Rather confused Overture spoilers (or 'What We Still Don't Know About Sin's Parents')

[rallamajoop]

Well, the Internet provided at last - I've finally gotten to see right through the story mode from Overture. Was even lucky enough to find a Japanese fan who'd been good enough to transcribe large chunks of the dialogue into Rikai-chan friendly format, so I managed to figure out most of the story too. Hah, no wonder fandom was going so nuts over it. In retrospect, I can't really blame 'em.

I'll get around to posting some in depth thoughts and links on it all later (not as much positive to say as I would've liked after all that *sigh* but I'll get to that when I get to it). For now though, I thought I'd better see if I could shed any light on one of those tricker questions a quick browse of the net suggests everyone's still stuck on - the exact identities of certain parts of Sin's parentage.

So (context for those who actually haven't spoiled themselves yet), it was always pretty obvious that 1. Sin was biologically Ky's child, 2. He was a Gear, and born that way and 3. He'd been given to Sol to raise on account of those messy Gear growth-rate problems. What I wasn't counting on was them to twist the storyline far enough to make it possible for Ky to have fallen madly in love with a female Gear to produce him (no, really, even a couple of the in game characters do a major double take when that's revealed). But even once we're over that little moment of WTFery, precisely who she *is* remains a pretty major sticking point. I'm about 99% sure at this point that Overture is an alternate universe to the one we're used to (more on that to be explained below) so everything we thought we knew... may or may not still apply.

The first guess fandom's had is that the female Gear in question is Dizzy. Having seen the story mode in it's entirity, I can now conclude... I'm pretty sure she's not. I'm not certain - and from what I've seen of the Japanese side of fandom, even they're divided over it. See, all the way through the story mode her name is never specifically mentioned, and we never once get a clear look at her face.

If she's not Dizzy, she's certainly got a lot in common with her. Ky describes her as being gentle and kind, and Dr Paradigm refers to her as 'Justice's backup', which could easily mean Justice's daughter. More importantly, there's a brief description of how she was found which sounds a *lot* like the plot of GGX - a sentient Gear was discovered, a bounty was put on her head, she was supposed to have been killed but really just disappeared. So it's not Solaria, in any case, but since this is where the AU stuff starts, I'm not convinced it was the Dizzy we know either. While you could probably stretch canon far enough that the Gear they found met Ky, spent a year or two floating around with a gang of sky pirates and only later fell for him, the impression I got from the scene was that whatever happened with her and Ky was a whole lot more immediate than that. In context, it sounded more like in this world, the mystery Gear with the bounty on her head had turned out to be someone else (ie, Sin's mother, and not Dizzy, whoever she actually was).

Compounding that impression, if she was meant to be a character we'd recognise, why wasn't it made a bit clearer? As I mentioned above, she's never named - Sol only refers to what's-her-name as the 「木陰の君」 which I think translates as something like 'Shadowed One', and the rest of the time, she's just 'she' or 'her' or 'Sin's mother'. During the one blurry glimpse we get of her she's been sealed up for protection from Valentine, and though it's implied she was freed at the end of the story, we never actually see this happen.

On the other hand, this is when I remembered that Ky and Sin's Master Ghosts have the image of a woman inside them - that's got to be her, right? So I had a quick hunt around, and this was the best image I came up with:



Tattoos on her arms, hairstyle's not particularly familiar (those of you who've been throwing around some of the weirder theories I've been seeing may be amused by the egg she's holding though *g*). Whoever that is, it sure doesn't look like Dizzy.

On a final note, I've seen some Japanese fans claim that Sin is stated to be half-Gear, whereas if Dizzy was his mother, he'd only be a quarter Gear, though all that gets us is back into the ongoing mystery of just where Dizzy came from anyway, which isn't going to be resolved until March at the earliest.

So, where does that leave us? Solaria's out, so I have three working theories left:

1. We're in the GGX timeline, but sometime after GGXX, Dizzy leaves the Jellyfish Pirates and falls for Ky. (Not utterly impossible, but pretty damned unlikely.)

2. We're in an alternate timeline that diverged when Ky and Dizzy first met. (A bit more plausible, but I wouldn't count on it.)

3. We're in an alternate timeline where the Gear who had the bounty placed on her head around GGX wasn't Dizzy but instead some other full-blood Gear who resembled her in a few respects. (This is where my money would be, but it's still not exactly certain.)

In conclusion... I've been finding parts of Overture rather difficult to follow. o_O

Comments

[gonsai.livejournal.com]

That woman looks like Solaria. Also, that plotline doesn't rule out Solaria at all. Like I said before, she and Dizzy have near identical stories, given (if I'm not mistaken) there was also a bounty on her head and that with the fall of the Blacklund company, she is assumed dead.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

I can only guess we're somehow working with very different summaries of Lightning the Argent in that case, because as I understood it, Solaria was a Gear created by the Blackard company and who appeared briefly at the end of the novel, but though I do remember her being hidden somewhere quietly at the end, I'm pretty sure the 'Gear with the bounty on her head' mentioned at the end of the book was a reference to Dizzy having been discovered shortly after that. I could send you copies of the summaries I've been working from if you'd like. For which matter, I should really go double check that part...

[gonsai.livejournal.com]

I'm working off of what I remember of the translation I read years ago, so I could likely be mistaken.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Just double checked anyway - there was definitely never a bounty on Solaria's head, it's Dizzy they were referring to at the end of the novel.

In vaguely related news, Valentine is referred to as/connected to someone else called 'Aria' a couple of times towards the end of the game. This is one of those points even the Japanese fans seem a little hazy on, but for now I think I'm going with the theory 'someone in the scenario writing department liked to connect the name 'Aria' with Gears enough to do it twice.'

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Very confusing, but no, there's really nothing of Solaria in her that I can see. Valentine's the character who might be connected to someone else called 'Aria', but that's unrelated (actually, that part of things is starting to sound more interesting than I thought, but either way 'Solaria' has been completely forgotten by canon since Lightning the Argent ended, and I'd expect it'd stay that way).

Reading it now, though it's nothing more than I already knew. Honestly, I'm a little worried about how they could tie up *so many* loose plot threads as they seem to be promising to *and* structure the story so that you can run through it with any two characters and still make things coherent. But no sense worrying about it too much until we know more. ^^;

[bungiefan.livejournal.com]

Rerember, Daisuke apparently likes to mess with the fans by not outright saying things. He intentionally hid Justice's gender and used only non-gendered pronouns to refer to her for about 8 years. Faust has never been outright stated to be Baldhead, but they've come pretty close and heavily imply it.

He's also already done alternate timelines at least once with Side Red and Side Black, which started before GG1 and before I-No messed around to get the timeline we know by using time-travel.

[rallamajoop.livejournal.com]

Yeah, now you mention it, that's so very true. The alternate timeline theory does make more sense to me, especially counting that interview stuff you mentioned on Dustloop (same bungiefan, right?) Since I'd seen so many people wondering, I wanted to outline what we did or didn't know, but in conclusion - yup, deliberately ambiguous. We've got good reason for being confused.

Mostly, I just want to know whether I should be expecting to see Ky/Dizzy stuff happening in AC+. ^^;

[velithya]

ps. these are the subtitles we were discussing earlier today. ^^