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Awakening Calamity indeed…

Ooohboy, finally we know why the Mobile Armor kit announced for Christmas was so important.

Quite a bit of world was revealed in this episode.

On one hand, the efforts of Kudelia to invest in education to make a better world for the future (hint: Kudelia is wiser than most current, real world leaders), and the condition of the child soldiers that don’t even know what to do with a honest pay (ok, save for the ones spending it on girls at brothels and strip clubs…).

But obviously I’m dancing around the big reveals here:

• An unmanned drone looking all creepy… I’m already getting suspicious and… bam, right on cue: Artificial Intelligence was the real enemy of the Calamity Wars!
• The Mobile Armors were the calamity the Mobile Suits (and the Gundams especially) were built to fight against. So now we know why their armor is especially designed to resist high-energy plasma hits…
• …Because Mobile Armors are the first machines of war in the entire show to use energy weapons! This is huge! We already saw how the simple activation of the SINGLE Mobile Armor’s main gun has dug a trench across hundreds of meters of martian dirt and rock.
• And the Drones (or, rather, the Feathers… because yeah, Pluma is an ancient Italian spelling for Piuma, which means Feather) are its support vehicles!
• And the drones are Feathers because the Mobile Armors are called like Angels! (this is not mentioned in the show, but it’s in recent announcements about the kit for the MA). I guess it makes sense that an army of Princes of Hell was built to destroy those avenging angels.
• The Alaya-Vijnana clearly makes people sensitive to Ahab Reactors. At least if you have enough on you. Mika was aware of Mobile Suits from high altitude descent. And he reacted in a manner very similar to when he pilots the Barbatos when the MA activated. Verrrry interesting. I suspect the stigma around the A-V might be a heritage of a time when that same basic tech (nanotech and augmentations) had been the building block for the biggest danger the Solar System ever faced, the IA driven Mobile Armors.
• Nice bit about the Order of the Seven Stars, too.

Man, just when we were thinking the main danger in the show were going to be scheming old men. A single damaged Pluma almost wrecked a MS hangar and required two or three IO Frames just to subdue it. Looking forward to see the rest!