WMG: According to TVTropes,

This is a "Wild Mass Guess" entry, where we pull out all the sanity stops on theorizing.

Here at Chizumatic we call it Engineer's Disease. Ready for big spoilers below the fold?

Ep 4 was very odd, and introduced two things which might end up related. First: Sono learned the game from an American who was in the military, and who eventually was killed in combat. Presumably he was a Marine but they didn't say so explicitly.

Second, Yura is revealed to have some kind of extraordinary power over alternate realities, plus the ability to graft such realities into our own timeline. At the end of ep 4, she returns to the temple, stands on the firing platform at the target range, and does something deliberately that puts her into Choujirou's timeline. And she stopped the arrow that was going to kill him. Oddly, she seemed to be in both places at once. Her bullet from the real Skorpion hit the arrow, and her pellet from the Airsoft replica hit the coin. Both shots seem to have happened simultaneously.

Ren was pulled into the alternate space and saw it all happen. (I'm not sure why she didn't say anything about that at the end.)

And then we find out that Choujirou, who originally had died young, instead lived a long life and died as a graybeard.

Now follow me here, because this is where we pull out all the stops: Suppose that Yura convinces Sono that this all happened. And suppose that Sono gets it into her mind that the two of them could save her American mentor. Wouldn't that make for a strange story? It would mean operating in a real modern battlefield, which means Yura's skills would have to be tip-top. So it fits at least somewhat into the kind of story they're telling, about Yura getting into the game and being trained by Sono.

It sure as hell isn't what we all expected from the way the series was advertised, and if it were any other studio I'd say there wasn't any chance of this. But this is Gainax, so anything is possible.

And why else would we learn about Sono's mentor being dead? Well, because one of Sono's points is that everyone has to find their own reason to play Airsoft, but there could have been other ways to do that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 03:50 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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