SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
Mission Log: Gerald Tarrant
The Rebirth Arc

BEGIN TRANSMISSION
DECRYPTION CODE MCRSS
--CLASSIFIED--

 
INTRODUCTION

          We made it!
          First, to everyone who has supported us through our five year "serial run": Laurel, Anoni, Lyra, Neesan, Tin, Maud, the folks at the GW fanfic archive and fanfiction.net, and all our fanart illustrators, thank you so very much!
          Sainan no Kekka is like a child to both of us, one we've nursed through teething and first steps and growing pains and temper tantrums. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and can't quite believe it's over, that I'll never open a blank document on my computer and begin typing up the next Trowa or Heero section for the current act. The characters I've written, Heero, Trowa, Wufei, Relena, Zechs, Shinobu, Darkflight, Atsuki, Li, Dorothy, Etille, and rest of the Catalonias, will always be vivid to me. In the course of five years, they have ceased to become "those anime characters from Gundam Wing" and become my own creations.
          Below in my last mission log (*sob!*) I'll reveal some of the long-awaited secrets (XD) behind the writing of the Rebirth Arc and some more of the concepts behind SnK in general. Please enjoy!

 
THE REBIRTH ARC

          Most of you probably thought the Rebirth Arc would never be finished, and sometimes, we thought you were right. SnK has seen me through my beginning days as a university student through graduation and transitioning into a full-time job, with increasingly more responsibilities and longer hours until I barely had time to eat and sleep, much less write fanfiction. It's not that QS and I ever really believed we would abandon the story, but at times the idea was inviting.
          The fourth arc of Sainan no Kekka, the culmination of more than five years of work, is some of the finest writing that I believe QS and I have ever done. The Rebirth Arc takes the characters of the previous three arcs and springs them into action. There is very little of the slow introspection that fills some of the earlier acts as QS and I found ways to weave the plot of the TV series into our own story. As the Betrayals Arc ends with a bang, with Sally's confrontation of Wufei and the ultimate realization that we've finally abandoned her to her own private war, the Rebirth Arc deals with the question of how to bring to justice a woman whose friends still wish to save her. The very concept of "rebirth" is the concept of life through death, the idea that great sacrifice will somehow grant salvation, and I hope we managed to portray that the sacrifices of all the main characters of SnK were not in vain.
          Personally, Acts 12 and 13 are my favorite out of the entire fic. Act 12 was my version of a solo act; with the exception of a few excerpts from the Aidoru scenes in 12.1 and the beginning of 12.2, I wrote Act 12 alone. This was not a creative difference on our parts; QS and I had already agreed that once Aidoru was dealt with, she would exit gracefully and let me do what I do best: write battle sequences. I had tons of fun sticking Relena into Epyon, dropping Zechs into the middle of enemy territory, giving Etille that code to the silo, helping Duo and the Cliffside gang save L1, and finally giving Sally the ending she deserved.
          Act 13, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. I've always liked epilogues, since I'm one of those people who is fascinated with the "three years later..." concept of fiction. I like to see where characters go after the great battles are over, after normal life creeps back in and they're debating whether to hit the snooze button on the alarm clock in the morning or go back to bed. All the endings in 13 are exactly where QS and I wanted them; we planned out this act probably around the timeframe of Act 5 or 6, and we knew where all their storylines were going by the end of Act 12. Not everyone's got a happy ending. You'll notice that Heero never makes complete peace with Quatre, and Shinobu and Helena don't tie the knot and remain in love forever. We COULD have done something like that, but that's just what I didn't like about Endless Waltz. It tied up the lives of the characters a bit too perfectly, and I wanted our story to be more realistic.

