oh boy, spicy, spicy!
so, x is a pretty alright guy in his own games, right? but he has a pacifism problem. like he's a softie but also involved in a lot of forever hell wars. as much as x7 is a meme game that isn't good, i think its interesting that they reflect this by straight up not having him be playable for the first like quarter(? or half? i forgor) of the game because he's moping about war. in zero 1's ending, he outright states that he retired and *died* and is a ghost because he just got so depressed about always fighting mavericks. (side note- x wasn't outright lying but also he sure was omitting a lot until he had to come clean about the dark elf so zero could fix it.) i think the zero series is meant to imply that, like, neo arcadia got evil pilled because x wasn't there to steer it right? but that actually just ties back into tanuki man's whole spiel in the simon story, about how a system is kinda fucked if it can't really self regulate without the threat of some dickhead getting elected and ruining everything. and this kinda naturally lead me to the thought of, like, how do we get from "charismatic leader builds a haven city and dies of the sads" to "that city is now extremely fashy"? well, the obvious answer is that the leader was always a liberal, and you know what they say about who bleeds when you scratch a liberal.
okay, no, i'm not saying that x was or became an outright fascist. that would be... well, silly. but i am saying that it feels like it would make sense for x to be really obsessed with trying to preserve a sort of status quo that humans in particular value and it probably lowkey comes from a sense of guilt about all the wars. so the speech he gives in this story is extremely... obama. nice sounding rhetoric to mostly say nothing at all. hope. change. drone. strike.
"we will rise to the challenges of this brave new world" omg he said the thing. it's like he's some kind of... man that's mega. x
i guess the whole "forgot about robot masters" award X earned here is kind of an accidental chud moment on his part. lol
i'm proud of the idea that eurasia specifically is what lead to neo arcadia, and that it actually existed in some form as the rebuilt world state prior to the elf wars, and it had extant city states out in the wastes that likely just had their populations consolidated into the main geographic locale after most of them were wiped off the map in the hell that was the elf wars. i think it would tie a lot of things together very neatly. the zero series was always meant to follow on from x5 specifically and inti creates really only got the opportunity to account for later x games in subtle ways like with the morph tech mirroring next gen reploids (something i imply here, by the wayyyy) or super post-hoc with things like model A calling back to axl in zx advent. the x series is basically a slow motion apocalypse with the world getting more fucked up in each game, and it feels like the zero series is built off x5 and to a lesser extent x6 showing the world as a barren desert after the eurasia incident occurs. zero 4 especially wants to be connected to x5, with it taking place around the crash site and having the x5 end motif built into esperanto and i mean the whole plot point of "weil said we're crashing another space station lol have fun". so like with all of that in mind i think it just made sense to more directly tie neo arcadia as an entity to the immediate outcome of the eurasia incident.
"hey molly, what the fuck was up with that ascii guy?" nothing, really. he was a character a buddy had that i took over. kinda hard to do much with, but a cool enough concept that i sort of just wanted to throw him in at the end. it's really just for the people that were super locked in for bnw. i guess i sort of like the idea that ascii acted as a guardian angel to the individuals in the city. like maybe the elf wars would have been way worse without his subtle interference or whatever. he doesn't come up again but if you wanna pretend he's around when you replay mega man x6 as some sort of dark self flaggelation ritual, go crazy on it. do tricks on it