#cyber newtypes

[darkwitchclaire]

[futurecentury]

I think there should be a CDL-style modern day parody manga about all the cyber newtypes hanging out at a 2000’s era mall as extremely chuuni highschoolers.

four and rosamia are in different classes but became best friends after fighting over the last slap bracelet at hot topic. they are emo and come up with elaborate fake edgy backstories and experiment girl personas as a way to to complain about all the lame teachers and preps they hate at school. they get into constant mall hijinks. gates is the seemingly normie kid they drag along on their adventures who they eventually realize is just as much of a weirdo as them but he tries to hide it.

mashymre and chara are the scene kids they are rivals with and they argue in the middle of the food court and nearly get thrown out. four has a little sister, deux, who she has to babysit once and thinks she is cringe as hell bc she is going through a major like. furry wolf girl phase and keeps roleplaying in the middle of the mall. somehow only gates can get her to calm down? four commiserates with marida over it because marida is always stuck looking after n+1 purus.

kamille and fa are considered preps by four and rosamia but when it’s discovered they both are secretly kinda alt kids too the girls get obsessed with competitively trying to become best friends with them slash date them. this causes a confusing love quadrangle between everyone involved

chloe croce is older than the others and usually pretty calm and the girls look up to her, she is also a secret horse girl. she drinks too much Mountain Dew and ends up chasing everyone around the mall on a sugar high. marion welch is her bestie who always is accusing chloe of stealing her ideas and borrowing her makeup palettes and shit and you get the sense that when they were a little younger they were the queens of the mall in the same way four and rosammy are now.

allenby hangs out in the arcade and is way overcompetitive and will go nuts if anyone gets close to beating her at a game. the elans are also occasional visitors, and the girls cant tell them apart, and so they are really confused when one week elan will talk about emo music with them & then next week he’s a debate bro

their mobile suits are all some sort of knock off labubu thing they are obsessed with buying from mall kiosks. do you understand my vision

[wordsandrobots]

So today's random half-awake-on-a-Sunday-morning question is: is Allenby Beardsley the only cyber-newtype archetype in Gundam to be alive and thriving at the end of the series?

Sounds like it's time for another list!

By 'cyber-newtype', I mean a character who is the product of a deliberate attempt to create an augmented, ESP-equipped super-soldier, usually via highly unethical experiments, with the result displaying an unstable, often child-like personality. This archetype was established in Zeta Gundam (following the events of the original Gundam anime as the result of an attempt to mass produce psychic 'newtype' humans for military purposes) and has popped up in various guises across the franchise since. Just on the basis of the original iteration, I'm going to say that the mental instability is an important distinguishing feature of the trope, even if it does not automatically follow from the concept of an augmented human. I will however allow that that instability doesn't have to directly result from the augmentation itself to fulfil the archetype's parameters.

All right then, let's enumerate. Spoilers, of course, ahead.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam

Four Murasame -- the original cyber-newtype. Killed in action (fuck you, Jerid)

Rosamia Badam -- Killed in action

Gates Capa -- oh yeah, this guy . . . exists. Probably dead

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ

Chara Soon -- killed in action, went out like a boss

Mashymre Cello -- died as he lived: exploding for the sake of his queen, who did not bat an eyelid

[Gundam Wiki lists Elpeo Ple on their cyber-newtype page but isn't she meant to be a natural newtype? I'm not counting her here]

Ple Two -- expired making a last-ditch effort to locate and rescue the series protagonist in what feels like a very contrived reason to just have her drop dead for the sake of tying up loose ends no I'm not bitter at all why do you ask?

An uncomfortably large number of additional Ple clones -- killed in action (fuck you, Glemy)

Char's Counterattack

Gyunei Guss -- oh, so very dead. You would not believe. Seriously, nobody try to get in the middle of the Char/Amuro/Lallah tangle, it's just not safe

Mobile Suit Gundam F91

Iron Mask -- killed in action

I have not seen Victory Gundam

Mobile Fighter G Gundam

Allenby Beardsley -- alive and well, and free of the effects of the Berserker system

For the purposes of this list, we could theoretically count Schwarz Bruder (robot edition) since he's technically an augmented clone, of sorts, but he doesn't really display any mental confusion per se. Anyway, he's dead

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing

Here's where things get interesting. Does Heero Yuy count as a cyber newtype? He is, after all, an augmented human being, the result of hideously unethical experiments, who is severely traumatised as a result. He's definitely not positioned the same as the previous cyber-newtypes (Wing doesn't really hit that beat in its plot), but . . . yeah, he does kind of fit the concept. The only major difference is the lack of ESP, which we might even argue the Zero System briefly provides (as it does to the rest of the main six pilots). Furthermore, his character arc is one of learning to regain his humanity and pull himself out of the destructive military scaffold that has consumed his life -- very much in keeping with themes that swirl around cyber-newtypes in general. So yeah. If we were to count him, he is also a case of such an archetype finding a happy ending (of sorts).

After War Gundam X

Carris Nautilus -- alive and well! Well . . . possibly. He's presented as being perfectly content but I don't think we ever got a cure for his Synapse Syndrome. Hopefully not having to pilot any more will help reduce the bouts of agonising pain

Turn A Gundam

Corin Nander -- is I think the closest we get in Turn A to a cyber-newtype of any description? He's definitely got the instability down, being one of the more extreme examples. Killed in action

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED

Technically, we could count all the Coordinators as being a form of cyber-newtype, since they are quite literally an engineered super-race. However, they largely don't posses the ESP factor for this setting and are treated more or less as just normal people most of the time. This said . . .