 
SAINAN NO KEKKA'S INTERNATIONAL CAST

          One of the things that has always struck me about fiction is that it most directly reflects the author's familiarity with different cultures and parts of the world. No matter how much a story delves into the fantastic or even if it's set in a different world, such as Tolkien's Middle Earth, eventually the influence of the richness of our own world comes creeping back in.
          Gundam Wing is, by the sheer size of its stage, the perfect setting for a truly global cast. In the Rebirth Arc, we expanded on the Preventers' globalization; the Geneva base is no longer the only military installation in the picture. The Indo-Pakistani "Asia Minor" base of Kashmir is now the center of attention, and besides Sparta in Greece, I also introduced various other bases in South America, Asia, Australia, and of course the L3 base. Setting key events at each of these other bases would obviously make for a really bloated and slow-going story, but it was fun to insert little tidbits to remind that yes, Une's Preventers truly are a world-wide government organization.
          The Gundam Wing TV series deals primarily with European influences, with only a tiny bit of (stereotyped) Chinese influence introduced by Wufei. Japanese culture is almost nonexistent, which is curious considering the anime's origin, and even Quatre's Middle-Eastern heritage is mostly ignored. QS and I have through the course of the epic inserted other nationalities to expand on this: Enrico Lopez, of Hispanic descent, Pierre Gils-Reve from Canada, and Machida Varis of Latvia. We also were interested in touching on Sally's mixed heritage, for which I wrote the sidestory "Legacy."
          The character of Jeong, Wufei's second-in-command, is a last minute addition. Jeong was created because I needed someone to work as a second-in-command for Wufei and I didn't want it to be just another throwaway character. Jeong only appears a few times, but I like the introduction of another Asian ethnicity besides Chinese and Japanese.

 
TREIZE KHUSHRENADA: THE CREATOR OF HISTORY

          I think it took us about 7 or 8 acts in to realize that something was missing from the heart of our story, and that something was Treize. If there's any character in Gundam Wing that truly embodies the rebirth concept, I think Treize Khushrenada is it. When we went back and wrote Act 0, QS and I had an idea to portray all our characters' thoughts and beliefs about Treize from before the series to just after his death, whether he was to them a teacher, patron, father, brother, hero, or villain, and I don't think we could have finished the story without that.
          Now, as Sainan no Kekka concludes, Treize has been dead three years and the world and colonies are still turning. It's not only Wufei and Une who have to deal with the repercussions of Treize's sacrifice now, but Sally's whole rebellion is based on it. While Wufei believes he died for nothing and Une believes he sacrificed himself for the greater good, Sally thinks Treize was a fraud, a puppeteer who manipulated the world under the guise of overthrowing the Federation, a power-hungry maniac who died before he could be found out so he'd be remembered as a martyr rather than a despot. The real question in the Rebirth Arc draws down to this: do you believe in Treize?
          Etille is the perfect character to swing the balance. Having been a soldier all his life, not influenced by hot-headed ideals borne by the younger Zechs and Sally and even Une or the Gundam pilots, Etille regards himself as pretty level-headed and rational. To him at first, Treize is just another failed revolutionary. It takes Sally's betrayal to make him think twice; the vehement denial of Treize's ideals from a woman he once respected is his first indication that perhaps Treize isn't just another dead soldier.
          The title of Act 0, "Treize Khushrenada: The Creator of History", is taken from one of the Gundam Wing CD track titles. I can't think of a more apt thematic title for Sainan no Kekka. Treize in the world three years after the One Year War is no longer just a great general who died too soon, or a crazed fanatic revolutionary. Those who loved him, those who hated him, and even those like Etille who struggled to stay neutral have, by the sheer force of Sally's rebellion, been forced to accept the fact that Treize's beliefs of what the world and the soldier should be have now shaped the rebuilding of society.
          That's why Etille chooses Treize, in the end. If the antithesis of Treize's belief that the world no longer needs soldiers is Sally's belief that the ends justify the means, he'd rather ally himself with a man who was willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good than a woman who is willing to sacrifice everyone else for her own desires.

