Some background: I've been gone from this forum for so long that I completely missed the conversation around the film. I looked at the mahq review as a bit of a fan sampler and the reaction was pretty much what I expected. Furthermore, I was hopping around animenewsnetwork recently and stumbled upon our very own LightningCount commenting about Narrative. While I don't remember exactly what he wrote, it boiled down to him discussing some of the new ideas Narrative put on the table that Gundam hasn't explored before (like the direct confirmation of an afterlife). Unsurprisingly, he got some push back by other Gundam fans in the forum (with some very hot takes), but it got me thinking about Narrative again, namely one idea in particular:
It was an offhand comment made about the Neo Zeong in Narrative. It was said that the Psyco Shard system (and maybe other tech?) was actually made by the 'Ghost of Char' returning from the afterlife with this knowledge and inhabiting Full Frontal. Meaning that the technology is not from 'their world' and it was why no one fully understood how it worked.
This idea is . . . 'otherworldly.'When I heard that line, I had to pause the movie and stare off into space for several minutes. The implications of that are fascinating, and yet, unsettling. The 'undiscovered country' is reaching into the Universal Century and delivering it tech that could fundamentally change the course of its history. This not only should shape the way we view the later additions to the UC timeline, but how this perhaps connects to the entire Gundam multiverse (if you are into that kind of thing). I have always wondered how UC could twist into what we see in F-91, Victory, and (much, much later) G-Reco. Maybe this is part of a much larger puzzle? One that builds to the locking away of newtype technology? Hopefully it will get explored more in future projects and we are all able to look beyond the Narrative film itself into the wider implications this has on the next phase of UC projects. I know nothing about Hathaway's Flash (except that presumably Hathaway will flash something or, god forbid, someone), but I hope it can link to some of these themes. Will it?
Anyway, I just wanted to see if anyone else has been thinking about this idea/theme of divine(?) intervention. Or if it was just me.