Oh boy. Yeah, I think I can say for certain that Kira Yamato counts. Our boy is super-duper augmented as all heck (even by the standards of the Coordinators) and has the emotional stability of an extremely not very emotionally stable person. I haven't seen Gundam SEED Freedom yet, but I assume he's still alive and kicking? Probably going to need more rounds of therapy though.

Conversely, Rau Le Creuset does not count. He's a clone and, politely, batshit, but he's not augmented. He comes by being that much of a problem honestly!

Orga Sabnak, Shani Andras and Clotho Buer -- your actual augmented soldiers. Dead as doornails, in another example of SEED speed-running Universal Century tropes

Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny

Stella Loussier -- THE example of the cyber-newtype archetype being reiterated in a non-UC timeline, in that she is basically Four, again, but even more mentally unstable. Killed in action, tragically, because of course

Auel Neider -- killed in action

Sting Oakley -- killed in action, and may I just say that GundamWiki phrasing these as 'killed by such and such's Gundam' is some masterful passive voice

Again, Rey Za Burrel does not count, for the exact same reasons as Rau (duh)

Mobile Suit Gundam 00

Where the heck do we even start with this one? OK, so if Innovades are artificial versions of the 'true' next-stage-of-evolution people, the Innovators, and we factor in that 'mentally unstable' can cover a remarkably wide variety of states and the Innovades are a roulette wheel of such conditions, then:

Tieria Erde -- digitised but otherwise fine

Ribbons Almark -- killed in action (satisfyingly)

Bring Stabity -- killed in action

Devine Nova -- killed in action

Hiling Care -- killed in action

Revive Revival -- killed in action

Anew Returner -- killed in action (tragically; fuck you, Ribbons)

Regene Regetta -- digitised but otherwise fine

Sky Eclipse -- wait, he's not just a Ribbons iteration? Huh. Anyway, murdered, recreated as a walking statue, destroyed

AND THEN we have the non-innovade cyber-newtype analogues, the super-soldiers and otherwise modified human beings:

Allelujah Haptism -- alive and well

Marie Parfacy -- alive and well

Johann Trinity -- killed in action/murdered

Michael Trinity -- murdered

Nena Trinity -- killed in action

Louise Halevy -- alive and well

Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn

Marida Cruz -- killed in action; Ple clones cannot catch a break

Full Frontal -- transubstantiated, and good riddance

Mobile Suit Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans

By a strict technological definition, a solid fifty percent of the cast are essentially cyber-newtypes. However, I think only Ein Dalton actually fits the archetype; killed in action

Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative

Zoltan Akkanen -- killed in apotheosis

Mobile Suit Gundam The Witch From Mercury

I think we have to count Suletta Mercury herself for this. She really does hit a lot of the cyber-newtype personality traits, in that there is a line to be drawn from Four and the Ples to how she is characterised. Alive and well, albeit with reduced mobility

Sophie Pulone -- killed in action

Norea Du Noc -- killed in action/death by cop

Elan Ceres (Enhanced Person Number 4) -- digitised, but in a way that means he's functionally dead

Elan Ceres (Enhanced Person Number 5) -- alive, begrudgingly

Right. Stopping there because while I know there are a bunch of other cyber-newtypes in various non-mainline spin-offs, cataloguing the 00 manga alone would take more effort than I'm inclined to put into this. Anything not covered here doesn't have an equivalent to a cyber-newtype that I recall (Raraiya Akuparl from Regonuista in G fulfils some of the tropes, for a while, but is not augmented; the non-Unicorn UC OVAs don't feature cyber-newtypes [Dayrl is augmented with cybernetics but his newtype abilities are natural], etc), or doesn't meet the criteria for my purposes (Eri in G-Witch, for example, seems perfectly well-adjusted for a girl who lives entirely in cyberspace).

Counting the Ple clones in ZZ as a single instance and discounting Schwartz as a borderline case, that gives us 45 cyber-newtype archetype examples across the main franchise, 11 of whom are alive and nominally well at the end of their respective series. So a 24% survival rate, which is honestly a lot higher than I would have expected. How about that?

(Glancing across the wiki, I see SEED Freedom gives us one more alive and well augmented person and seven dead augmented people, but having not see it yet, I can't judge if they fall into the archetype I'm describing. I would assume, given who the survivor is, the answer is that they do not qualify for the 'unstable' criteria.)

[degeneracygenerator]

gay rights

[darkwitchclaire]

is rosamia badam a little

[ryoumensan]

recreating fancy space autism may give your science experiment battle advantages, but they'll have space autism migraines as a result

[gundamexplored]

"Precognition, the ability to read an enemy's will and react beforehand, was a valuable ability for a pilot. Humans are creatures that unhesitatingly use their intelligence to attack their neighbors. Thus they made use of Newtypes and established the Newtype research institutes. Originally, species changed in accordance with natural principles of mutation and natural selection. But humanity, with its unique ability and motivation, set out to create Newtypes artificially no matter what the cost. Four knew no other name than Four Murasame. Now Four, surrounded by a psycommu system that artifically expanded her sensory and recognition powers, sighted the Zeta Gundam." - from Zeta Gundam Novel Vol. 4; by Yoshiyuki Tomino

[gundamexplored]

"Enhanced humans were people whose fighting capabilities had been enhanced through means such as drugs, hypnotherapy, and organ transplantation. But these were essentially methods of strengthening the mind, rather than modifying human biology. Basically, drugs were administered to relax the mind and, by slowing down speed perceptions, make actual movements feel slower and eliminate sensations of fear. Drugs were also administered to increase the body's reaction speed, and mentally the subject was placed under hypnotic control. Of course, the original enhanced human plan involved the use of biotechnology for biological modification, but this fact was unknown to the average soldier." - from Zeta Gundam Novel Vol. 3; by Yoshiyuki Tomino