 
THE PEACECRAFT DYNASTY AND NOIN'S LEGACY

          Despite her brief appearance in the fake 9.2, Noin is really still dead.
          Moving on, let me swear to you that I'm not sure what prompted me to stick Relena into Epyon and go swinging into the thick of things. Believe me, I've asked her, and she just gives me a blank stare and tells me I'm the author. I think she's trying to pass the blame.
          QS and I thought that Hilde's and Relena's brief meeting in the TV series should have some kind of repercussions in our story, and this little jaunt with Epyon was too good to pass up. Hilde, still smarting from her failure with the Zero system, is too stubborn to admit failure on the first try, and Relena has been chasing Zechs for far too long to be satisfied with his latest death-defying antics. The Peacecraft queen has never been one to shy away from the face of danger, so in retrospect, ordering Hilde to take her up in Zech's Gundam might not be so farfetched after all.
          Zechs takes Noin's white Taurus to the battlefield instead, and the simple fact that he accepts it from Wufei tells us that he's come to terms, at least in part, with the fact that Noin is gone. He rebuilt Epyon for vengeance, and if he had been the old Zechs, not yet been to A007 and seen the destruction there, he might have gone for it. But A007 and Dorothy and Etille and the Preventers have changed him too. Just like most of our characters in SnK, death and life are no longer such a black and white issue, and vengeance isn't always the best answer.
          QS and I decided early on that Zechs was to be Une's successor to the Preventers. The physical and mental attributes Zechs bears to the job speak for themselves, and his charisma is without question. The question was, would the Zechs at the end of SnK WANT to go back to Geneva and assume the burden of commander-in-chief, in a world still rebuilding itself and reeling from this latest uprising? Would he willingly step up into Une's shoes and take the reins of an organization that represents the centralized world government he was so opposed to in White Fang?
          If he hadn't made peace with both Noin's memory and Relena, maybe he wouldn't have. His relationship with Relena takes a sharp turn in Act 12 as they infiltrate the Kashmir base together and realize that what they've both been fighting for is the same thing. "Pacifism doesn't mean passive!" Relena declares to Chris in the Betrayals Arc, and it's only here in the Rebirth Arc that she shows her brother the truth of her words. She really doesn't believe he's a failure, only that he's a terrible brother and someone with no family loyalty. As Zechs returns to their ancestral home at the beginning of Act 13, the separate worlds carried by each of them are reconciled.

 
UMI NO BALLAD

          One of the things I wished the GW TV series had done more of is delve into the mixed heritages behind each of the colonial structures. In SnK, QS and I decided to base the history of each colony on a particular nation or ethnic group, in effect taking international politics to a whole new level. We've a complete colonialization history in our SnK Timeline on the info page, if you're interested and haven't read.
          L1's Japanese heritage did a lot to influence the characterization of Darkflight and the final confrontation that takes place between the Cliffside gang and colonists in Act 12. As Helena addresses the crowd, I tried to make the distinction between her world and the foreign world that she's now entered. She realizes that no matter how hard she tries, she can't quite bridge the gap. Not only is she from the Earth and not of the colonies, but understanding a foreign culture isn't just as simple as running in during a time of crisis and taking the reins; for a girl as driven and used to success as Helena Rosenbaum, president of the Cliffside student body, that's hard to take in.
          Shinobu and Darkflight, and even to an extent, Duo, are the ones who are needed to overcome this - Shinobu, of full Japanese blood, Darkflight, of the Breaks, and Duo, of the colonies. The Breaks aren't just an isolated, unneeded appendage of the "real" L1 colony: in the end, it's the Breaks and the underbelly of the colony that do what need to be done. For Shinobu, used and abused by his power-hungry grandfather, it's a chance to prove his own merit. For Darkflight, it's the first real step he takes in acknowledging that he's not just an extension of Heero, a step that takes him well on the way to where he is in Act 13.
          Umi no Ballad, "Ocean Ballad," is the title of the song I chose for Darkflight in the Act 13 soundtrack. There's no ocean on L1, and Darkflight's life can hardly be called a ballad, but in the end, after saving the Breaks, making peace with Shinobu and his own past, and taking a tentative step forward, I think we can safely say that Darkflight's on the way to finding that calm. A big part of this transformation is only able to take place because the Breaks are finally and irrevocably gone. There's no place for him to go back to now, and only then does he realize that the Breaks are one option for his life, but not the only option.
          At the end of his scene in Act 13, as he takes the taxi back into the city and thinks about the vastness and calmness of the night sky and of space, I believe Darkflight will be ok. The ocean of space might never be his home, but from his new life on the new L1, I think he's found his peace.

