The Witch of Mercury plays a fascinating game on Gundam’s past

The Witch of Mercurythe latest series in the gundam franchisecarves out its own path in the series in many ways, the least of which involves the introduction of Noch another alternate timeline to the already multiversal level series. But that doesn’t mean the series doesn’t make its own intriguing connections to some of them gundam‘s earliest and most effective ideas.

The fifth episode of The Witch of Mercury“Reflection in an Icy Eye” raises the stakes for our heroine Suletta Mercury far beyond whether it will last or not her new future wife Hand in marriage through their new school’s intense mecha duel tradition. The episode focuses on a classmate at Asticassia School of Technology who has been quietly supportive of Suletta, Elan Ceres, dueling committee member and Peil Technologies scion, and calls back Witch of Mercury‘s own prologue episode to explore another intriguing element of his world-building beyond the anti-capitalist sentiments we have explored last week.

In the world of Witch of Mercury, mobile suit Design evolution changed radically with the creation of the GUND format, a bio-organic connection between suit systems and its pilot’s physical body, giving rise to the first GUND arms, which eventually became known as, you guessed it, Gundams. Gundams were ostracized during the events of Witch of Mercury‘s 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 in Earth’s Development Council who call their pilots “witches ” eject and tries to eradicate the building 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 are one of the few naturally occurring ones, it turns out. In the latest episode, it quickly becomes apparent that Elan is an “Enhanced Person,” the fourth of his kind – rumored to be a clone of some kind – created by Peil as an artificial, experimental pilot of her own Gundam, the Pharact. While the term used in the official English subtitles is slightly different, the Japanese dialogue “Kyouka Jinshi” and the concept itself show parallels to one gundam‘s oldest and most fascinating science fiction idea: “Kyouka Ningen” or “Cyber ​​Newtypes”.

What is a cyber newtype?

in the gundam‘s original timeline – the Universal Century, and home to most of the franchise’s key series, including the original trio of gundam, Zeta Gundamand ZZ Gundam—New types were the natural evolution of humans existing in outer space or spacenoids, developing latent psychic powers and enhanced empathic senses. Armed with the intention of using these abilities to connect deeply with their kind, these individuals became powerful mobile suit pilots throughout the many conflicts of the Universal Century, using their abilities to deploy specialized mechas, commonly remote-controlled drone weapons , known as Funnels and Bits, used . After the first prominent appearance of Newtypes in the original gundammost notably its protagonist Amuro Ray, attempts to artificially develop Newtype abilities in humans began, creating the dawn of the Cyber ​​Newtype.

Enriched with organ replacements, bioengineered implants, chemical exposure, and harrowing mental conditioning, even successful attempts at Cyber ​​Newtypes met a debilitating mental instability that made them fugitive weapons of war. In some cases, these test subjects were stripped of their former identities – how Zeta Gundam‘s Four Murasame, named as she was the fourth of her kind created at the Murasame Research Lab in early Cyber ​​Newtype experiments. Look where Witch of Mercury was it now about making Elan the “Enhanced Person Number 4”?

What do Enhanced People and Cyber ​​Newtypes mean? Witch of Mercurys story?

It’s hard to tell right now, other than the fact that they apparently are, despite being differently named and seemingly operating in a strictly non-psychic way Witch of Mercury‘s response to the Newtypes of the Universal Century – Elan, Suletta and Elnora before them – all relied on the bio-organic connection to the format, and it has been strongly suggested that this is still the case, even if Suletta has none of it seems to show the usual side effects of using the GUND format, so there hasn’t been any evidence of psychic shenanigans to date.

But that’s interesting Witch of Mercury examines these echoes of the original gundam and the conflicts of his successors – the exploitation of humanity’s future by old ruling powers in the name of war and dominance – through his capitalist future lens. Among all the new things the series is experimenting with unprecedentedly gundam— a female protagonist, a potentially queer romance at the heart of its story — there’s something wonderful that it’s willing to delve into some of the franchise’s oldest defining sci-fi ideas in its own way, too.

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