the maverick guide is absolutely amazing!! thanks for putting in so much work to try and make sense of stuff that Bob Capcom himself couldn't explain.
anyway, I guess Zero and Sigma aren't on the list cus they're anomalies that would mess up the data, but how would you class them?
thank you! the X series is my favorite subseries, so i like going into it.
zero would be Built / Resurrected, since he was intentionally designed by Dr. Wily to be a walking buzzsaw of destruction. he's kind of an asshole like that. he's not anymore because he was designed to be the worst evil robot ever designed ever and so getting infected with the maverick virus made him a good boi (no, really. no, really, that's actually canon), but he's still intentionally designed for every problem to be solved with at least three stab wounds and a few unnecessary flips. and, likewise, he died and then came back multiple times. so, pretty cut and dry.
sigma is a little bit interesting, partially because of how utterly fucked the X timeline's story is. Bob Capcom did not give a single shit when the X series started, inafune didn't actually have much of an end goal for the series, much less a start.
even reading past the obvious haha-funny slice-of-life anime-work-comedy, by their own admission the development of megaman X was pretty horrific. megaman game development in general almost always tends to be extremely hectic and painful, there aren't many games with positive stories behind them. sigma was kind of slapped in as an antagonist, and as of X1 and X2, he just turned evil for unclear reasons. humans limiting reploids. somehow. so you could declare him Lol.
X3 introduced the maverick virus as a story concept, which was what caused Sigma to get fucky, so you could declare him Viral. X4 introduced the fact that the maverick virus came from Zero and Sigma was infected while trying to defend his troops from the red bastard, so you could declare him Unfortunate. inafune was truly and completely flying by the seat of his pants.
the man left the series after the end of X5, and as impressively aerodynamic as inafune's pants were, Bob Capcom's deployed replacement for him had no pants to fly by. X6 to X8 didn't change much with regards to Sigma's motivation, but after the series had "ended", inafune got an extra set of pants and wanted to restart the series to make things a little more cohesive. perhaps X could actually be the main character of the Megaman X series this time, instead of Zero's sidekick. to that extent, Megaman Maverick Hunter X's story is a little more fleshed out, and even gives Sigma a clear motivation. he believes that reploids are chock full of potential, but working underneath humanity limits their potential--evolution requires people to struggle and to suffer, and so by starting a war, he can make reploids take the next step. X's infinite potential because of his ability to worry (????) is something that fascinates him, and so he wants to push X to the brink and turn him into a war machine. so, to that extent, that's pretty clearly Intentional!
but then the reboot sells like three-day-old McNuggies during Lent, so the reboot series is cut off. and any attempts at furthering the storyline there along with it kind of gets put in the mud. usually, when it comes to media storylines, it's always the most recent entry's iteration of events that takes precedence--"retcon" is a portmanteau of "retroactive continuity", the process of new information rewriting over things that happened. but if, in doing so, the retcon introduces new information that conflicts with the information that comes afterwards, how the hell do you handle it? what IS sigma's deal? do we take the new motivation from the new timeline? is that caused by the Maverick virus? or is it something he'd felt the whole time?
if you have a friend who knows about touhou, ask them about what happened in the lunar wars. it’ll be great. honest.
and likewise, what the hell is his final fate? Sigma's a pretty clear candidate for Resurrected, given how often he dies and comes back. but the ending of X8, spoiler alert for the twelve others that don't know and sincerely care about plot in megaman (i'm the 13th), has Sigma straight-up Retired at the hands of Lumine. dude's completely wiped out in a remote area, with nowhere to spread his virus, surrounded by a host of people immune to his virus and turn into him for funsies. the idea was for Lumine to become the new Big Bad Evil Guy of the series, and a fat lot of opportunity that got. but as far as any post-X8 story is concerned, Sigma is gone for goodsies. even the stories set after the fact, like the Elf Wars and Command Mission, don't have him around coming back. which is good, honestly, i find the X story more interesting when Sigma isn't the main focus.
THAT BEING SAID I CAN FUCKING GUARANTEE YOU THAT IF CAPCOM MAKES AN X9 AND SETS IT AFTER THAT, THAT MR. CLEAN-LOOKIN' TIN-ASS IS COMING BACK BECAUSE OF THE GODDAMN STATUS QUO
but yeah for now i'd classify him as Intentional / Retired and sigma balls
