Alita: Battle Angel The secret of Zalem - A fans take on.
In August of 2019, there was a lot of talk recently on Twitter from the Alita-fanbase, theorizing things we saw in the Movie that seem to hint to a direction. Something that wasn´t covered in the Notes of James Cameron (Maybe because we got just 6 of 600 pages). Basically, we try to figure out how the plot could go on from now. I collected these thoughts and made my own theory about the nature of Zalem and its’ inhabitants, and gave another motivation for the war than just pure greed over resources.
The starting point was a discussion about Alita’s weight. In the making-of book it was stated that just her heart would weigh 300 pounds. But even if you, for whatever reason, refute the official info about it, the rest of her body based on her composition should weigh 400-500 pounds. So what has that to do with the secret of Zalem? (Give me a second). If she is that heavy, why can Ido carry her? He seems to be the only one carrying her. Also did you wonder how an old man could fight off Cyborgs for years? How could Zalem, which seems to consist of ordinary humans, fight an army of URM Berserkers, the most advanced Cyborg weapon ever created? How could they do it without some kind of equalizer, which would give them equal powers to go toe to toe with Mars?
What about Chiren? Because of Chiren, we know that the secret of Zalem the way we know it, yet, can't exist. In the movie they showed a regular human brain, so it is relatively safe to assume that they don't swap out their brains for computer chips... But I also think that Cameron won't entirely give up on the secret, but just change it into something else.
We know by now that Ketheres and the Ladder exist, but we have no signs of Venusians or Jovians. I can imagine that in order to condense the story, they fused factions. So what if they fused the Venusians with the Zalem faction, and the Mars faction with the Jovian one? This would give Mars and Earth, of course, more weight. The Zalemites would master genetic engineering and nanotech to reach perfection. That way they could give themselves super-human strength, speed and durability. The nanomachines heal the wounds and make them basically immortal. Speaking about perfection, Remember how Zalem kicked out Ido and Chiren for having an imperfect child? It would make sense in a society that is obsessed with biological enhancements. Also, Zalemites don't seem to have mechanical upgrades. They seem to consider this as impure and doesn't fit their idea of perfection. The URM would go for cybernetics and nanotechnology. For Zalem, only lowlifes would use mechanics to upgrade their bodies. And then we have the URM. Maybe they see mechanical upgrades as the way to go. Zalem might hate that, since those are suddenly impure humans that are equal to them, a thought they must have hated. They could have been obsessed with that route to perfect themselves...
...And there you have it. 2 human factions that have the same origin, but then started off in different places and paths, becoming alien to eachother and incompatible, not as a figure of speech, but literally. They develop themselves as two different species, and we know how fierce people can fight over mundane differences, like PS or Xbox, or left wing vs right wing. Imagine that the subject of argument is how we build our own bodies.
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