THAT'S MY STUPID FOUND FAMILY AND I'M HERE FOR THEM.
Are you getting attached, professor ? Damn he really loved to live this way with them...
That dream/illusion chapter was stuck in my mind for years and it's making me so sad...It was sweet ! What do you mean the evil mad scientist guy made an illusionary world in which he's living with his opponent as if he was her uncle and works with the not insane scientist guy who's like a father to the little Gally ? Sobbing.
Yesss I thought about it a lot too!
The antagonist who tried to soften the protag and instead softened themselves.
The antagonist making a trap of peaceful life for the protag, falls into their own trap because deep inside they're also hurt ("despair"), starts questioning what they actually want in life, ends up heartbroken because they finally felt peace/happiness/love, and heartbroken because they loved/love the protagonist now.
Like this is one of the best ways to defeat someone ever nhhhh.
If the movie adaptation doesn't deliver basing such a peak concept then I don't know Q_Q
Want to make this chapter even sadder while making it more bautiful in a weird way?
Imagine that's a copy of the real Ido in there. We know that when Ido got Nova to wipe his memories, Nova made a backup.
Imagine if that backup is what he used here, and not just an illusion based on his and Alita's memories of Ido.
Imagine Ido was really there and let it dawn on you that this would make this last goodbye so much more real.
What I find fascinating is the tragic context remembering this scene adds to their interactions in Last Order. Is Gally/Alita ready to end Nova at the first sign of a double-cross ? Of course. This bridge has already been crossed. Does she accept to give him a chance and cooperate with him on the road to Jeru ? She does, probably in part by remembering he's not entirely the entitled mad scientist he pretends to be, and has human sensibilities and the potential to do good. Alas, this version of Nova doesn't remember the Ouroboros scene since his backup chip was 12 hours late and so we get brain-in-a-box shenanigans. T_T (not helped by his tragic death at the hands of M'Badi, which, by the time she meets him again during the ZOTT, means she might have partly idealized him like she does for several of her dead adversaries (see : Jashugan, Den, *freaking Payne*). ...Which might have cooled relations slightly since upon going to see him to help save Erika in the one volume of Mars Chronicles which is not an old flashback (Kishiro can be such a troll :( ), she's back to threatening to destroy him on non-compliance.
Thank you for pointing it out! She tries to humanise him in her mind a lot. Their hard to decipher relationship is one of the story's driving forces.
Why is Alita humanizing so much this one specific man she still hates?
She has this moment before Ouroboros 2 even happens:
