again this title is really literal tone poetry. it's basically reflecting tanuki man's view that while a lot of bad things set the tone in a lot of ways and there were way larger scale incidents that would occur, the crash of Sky Lagoon is where he came to terms with the fact that the hope for peace was going to be something to shelve for a few decades at least.
so, if you're not familiar with mega man, this is set during the intro to mega man x4. x4 is a game a lot of people love and i'm kinda not one of them. even with the undub mod, the story is sort of atrocious! so, like, theres these dudes, the repliforce. theyre real honorable and shit. some kind of ambiguous military/paramilitary/pmc(?) separate from the maverick hunters. zero is in lesbians with one of their higher up men, and in faggots with the sister of that guy. so. um. someone built a flying city for some reason? and placed it in the vicinity of a ground city?! and in the intro stage it gets attacked by magma dragoon and some repliforce goons and x/zero show up and he tries to play it off as "bro i was just the first hunter on site but we gotta go this ship is going down stronger than you by rebecca sugar streaming on spotify now"
so like. ultra instinct 9/11 happens?! this flying turd of a city just flattens the city below???? and x/zero are like "yo repliforce some of your guys were there we need to run an investigation but like it's chill just put ur weapons down"
and the leader guy is like ERM. CRINGE. DECLARING WAR ON HUMANS NOW. and the game is like "hey theres this guy in the shadows thats not sigma even though its obviously him but the leader guy told him to fuck off so dont worry about that" and yeah so it turns out sigma was totally behind everything and corrupting guys and engineered the whole thing for a laugh. and also at some point zero stone cold murders his boyfriend and girlfriend. at least he still has x or whatever.
really fucking stupid game.
anyway yeah apart from the motivational implications this has for tanuki man and also me just wanting to flex how cool copy man (not my character, a bestie wrote him) is, this story is basically just me critiquing the setting and harping on the fact that sky lagoon could only have been built for really stupid and impure reasoning.
guess i also use it to codify that in my vision of a BNW that continued on, repliforce would have just been straight up a branch of the UN military (and by implication, the hunters are more of a specialist policing task force by comparison)
later on in the anthology, i play with the idea that whatever happened in our version of x4, repliforce post secession were seen by some as a legitimate revolution. this would imply that our version of x4 was a lot less dumb, which is something i basically think would have been guaranteed to have happened. not to toot our own dicks or whatever but like it's not hard to write a better x4, and frankly, some of the shit some people wrote about mega man stuff will just always stick in my head forever. like nowadays i will always view wood man as this heavily spiritual unabomber sort of guy because of the person that wrote him.
oh yeah uh to be clear the mysterious figures tanuki man sees up in the observation room is just x/zero and magma dragoon.