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The Anime Crisis Center > The Anime Crisis Center Community Forums > Network Forums > The Bubblegum Crisis Center v

The Role of the Knight Sabers


The Role of the Knight Sabers
#1
With this I intend to explain the role of the Knight Sabers as I see it, in their original concept. I?ll start by explaining the setup of the squad and then their role in Megatokyo during the 2030s.

I am going to start with Nene simply because she is the most poorly understood. Most focus on her abilities as a hacker, believing this to be her role. While this and other intelligence gathering are part of her role, it?s not why she?s out on the field in a hardsuit. On a starship she would be called the sensor operator, in a gang the lookout. Her suit is bristling with sensors allowing Sylia to have those abilities on hand. She allows Sylia to know how things stand on the field greatly enhancing her ability to render command decisions. War is the art of deception, and calling information power is not just for show. Additionally there are things like her using her sensors to assist in targeting in Red Eye?s.

As such it is only natural that the operator should avoid combat. For if they?re in the middle of combat, they?re not paying attention to their sensors, which could spell the doom of the entire squad. Arming Nene?s hardsuit with powerful weapons, would be the result of having the luxury to do so. As there is not such a technological gap that such a luxury can be afforded what she does have makes sense, and can be best seen in the first 3 OVAs. On the thumb side of her gauntlet she has a laser system capable of etching or providing harassing fire to encourage enemies to leave her alone. On the pinky side we have a device which appears to be a form of knuckle bomber for emergency close range defense, as was used against Mason?s escort, likely a model 55C. The two emitters can be best seen when she etches on the sidewalk in Tinsel City. Naturally her suit is designed to keep up with Sylia?s and she is teamed up with her.

Linna and Priss are simply put grunts. Their job is simply to do what Sylia tells them to do, and contribute with their fighting skills. As such they are just about the most expendable people in the organization. They do not need to possess any command ability, or skills with intelligence gathering and sensor operation, they just need to be able to work a hardsuit halfway decently. If Sylia ever needed to recruit more grunts, she would have a very large pool of potential candidates.

Linna?s suit is optimized more close combat, in that it seems to take all of the originals CQB weapons and recreate them in a more powerful form suited to Linna. The armor piercing dagger type weapons built into Sylia?s suit become the longer ranged and somewhat more versatile ribbons attached to Linna?s helmet. The knuckle bomber is taken to the point Linna is the bomber woman. She however is not fatally deprived of longed ranged weapons possessing some form of three barrel energy gun with good penetration capability.

Priss?s suit could on the other hand be considered to be optimized in terms of longer ranged weapons, with the cannon and needle guns. Like all the other suits hers possesses knuckle bomber technology from the start, although it is only seen used once with the first suit just prior to it being effectively discommissioned in Red Eye?s. While all the Knight Sabers possess Motoslaves hers tends to see more use, although it is more due to her being impulsive. When Sylia has seriously broken out the Motoslaves, both Linna and Priss have them.

Sylia is simply put the leader, and debatably the best in terms of combat skills, in addition to being a good leader. She tends to favor the form of leadership where you listen to your underlings suggestions and then render a command decision. Her suit is basically the original, a versatile armored suit providing good mobility and fighting capability. It has shown the ability to be able to punch through battlemover armor, as it did with the DD. Its energy guns are nowhere near as impressive, but then they are energy guns and BGC is an anime that seemed to avoid the associated brainbug for the most part.


The role of the Knight Sabers is somewhat hard to pin down. Their job is not however to be keepers of the peace and to protect people from boomers, regardless of Scoop Chase messing that up. That is the job of the AD Police, and the JSDF if the AD Police truly can?t handle it. Sylia went after the rampaging boomer in Tinsel City, because it was behaving oddly, something that deserved looking into. Considering it was a completely new breed of boomer, it was definitely worthwhile for the preservation of the Knight Saber organization. The mere concept of doing so for free was foreign enough to deserve comment.

Whether Sylia truly even has any long range goals, is something one can only speculate on. For the most part she seems to run an organization that is a kind of Trouble Consultant third party organization that wishes to do the right thing whenever possible. Naturally the costs of keeping such an organization equipped and running smoothly aren?t exactly small. It does however appear that Nene, Linna, and Priss are paid on commission instead of in terms of an annual salary. One can only speculate at how the actual payroll is setup.

One of the big problems with 2040 and Crash from what I?ve seen is this all goes out the window. They just turn into a squad of skilled persons, who happen to work together. Plus the AD Police is contrived into ineffectiveness and the JSDF dropped so the writers can be lazy and just sub them in a bog standard good guy stops bad guy role.

To be fair this all started in a way with the director and screenplay writer for Scoop Chase. They decided to break with everything and have the Knight Sabers deploying before the AD Police were even aware, to stop boomers for free, so they could contrive Miriam as designing Boomers that would ?surpass? the old suits. Like Priss suddenly going pure HtH to exclusion of her ranged weapons with her deus exed suit in Red Eye?s the reason is simply the whim of someone. Even the whole out hacking the boomer thing was hurt by things like why these consoles have all these ports she needs to plug into. A Nene episode in concept is a good thing, and Scoop Chase isn?t that bad, but it involved a slipping up from which Bubblegum Crisis has never managed to regain its footing. Plus it was more like a half hour ripping on Nene then anything else dealing with Nene.
#2
2040 did slightly touch on Nene's role in the Knight Sabers. The episode where the other 3 girls fought that bug underground showed her position in the team. It also shows that without Nene, the team would be at a huge loss of information (and their lives could also be in danger) regarding their missions.

I see Linna as probably the most expendible (just like she says in the series) but yet kind of vital to the team. If anything she could just be the one who is there to hold the team together but on the other hand she also proves to be a vital support to the team. If anyone remembers back to the episode where she goes back to the country to her parents, Both Nene & Priss were having a hard time dealing with a military boomer rampaging through the city and Priss was at a crucial point of dieing out with her low batteries since she was the only one fighting it. When Linna arrived, not only did she prove how important she is to the team but her priorities as well since she was back in the country and could've ditched the team.

I'm not sure if I can explain the roles of Sylia & Priss in 2040 but they too have areas which are vital to the Knight Sabers, actually I think 2040 did indirectly deal with each girls position on the team.
[Image: mesho-san.gif]
#3
Pretty much 2040 made it clear that if you need a boomer blowed up, Priss is the one for the job -- hardsuit or no.
#4
Priss did a pretty good job of cleaning up boomers in the orginal series too.
#5
The roles were certainly more cemented in 2032/3 for the KS. This speaks of the competency of Sylia, however. The 2032/3 version was calm, cool, and 3 steps ahead of everyone else around her. In contrast, the 2040 version was one crumb short of a cookie... usually with a shot of scotch in one hand and a handfull of pills in the other. Its no wonder that the Knight Sabers of 2040 were just haphazardly tossed together... and the reason that Sylia had already lost two other girls to her crusade by the time 2040 rolls around.
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