...I wasn't using "kung fu" to mean "the Chinese Martial Art agglomerate refered to as kung fu (well Wu Shu these days but w/e)", I was using it to mean "martial arts".
Anyway, I stopped respecting the fighting in chapter 3, because...
1)
Page 12. Vivio's got a really goofy-looking knuckle there, she's definately gonna jam her pointer finger, but whatever. What really got me was that silly-looking.... thing... Corona's doing with her leg in the upper left. Is it a turning kick? No, because she'd jam all her toes. It's not a straight kick like her foot is positioned, because her upper body is twisting to her right. It's like the artist drew two completely different kicks, and just copypastad the unrelated top and bottom halves together.
2)
Page 16. Another jam-all-your-toes kick. This is the first panel where I saw someone smackin' their shin into something. That hurts so bad. This happens a lot in Vivid, even though it's so painful. I guess they're wearing magic shin guards? It really drew my attention.
3)
Next page, 17. I don't even know what this is, but I do know that (2.1) There is no way Nove could still be standing when the raised leg gets a big ol' push like that, and (2.2) that sort of impact right on your heel with something as hard as another heel would break your foot, or at least fuck up your ankle, and (2.3) they probably fell over really stupid-like in the next panel.
I mean, this isn't like Dragonball Z, where the kung-fu is different because their engagement range is like a kilometer, also they all fly around, and shoot beams, and have tank armor for skin. This is a just stupid-looking, they don't look like humans moving according to human biomechanics, they look like badly posed dolls.
This would be a pretty shallow criticism... except Vivid is basically
all about kung fu.
Einheart wanders around picking fights in the middle of the night; I was like "where the fuck are this girl's parents", but I guess that never came up, it was just a way to set up a kung-fu rivalry with Vivio.
She's the reincarnation of Hegemon Ingevalt, which implies even
more questions about her background, like "is Jail her godfather, like she's a success from his reincarnation experiments or something? Or is Einheart also some kinda cyborg?" Nope, we never find out, it's just a way to make her Vivio's kung-fu rival in the last lifetime or whatever, so we get that homoerotic subtext going on too.
Hey wait, isn't Vivio learning magic from Yuuno or something? I know Nanoha, as a series, is
all about informed abilities like that, but I mean, the guy's an archaeologist. Maybe he could take them on a trip to see an old castle or something, kinda explore the whole "coming to terms with being a cyborg clone of the Emperor" plot we've got set up with these two. It could even start up like a Lost Logia or sommat, I don't even know.
Nope! Tournament arc!
But I'd be willing to go with it, if the battle poses weren't so goofy-looking.
In the end, I just don't
respect the mangaka's ability as a storyteller, this feels like, he was hired to cash in on a hot property, he's not in it to tell a story he cares about tellin, so he just wrote down a checklist of all the pantyshots and stuff that he thought would make it sell, and then writes each chapter by spending the absolute minimum amount of thought he could to check off all the little boxes.
EDIT: Misspellings galore!