stated to have been against, this makes Precia a tragic figure in her own right.