Brilliantly drawn, but storywise, the author doesn’t know how to stop. There are characters upon characters and entire chapters just for the shock content. Girls from an orphanage being killed by soldiers in a false-flag op. A child abused by her parents until she schemes to dispose of them.
Martian Chronicles is both a sequel to Last Order and a prequel to the original Gunnm. It suffers from the same problem as many other prequels, like Star Wars Episode 1, which is call The Messiah Complex.
You seen, in Star Wars 4-6 Darth Vader was a formidable enemy and a very interesting character. But in Episode 1 Lucas made him the result of a prophecy and The Most Powerful Jedi of All.
In the original manga, Alita was a talented warrior, with strong spirit, secret techniques and all. But here we immediately told that even as a kid she’s the result of some Prophecy that would Change the World. I think that approach completely takes agency from the character. Instead of a story of personal growth, we get a story of simply following your destiny all along.
Since all of events happen on Mars and Mars is a German colony in Gunnm (Venus is French, by the way), there’s a lot of germanophilia going on. A lot of german words, soldiers dressed as 3rd Reich, there’s a terrorist organization called “New 3rd Reich” (why not 4th?)