 
HEERO AND THE ART OF LIVING

          Those famous words spoken by Heero at the end of the Gundam Wing TV series are some of the most memorable in 49 episodes: "I will survive!"
          Easy to say in a moment of hard decision where even a second's delay means death, but as I've discovered in writing Heero through SnK, survival inside a piece of spaceship falling to earth and survival in a world devastated by war, where you're just another used up soldier in an era of politicians, is a totally different story. Surviving isn't the same as living. The Wing of the Breaks might have been surviving, but he certainly wasn't living.
          The Rebirth Arc finds Heero back in Wing Zero, his old memories restored and his familiar icy personality mostly returned, except for the occasional smile and the scar across his face. Quatre still hasn't forgiven him for his past with his sister, the boy who was once his closest friend is almost a stranger, and one of the women he respected most during the previous war is now trying to kill him and destroy his home colony at the same time. Even Wufei, who supported him through the last few acts, is helpless now in the fact of Sally's defiance. This is when living gets hard.
          Heero's role in the Rebirth Arc is ironically again to save the colonies. He doesn't necessarily like it, but he realizes now that it's almost automatic that he's shouldered the role of Gundam pilot icon. Trowa might be at the controls of the missiles, but it's Heero that the world looks to when it comes down to the wire. Looking at it from his perspective, there couldn't be a more unlikely hero: a no-name boy out of the slums of L1, fresh out of drug rehab, trying to regain the memories he lost after the war, who for all purposes still has no social skills to speak of.
          But that's not what the rest of the cast sees when they look at Heero, and that's because to them, Heero still represents the art of not only surviving, but living. Relena looks at him and still sees the same boy who believed in her when no one else did. Sylvia remembers that time in the graveyard when he handed her the gun and she spared his life. Zechs sees someone who he confronted man-to-man that winter day and who received the gift he wishes for most: anonymity. Wufei sees someone with the same scars on his heart reflected across Heero's forehead, and knows that he didn't come through all this for nothing. Living is perhaps a greater challenge than dying, and Heero accepts that at the end of Gundam Wing, swearing himself to survive the day rather than go out in a blaze of glory like Treize or Zechs tried to do, as Sally tries to do at the end of 12.3. It might be a hard and lonely road, but unlike Treize and Sally, who both are symbols of the past, Heero believes in the future.
          "It's always been about Heero," Duo says, and Quatre's words at the end of Gundam Wing, which echo in Heero's dream sequence after Atsuki's death, describe him best: Heero is the heart of space.
          In Act 13, I wanted to show Heero letting go of the past for good. No matter how much you want to live, you can't move forward until you leave your mistakes behind you, and Heero hasn't quite yet. The chain with the knife he used to wear around his neck is his tie to the old Heero and the reign of Doctor J, and only by making that final sacrifice can he break free. For Heero, the art of living begins in the last paragraph of his last section of Sainan no Kekka, and let's hope it continues for a long time yet.

 
TROWA'S KASHMIR MISSILE SYSTEM

          The questions Trowa asked Catherine as they sat in Dorothy's kitchen finally manifest themselves in Act 11, as it comes down to the wire and Trowa is forced to make a decision: does he release the missiles and kill Sally, or does he listen to his gut instinct and disobey a direct order because he thinks she can be saved?
          The Trowa of the TV series would be the perfect choice for the operation of the missile system. That Trowa didn't question, didn't think, simply acted and did what he was told. The Trowa of SnK, as we've seen through the Betrayals Arc, can't afford to do that anymore. With Ilene's death, he can't ignore any longer that the world isn't as clear-cut as the yakuza made it out to be. So he sits on the button, doesn't fire the missiles, and gives Sally the chance to take over the base.
          Was he wrong? One of the things I'm proudest of in my portrayal of Trowa is that I think I haven't simply portrayed his change in isolation. The other characters might be baffled at his sudden defiance, or confused and disappointed, but not one of them blames him. And how could they? Trowa was sent to Kashmir to do a job that no one else was willing or able to do, because no one who really knew Sally could have pushed that button knowing that she would die. No one was willing to take responsibility for her death, and so they pushed it on the one person they thought wouldn't budge or complain. How can you punish a person for failing to do something that you didn't want him to do in the first place?
          Trowa's return to L3 and finally his yakuza haunts of old are, just like Darkflight and Wufei, a symbolic full circle of coming home. But as with everything, nothing stays the same. The base, the trains, the ruins are all different now, and he realizes that things will continue to change, even people. But like Heero and Wufei and Zechs, Trowa now believes in people: he reaches out to Dorothy and Quatre, he accepts the job under Zech's command, and keeps Ballade pour Adeline on his phone to remind him of the ones he loves.

 
WUFEI: THE STORY OF MY LIFE

          Chang Wufei, the scholar, the artist, the thinker, the warrior, and in the end, the historian. It's only right that QS and I decided that Wufei be the one to chronicle the events of Sainan no Kekka and finish the manuscript that Quatre started.
          The Wufei of Acts 11, 12, and 13 is a quiet, decisive, driven man. Still believing that too many people have died because of him, doubting his own ability to face Sally on the battlefield, he escapes into the mentality that has served him well in the past: running away. But running away only brings him face to face with the memory of Meilan, of her death caused by his blatant refusal to accept that their way of life was coming to an end. Wufei thinks, in Act 12, that if he can somehow stop Sally and bring about her death with his own sacrifice, the world will somehow be righted and everything will be okay. Stepping back, it's easy for even the casual observer to see that this is exactly what Treize tried to do and nothing really came of it except a few spaceships exploded, another world government took the place of the old one, and Heero decided to survive (which was a good thing, I think).
          Of course, in the end he doesn't kill himself and bring Sally down in a blaze of glory. He joins forces with Heero and Duo, helping save a woman he doesn't quite believe in anymore. He returns to China not quite knowing if he did the right thing, settling into the monotony of daily life in solitude again. The letters he receives to and from Zechs and the rest of the others adds some spashes of color, but he's not ready to go back to Geneva yet. Une's offered him a position, but Wufei knows better now that he's just not a soldier, no matter how much Treize wanted him to be.
          Truthfully, we'd almost forgotten about the half-finished history Quatre started in Act 5, but it was the perfect backdrop for Wufei's transition to the role of historian. The lives of people, both great and small, fade in the end without a great writer to tell their stories, and Wufei is that great writer who has come to see that the world is larger than himself and his own ideas of penance, that everyone bears their own scars and he is not the least of them. His destruction of Shenlong is the final farewell to Meilan; just like Heero, he too must let go of his ties to the past before he can move ahead.
          I wrote Wufei's section before any of my others in Act 13. I felt it was important for me to first jot down the final ending, and putting it all down in Wufei's point of view was almost theraputic. To a certain extent, I'd say that Wufei is me, bearing traces of my own fears and insecurities and beliefs about my Chinese heritage, and it's somewhat comforting to see that even someone as tortured as him can begin again. Act 13 and Sainan no Kekka ends in a shower of fireworks as Shenlong explodes, with the sun rising on a new day and friends going to join friends once more in a chronicle of the story of their lives.

 
WHAT'S NEXT?

          QS and I have finished SnK, but we've enjoyed writing together so much that we're finally beginning that novel we talked about when we posted the fake Act 9.2. We won't talk about it much, as original fiction is a bit harder to work on than fanfiction, and we'd like to publish it in hard copy form one of these days. I think you'll find it quite a bit different than SnK, but at the same time, our writing styles will obviously not differ too much.
          Thank you again for being with us over the past 5 years. Gundam Wing may be an older anime and an older fandom, but Sainan no Kekka is still the greatest journey I've ever been on.
          See you soon!

 
--CLASSIFIED--
ENCRYPTION CODE MCRSS
END TRANSMISSION

Back to Sainan no Kekka: the Rebirth Arc