[I'm on my knees from the opening!]
[I was wrong. I hereby declare: this year is the year of mecha's revival]
[Holy crap, the female leads from Witch from Mercury and Iron-Blooded Orphans were absolute eldritch horrors—finally we get one this gorgeous]
[Miorine Rembran: Say that again]
[I'm asking you—do you want this, or do you want Miorine?]
[Lmao, I'll take both]
[Gotta say, the Production Team finally got a clue. If they'd made the heroine pretty from the start, it would've blown up way sooner]
From doom and gloom at the start to howling with excitement—all it took was a mere twenty seconds.
But behind those twenty seconds, Inori's off-screen work had been anything but simple.
Although she'd "reincarnated" into this world, she didn't actually have a legal identity here. She was nothing more than a "doll" lying in the ruins of the Mendel colony.
And so, Inori began borrowing from the directorial techniques of her alternate-dimension isomorphic counterpart—Lacia.
Back in the Naruto world, Hanabi had already accumulated directorial experience. Now that she'd arrived in this world, Inori was taking things a step further.
First, she had to seed information about herself.
When Inori entered this world, it happened to coincide with the eruption of a global war.
To make people aware of her existence, she first needed a "signal."
February 14th—Valentine's Day. The Earth Alliance, led by the Atlantic Federation, launched a nuclear sneak attack against PLANT.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Inori planted a message across the network: that somewhere on the Mendel colony, there existed a "Black Monolith" capable of destroying the world.
She then disguised herself as a mysterious client, placed an order with the Junk Guild, and made sure the intel was intercepted by ZAFT.
ZAFT—having just been nuked—didn't need to be told how they felt about the words "destroy the world."
After that, the ZAFT fleet prepared to return to PLANT.
And from L4 back to PLANT, there were two routes.
One went past the Moon—but the Moon was Earth Alliance territory. Obviously out of the question.
The other route passed through the opposite side of the Moon—meaning right through where Heliopolis was located.
That was when the Black Monolith went to work.
Meanwhile, on another front, Inori had also released an MV.
When she uploaded it, she used a little hacking trick.
She shifted the MV's timestamp to over a decade ago.
—Indeed. In Inori's story, the one who "filmed" this MV wasn't "Yuzuriha Inori"—it was "Ouma Mana."
But in terms of narrative, the audience didn't know any of that. All they knew was the "incorrect" information that "this girl already existed over a decade ago."
And finally, she used the Black Monolith to produce Fyu-Neru robots equipped with hacking and manipulation capabilities—rice cookers... no, Fyu-Neru robots—then deployed them aboard the warship and throughout Heliopolis to begin their work.
The broadcast continued.
A rice-cooker robot appeared on screen.
(Gotta say, the rice cooker's kinda cute)
[A brand-new Haro!]
[That's not a Haro, is it?]
[What's a Haro?]
[Haro's the iconic mascot of the Gundam franchise—appeared in 0079, Zeta, Victory. Shame it hasn't shown up lately]
[Doesn't really look like one]
[Feels like they're doing something new. This isn't the UC timeline anyway—the last few series didn't have Haro either]
The visuals were intense, but there was no sound.
The song continued to play.
Oh flower, blooming with such resolve—what can you see from where you are?
Why can't people even forgive one another?
The peaceful interior of the colony. The MV footage shattering like a mirror. The fiery spectacle of a battlefield.
The three kept interweaving, cutting back and forth.
"The ship's out of control?!"
"It's that woman's doing!"
"What the hell is that Black Monolith?! Why did a woman come out of it?!"
ZAFT's soldiers were drenched in sweat.
The ship had slipped completely out of their control.
This woman who'd suddenly burst out of the Black Monolith had thrown everything into chaos.
But the audience couldn't hear any of this.
From their perspective, soldiers were hunting down a helpless girl.
Combined with the visuals and the lyrics, it was easy for viewers to associate the scene with war.
"It's over—we're going to crash into Heliopolis!"
"What's the word from their side?!"
"No way to stop it!"
"All hands—evacuate!"
There was no other choice.
The soldiers began evacuating, but explosions continued to ring out.
The warship bore down slowly toward the colony.
[This animation quality is insane]
[Leagues beyond anything before]
[Opening with a warship crashing into a colony, huh]
[When do we get a colony drop on Sydney?]
[Previous Gundam shows were all small-scale. The Gundam I want to see is exactly this kind of grand spectacle!]
ZAFT personnel abandoned ship to escape.
On the other side, the port staff at Heliopolis were in a cold sweat—because they'd just discovered the emergency evacuation alarm had malfunctioned!
It wouldn't sound!
But just then, the warship—which should have been unmanned—changed its angle at the very last moment.
"BOOM—!"
The instant the MV ended, a flicker of firelight appeared in Heliopolis's dark sky.
And that explosion—the audience heard it too.
"Huh?"
Kira looked up.
The sky had been torn open.
Kira hurriedly put on her hat, then gazed upward.
A gash had been ripped in the sky.
Something was "wedged" into the "sky."
"A ZAFT ship?"
A ZAFT vessel had plunged into the colony at a peculiar angle.
Any other trajectory and the ship might have broken apart—or exploded outright.
Everything had been calculated.
"Something's falling? No—someone's falling!"
A girl was plummeting from the explosion.
Kira didn't even think. Without bothering to pack up her laptop, one hand pressing down her hat, she dashed out.
Kira was fast.
Heliopolis might be a space colony, but it still had simulated gravity. A fall from that height could kill. So Kira sprinted at full speed.
"Not enough cushioning—I need to at least jump up and catch her to distribute the impact... huh?"
Something was strange.
As Kira ran, she realized the girl wasn't so much falling as she was drifting.
She seemed to have no weight at all—like a leaf, gently floating down from the sky.
And so Kira arrived at an artificial hilltop.
A girl in a red performance outfit.
She looked just like... the girl from that MV.
The girl was cradling a little robot that looked like a rice cooker, eyes gently closed, as though she were asleep.
Kira instinctively reached out and caught her.
(A classic reborn—Castle in the Sky)
[Castle・in・the・Sky]
[A・tribute・to・the・classics]
[boy_meet_girl]
[Kira's a girl too, right? girl_meet_girl. They're really copying the Witch from Mercury formula?]
[Definitely a girl. They kept her face hidden during the earlier footage, then only showed it when she put on the hat and stood up]
[What's the point of that?]
[Establishing the "male lead" slot. Starting with a tomboy look, then through a damsel-in-distress rescue, you instantly establish who's in the "male lead" slot and who's in the "heroine" slot]
[I bow before you, master analyst!]
[Brilliant!]
"What on earth is going on?!"
Kira looked completely bewildered.
But she couldn't just leave this girl here.
All things considered... let's just bring her home first...