Comic Review: gen:LOCK “con:QUEST Part 1”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sycorax takes over narration duties this time as the Shogunate continues its rampage through Osaka as part of their plan to end the war once and for all. Chase, who seems to be not at all mind controlled and participating in this entirely of his own free will, doesn’t even blink when they begin shooting Polity plans out of the sky and massacring their pilots, but DOES respond when the idea of harming innocent civilians comes up. He tells them that their focus should be destroying the nanobot cloud that the Union typically uses to wipe out people in enemy territories, making use of what is apparently some sort of escape pod to go find it, but makes the rest of Scyorax PROMISE not to kill anymore people…something they clearly do not give a crap about and just let him go so they can do what they want without his whining.

Meanwhile, the pilots retrieve Migas and assume command of Anno’s forces. But before they can face the Shogunate, they’ll have to face Sycorax within Siege, including Chase.

OUR TAKE

We’re onto Issue…6 of the full issues? The solicitations for the print versions say it’s out of seven, which means fourteen of these “chapters”, so we’re likely in the home stretch now. Naturally things are ramping up towards a climax, which in this case is a massive showdown in an exploding city on top of a confrontation on the internet as well. All (or maybe just some) of the elements converge on a few key points to finally be settled once and for all so this story can transition the characters towards Season 2 of the show about as well as it transitioned them out of Season 1, which is to say not well.

It’s only become prominent in the last few issues, but the most stand out aspect of this comic so far is the outright character assassination of protagonist Julian Chase. Last issue gave him a little bit of leeway and room to be interpreted that maybe he just got possessed by Scyorax somehow into becoming part of this scheme, because surely someone who has both seen what the horrors of war did to his family AND seen a version of himself be horribly corrupted by dogmatic philosophies would know that Sycorax were not in their right minds when they said they wanted to end the war by taking control of a giant killer robot. But no, it seems the first few pages are here to clarify that Chase is indeed perfectly alright with them killing forces ON HIS OWN SIDE so long as they don’t hurt civilians, which they have no reason not to do.

And that’s not to say that Sycorax gets out of this looking great either, since their plan is horribly flawed from the ground up. The farthest I see this getting is maybe the next big battlefield they come across, where the Shogunate WILL be destroyed now that both forces know it is coming, with the end result being the Polity wastes forces trying to stop its own rogue robot, the Union gets to use this giant fuck-up in their propaganda (whatever that looks like), and whoever’s aboard the Shogunate is immediately killed so the war can continue. Given that Sycorax were introduced in this story, I already didn’t see much of a future for them once it concludes, but Chase is the MAIN GODDAMN CHARACTER and he just committed probably a ton of war crimes that will at the very least get him discharged and at most locked away on a flash drive or killed. At this point, this comic might as well be ignored by the series because there is just too much to reasonably justify and keep it within the canon timeline, which is going to make reading the last few issues a certainly strange experience.