#zalem

When someone watches A:BA movie for the first time (doesn't know the manga or anything, a blank slate).

All they know is that apparently Alita fell from Zalem, being dumped with the trash.

So they think:

She was somebody's doll, servant of some kind and got disposed of.

OR, she was someone's experiment/property that escaped.

(At least that was in my case huh)

... Until it turns out she was actually a soldier from Mars, she is NOT from the sky city.

And if they follow the manga, it will turn out Alita didn't even fell from Zalem but from somewhere else.

Like her lying in Zalem's pile of trash was a giant red herring huh.

So, KoG uses the trope A:BA teased but went into another direction.

Btw, while "Guinevere being someone's property that ended up in the trash below a sky city" is rather a secure fact, that was just a pilot. Things can still turn out to be different than they seem at first, just like with Alita.

There is no crime in Zalem, yet Lou is scared of being sexually assulted. You could say this is just Lou being paranoid, but if that were the case, why would Russel's first reaction be to also assume Bigott was harassing her?

The fact that both Lou and Russel jumped to similar conclusions tells us this is a thing that realistically could happen and does happen on Zalem.

But it's a city with no crime, so how come?

That means sexual abuse is either covered up or not treated as a crime. Or both.

Not to mention the gun crime rates you'd expect if it's this easy for someone paranoid to get a gun and pull it on whoever they find suspicious.

In Last Order we see more female Zalemites with firearm while male Zalemites use more basic weapons like bows. At least some of them had to have owned those weapons and been trained in them before the reveal.

Even the accused doesn't find it absurd that someone assumed he was sexually harassing an employee. He finds it absurd that someone assumed he was sexually harasssing a female employee.

It's less "How dare you think I'm a sex pest" and more "How dare you think I'm straight".

So Zalem has gay rights and brainchips but still has not solved gendered violence and sexual violence. Got it.

That might be the scariest part of it, really.

YOU CAN SEE THE COMBAT-EFFICIENCY IN HER EYES.

PIC INFO: Spotlight on "Gunnm" and/or "Battle Angel Alita" fan art/digital art by Shanghai-based artist "Hou China," c. 2019.

One thing that gets me the most about this is that she seems aware in her "altered" state- which is horrifying. And the way her eyes move and her heart beats makes the inital shock of seeing this so much worse.

If we ever get a sequel, I hope they explore this topic in more detail because this was awesome.