The Witch of Mercury plays a fascinating game with Gundam's past

The Witch of Mercurythe last series in the Gundam franchisecharts its own path through the series in a number of ways, not the least of which involves the introduction of yet another alternate timeline to the already multiversal level series. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t make its own fascinating connections to some of the Gundamthe oldest and most powerful ideas.

The fifth episode of The Witch of Mercury“Reflection in an Icy Eye”, raises the stakes for our hero Suletta Mercury far beyond whether or not she will keep his new future wife hand in marriage through the intense mecha dueling tradition of his new school. Focusing on a classmate at Asticassia School of Technology who has quietly supported Suletta thus far, dueling committee member and scion of Peil Technologies Elan Ceres, the episode reminds Witch of Mercuryit is own prologue episode explore another fascinating element of its global construction beyond the anti-capitalist sentiments that we explored last week.

In the world of Witch of Mercury, Mobile suit design development changed dramatically with the creation of the GUND format, a bio-organic interconnection between suit systems and its pilot’s physical body, creating the first GUND-Arms, eventually known as, You Have It guessed it, Gundams. Gundams became outlaws during the events of Witch of Mercuryof the prologue episode – due to the GUND format’s controversial side effects of overloading a pilot’s body if they push their sync levels too far – by a conglomerate of rival mobile suit developers on the board of development of Earth, dismissing their pilots as “witches” and attempting to eradicate the construction of Gundams with military force. Suletta and her mother Elnora are apparently among the few survivors who can now safely pilot a Gundam – in the former’s case, her “sister” suit, the Gundam Aerial.

Or at least they’re one of the few that occur naturally, it turns out. It is quickly revealed in the final episode that Elan is an “enhanced person”, the fourth of her kind – supposed to be some sort of clone – created by Peil as an artificial, experimental pilot of their own Gundam, the Pharact. Although the term used in the official English subtitles is a little different, the Japanese in the dialogue, “Kyouka Jinshi”, and the concept itself have parallels with one of Gundamthe oldest and most fascinating sci-fi ideas of: the “Kyouka Ningen”, or Cyber ​​Newtypes.

What is a cyber new type?

In GundamThe original Universal Century timeline, and home to most of the franchise’s key series, including the original trio of Gundam, Zeta Gundamand ZZ Gundam— The new types were the natural evolution of existing human beings in outer space, or spacenoids, developing latent psychic powers and enhanced empathic senses. Armed with the intent to use these abilities to connect deeply with their fellow Newtypes, these individuals became powerful Mobile Suit pilots in the many conflicts of the Universal Century, using their abilities to wield specialized mechs that commonly wielded weapons. of remote controlled drones known as funnels and bits. . After the first major emergence of Newtypes in the original Gundamnotably its protagonist Amuro Ray, attempts to artificially develop Newtype abilities in people began, creating the dawn of the Cyber ​​Newtype.

Augmented by organ replacement, biotech implants, chemical exposure, and heartbreaking mental conditioning, even successful attempts at Cyber ​​Newtypes have been met with debilitating mental instability, making them weapons of war. volatile. In some cases, these test subjects were stripped of their old identities in the process, such as Zeta Gundam‘s Four Murasame, named because it was the fourth of its kind created at the Murasame Research Lab at the start of the Cyber ​​Newtype experiment. See where Witch of Mercury was now going to make Elan “Enhanced Person Number 4”?

What do improved people and new types of cyber mean? Witch of Mercury‘s story?

At the moment it’s hard to say, other than that despite being named differently and apparently functioning in a strictly non-psychic way, they are apparently Witch of MercuryThe Newtypes of the Universal Century’s response – Elan, Suletta and Elnora before them all relied on the bio-organic connection to the format, and it’s been heavily implied that this is still the case even though Suletta seems to only show none of the usual side effects of using the GUND format, so there have been no hints of psychic shenanigans so far.

But it is interesting that Witch of Mercury examine these echoes of the original Gundam and the conflicts of its successor – the exploitation of the future of humanity by the old ruling powers in the name of war and domination – through its capitalist futuristic lens. Among all the novelties that the series is experimenting with unprecedented in Gundam– a female protagonist, a potentially bizarre romance at the heart of its story – there’s something wonderful about it being willing to engage in its own way with some of the franchise’s oldest sci-fi ideas.

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