Citation Needed
One of the benefits of Wikipedia is that it can be edited by anyone. This is one of the major arguments about it, of course, and can cause a lot of troubles, however, it also allows for some rather unexpected links, something that you would never find in any traditional reference documents.
I am currently in the process of playing through the Metal Gear Solid series. I have just finished the first game, and now I am working on Snake Eater, and Portable Ops. I am saving Metal Gear Solid 2 for after I beat those ones, so I can play it and then 4 after it, allowing me to really get into the storyline about the Patriots. I will get to where I am going with this in a moment.
I watch a lot of anime, I try to keep up with currently airing stuff. I will usually start watching everything that starts each new season if I get the chance, then only continue on with ones that interest me. With certain exceptions, I don't like following cookie-cutter harem anime, unless there is some twist to keep me interested, with the particular exception of the Key-produced series with their complex storylines (this should be evident to readers of Skewed, since I use the protagonists of each of their three major stories in that work). I am not a fan at all of Mech series either, and avoid those completely. I generally follow the same genre that I watch of other television programs: sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery.
One particular series I had started, but didn't really like so I dropped it is My-HiME. It simply didn't hold my interest at the time,
and so I dropped it. However, when they aired the second series based on the storyline, My-Otome, I picked up the new one, as the beginning story was much more compelling. Following this let to a much more complex storyline as I had initially imagined, as it revealed that this wasn't on the same world as the original, but seemed to be a world that humans had migrated to after space travel was invented. It also goes on about technology that they didn't really understand that was left from the original emigrations. So, curious as to if there was anything that led clues to this and to what some of this stuff was in the original series, I decided to give it another chance.
The storyline was more appealing to me the second time watching it, as I had picked up on some stuff I must not have noticed originally. However, as it went on it quickly grew to be a favorite series, as it introduced an illuminati-like organization, the Searrs Foundation, which has great power and even controls who the President is in the United States. In the first series they seemed to have failed at what their goal was getting involved in what was going on, however, in the second series their logo was all over all the old technology, and the more the series went on the more came to light that the Searrs Foundation actually seemed to win in the end, after the events of My-HiME itself ended. The Searrs Foundation is most likely meant to be a fictional jab at an actual large firm in the United States, particularly at Sears Roebuck and Company, or as they are now known as, Sears Holdings. However, to tie this all together, a rather interesting, second connection comes together when reading Wikipedia about the My-HiME series.
Particularly, the reference is discussed on the character page for Alyssa Searrs, the most prominent character that is from the Foundation. As someone observes in a footnote in the article, secondary to the reference to Sears Holdings, it jumps to the Metal Gear series as reference. It references Solidus Snake, one of the Patriots who was the President, going under the name George Sears, suggesting from these two things together that the Searrs Foundation and the Patriots are one and the same. Going off this unusual citation source, there are some other things we can extrapolate to add to this. My-HiME's airdate was September 2004 to March 2005, which, presuming the series takes place in the same time period, would have been during Solidus' reign as President, and would have ended shortly after the Shadow Moses incident, which takes place February 2005, and the show ended around the same time Solidus had to step down from presidency. Furthermore, Alyssa Searrs was not a naturally bred child, but was created through genetic engineering. We know that right from the beginning the Patriots were involved with genetic engineering, with the Les Enfants Terribles project, as well as with the FoxDie virus, and possibly were involved in the Genome soldiers as well.
And you possibly never would have thought about this if not for the editor of the Alyssa Searrs article, that decided to use Metal Gear Solid as an unexpected source to his article.
Date posted: 09 July, 2008 Tags: anime skewed video_games wiki
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