The Corporate Agenda Behind The Duels in Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

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The story of the newest Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, is centered around the biggest conglomerate group in the universe, the Benerit Group, and an elite academic institution that is run by the group, the Asticassia School of Technology. Apart from the usual learning activities, Asticassia School of Technology also has a unique policy. Any student’s dispute has to be settled by a mobile suit duel. Whether it’s a simple disagreement or a challenge in order to get something out of the other party, a duel is a forceful and legally accepted way to settle all kinds of student-related issues. However, since this school is funded and run by the Benerit Group, you can expect to see some corporate agenda slip into the student’s duels. After all, the duel system is actually a lot more valuable to these companies than you might think.

The Companies And The Students

The Benerit Group consists of hundreds of different companies, most of which are doing business in the technology and advanced weaponry sectors, such as Jeturk Heavy Machinery, Peil Technologies, and Grassley Defense Systems, just to name a few. Generally speaking, every company within the Group offers its own unique products. However, one kind of product that most of them produced are Mobile Suits. The Asticassia School of Technology is an elite and expensive school. That’s why the majority of the students enrolled in this school are sponsored by a big company, most of which are a part of the Benerit Group. Most of those students are there so that once they graduate, they can immediately use their knowledge to work for the company that sponsored them. Not only that, there are even heirs to different companies that study in this school so that they will be ready to take over the company once they graduate, such as Guel Jeturk, Elan Ceres, or Shaddiq Zanelli, just to name a few. So what do you get when you combine companies that produce Mobile Suits with the fact that they also sponsored the students that learn in Asticassia?

A Form Of Research and Development

The first answer is to aid in Research and Development. Whenever a company comes up with a new model of Mobile Suit, they will send it to Asticassia so that their sponsored students can use it in a duel. It doesn’t have to be a completed product, as a matter of fact, most of them aren’t. The main reason why the company sends it to the students is to have them test out the new features or capabilities of the Mobile Suit and to gain valuable real-life combat data. After all, there are tons of different mobile suits from numerous companies that are being used in a duel every day. So where else can you get the valuable combat data between your new product and your rival companies’ mobile suits other than through this duel? In fact, that is precisely what Peil Technologies does with their Gundam Pharact. They told Elan Ceres to challenge some strong students to a duel so that they can analyze the combat data and even see how capable Pharact actually is in a real-life combat situation.

As A Marketing Tool

Although companies often send Mobile Suits that are still in a developmental stage to Asticassia, there are also times when they shipped a fully completed product to the school. This means the new Mobile Suit not only has passed every stage of development, but it is actually ready to be sold en masse to its customers. The companies that decided to do this simply want the change of free promotion through this duel. After all, the company usually asks the students to showcase the features and capabilities of their new Mobile Suits during the duel. And once the duel is done, they can show the footage to their potential customers. Some might even use it in their ads if they like the end result. More often than not, the other students, different company representations, and other people that are present during the duel will create enough buzz and hype for the launch of the company’s new product without them having to make any ads for the product. That is what Jeturk Heavy Machinery tried to do when they told Guel to fight with the company’s latest Mobile Suit, the MD-0064 Darilbalde.

As A Way To Settle Disputes

One of the main purposes of Asticassia’s unique dueling system is to swiftly deal with any kind of student disputes. On rare occasions, however, companies can also use this duel to settle any kind of dispute between them. After all, it’s not only students that may have disagreements with one another, the same thing can also happen to Mega Corporations. When such disagreements happen, and negotiations seem to reach a dead-end, then they will turn to their sponsored students. They will place their own bet and have the representative students from both companies duel each other. Win or lose, both companies have to abide by the result of the duel and follow through with the promise/bet that has been agreed upon before the duel. Needless to say, this kind of proxy duel happened beyond the knowledge of the school, or at the very least, they pretend to not know about it. After all, this exact same scenario happens when Miorine challenges his father, Delling Rembran (President of Benerit Group), in a duel in order to save Suletta from expulsion, and Aerial from destruction. Thanks to Suletta winning the duel against Delling’s representative, she manages to stay in school with Aerial.

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Final Thoughts

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Those are some of the hidden corporate agenda that has been revealed in the first part of Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. We might see lots of other ways the duel system is being used or abused by the members of the Benerit Group as the story of Suletta and Aerial unfolds. Have you watched every episode of Gundam: The Witch from Mercury? If you have, is there any other hidden corporate agenda that you notice? Let us know in the comment section below.

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