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Actually, taking the 10,000 mile view: what the hell is BGC actually ABOUT overall?

The Sylia’s Revenge For My Father part was satisfied in episode 3.
GENOM takes a massive, potentially story-altering pounding in ep 6 - but seems to carry on just fine after that?? REALLY?? With potentially hundreds of thousands of dead employees, multiple devastated cities, and surely a stock market crash like you wouldn’t BELIEVE??

We have no reason to believe that those explosions in other countries DIDN’T happen, especially when the visuals shift to POV Australia. Why didn’t this play forward into eps 7 and 8, like the USSD crisis did to episodes 2 and 3? GENOM should be in TATTERS after Largo. So should half the planet!

But we also have to take into account the background chaos of ARTMIC’s legal issues, their last-minute story revisions to eps 6 and 7 to spare Priss, and the ‘going out with a light hearted bang’ of ep 8 in particular into account too.

Should we then assume that the 'original’ Bubblegum Crisis story ended, incomplete, at episode 6? To be fair, we may not actually ever know the TRUE endpoint - since both Crash and 2040 are at best doctored documents, lacking the original plan and based on sketches, like Berserk continuing after the death of Miura.

I THINK the series wants to say SOMETHING about the relationship of humans, corporations and machines - but what that something is feels veiled to me on further consideration. Perhaps it never had the chance to reach its full form enough to make any specific argument in particular?

Well. There’s actual Word of God from Suzuki: “we added the Hissatsu Shiokinin (TV Tropes; Wikipedia) idea and set it in a city with all the mechanisms a city of the future would need and it became a plan where a futuristic Tokyo played a big role. With an emphasis on the concept of a “city,” and within that very planned city, the special police, a giant corporation and the Hissatsu Shiokinin-like figures involved behind the scenes. The relationships between those groups would be the basis of the story” (emphasis mine)

A-ha. So there it is. The entirety of the bubble is the point. This bolsters my belief that the ultimate core of the series is that of a system revolving around itself and its subtle permutations. The bubble spins, lurches, revolves, swells, teeters at the edge of bursting, skin thin as a breath - but it never actually breaks.

Individual components come and go, but the system remains. Vision shows up, tries to Revenge, is partially successful and partially thwarted, then she leaves again. Etc. Largo shows up and sucker punches GENOM, but is defeated and GENOM remains. Etc.