The Semi-Annual SEED Explodium

by Sylvie Mosse

I post this on various boards every few months while making some minor tweaks here and there. Does this count as a fanfic? It's kinda more like a bulleted outline for something that could be a giant epic fanfic, but I hope it counts.

"Maybe now you'll never slime a guy with a positron collider, huh?!"

Dr. Peter Venkman

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- Remake Destiny

- Shinn now blames Kira for his family's gruesome deaths and has legitimate beef with the guy out of the gate. You know the Orb flashback where he looks up in the air screaming at Freedom Gundam but then they just immediately forgot about that? It's a thing now.

- Mwu retains his original death from the first series and Neo is some different guy with another VA. Rey and Neo are rivals for the entire series.

- Athrun never goes insane and betrays his friends on the Minerva

- Athrun doesn't just float there like a confused baby while Kira flips out and destroys Saviour Gundam. He continuously questions Kira and Cagalli why aren't they doing anything to fix the corruption in Orb before things get worse, instead of just using ZAFT as their go-to scapegoat.

- A very fed up Athrun tells Kira to F off and slashes Freedom apart in Berlin while Kira is yelling about why Destroy Gundam is too dangerous and the only option is to kill Stella

- Shinn saves Stella. Stella tells Shinn the only way she can survive is with her human-battery-recharging bed thingie she remembers seeing in Heaven's Base. That's how the Heaven's Base battle happens in this version (also several weeks ahead of schedule)

- Lacus finds her magic Destiny Plan journal in space and immediately starts trying to make the same conclusions she does in the official show (while she disregards the fact it's all the opinions of another scientist who worked with Durandal, and not even writings from Durandal himself - Just like in the show.)

- Destiny and Strike Freedom are introduced simultaneously in separate overlapping battle scenes and both use "Vestige" as their image theme.

- Stella is now fully enlisted in ZAFT and pilots a Gaia Impulse made from spare parts

- Luna gets Saviour Gundam as her mid-season hand-me-down

- Rey gets Shinn's Impulse Gundam. It's basically always in Blast Impulse mode to match his Zaku Phantom's specs

- Heaven's Base ends the same way and Djibril skedaddles to his buddies in Orb

- During the Orb invasion, most of the Minerva pilots are sent into Orb. But the Minerva finds the Eternal's position in space and sends Shinn up in Destiny Gundam specifically to prevent Kira from doing what he does in the show

- Athrun (now using Legend with a commander's horn, a surfable DRAGOON backpack, and a magenta-themed Phaseshift overload gimmick called "Voiture Eclair") splits apart from the rest of team to hunt down Djibril himself, convinced Djibril is hiding in Cagalli's house.

- The scenes where Athrun is being heroic while breaking INTO the Orb compound are deliberately animated so they mirror the scenes from the original GSD where he was being paranoid and insane for no reason while breaking OUT OF the ZAFT compound (i.e. he's disabling dudes in Orb navy suits and throwing them out of windows etc. Chef's kiss)

- Athrun finds Djibril and extracts a confession confirming the following: Djibril was the one who sent the assassins. Getting Kira to blame Durandal and going out on a vendetta wasn't part of his plan (Kira and Lacus were both supposed to be dead before they even left LOGOS territory), but everything ended up helping him in the long run so he just sat back and let it play out that way.

- Djibril pulls a gun and Athrun is forced to kill Djibril in self-defense. The retrieval fails, but the invasion of Orb ends and Athrun has a recording of the conversation in his pilot helmet

- Athrun rushes to space to break up the fight between Destiny and Strike Freedom and prove the whole thing is a misunderstanding. He gets there just in time to recreate the final scene of Gundam 0080 (except now all three main characters are in Gundams)

- He actually succeeds in talking down Kira and Shinn

- Meanwhile, the three DOM clowns (who are completely isolated from the conversation and just see a bunch of enemy suits idly floating around) focus their sights on Destiny, saying "Hey, this guy looks easy."

- They try to Jet Stream Attack Shinn while doing their "FOR LACUS-SAMA" tribal chant.

- Shinn, having none of it, dodges and quickly kills 1-2 of them before the attack succeeds

- Shinn, completely hysterical, turns to the Eternal screaming "When are you guys ever gonna stop attacking us?!" He fires Destiny's rifle at the bridge. Lacus and Andy are killed instantly. There's a quick sentimental glimpse of the unused Infinite Justice parked in the Eternal's silo as it's exploding.

- Kira is also now completely hysterical. He starts having an existential out-of-body flashback experience where he's fusing Fllay and Lacus together, and remembering his shock from the first time he killed Andy and his Vivian Hsu girlfriend.

- Saikisen2023Retracks dot mp3

- Shinn charges Kira with his full-power Wings of Light. Kira insta-launches all his DRAGOONs and charges back at Shinn. He pushes Shinn away with raw nuclear anguish to create more distance between them.

- Kira tries to use Strike Freedom's multi-targeting aimbot stock footage thing for a quick win, but Shinn counters it by using Destiny's afterimages. They drive Kira's tracking system haywire.

- Shinn gets back in melee range, strafes around Kira, and starts slicing up his backpack to mess up Kira's radio connection. "Can't you learn any new tricks, you piece of shit?! How about learning how to actually pilot?!"

- SF spins around to face Destiny. SF and Destiny both go for the swinging Justice Kick thing but end up smashing each other's legs off because neither of them have beam shoelaces and they're equally-powered.

- Athrun is watching the whole thing completely aghast. He doesn't know how to handle it.

- Kira's screaming "If you hate my weapons so much MURDERER, just HAVE THEM!" He gives up trying to shoot Shinn and intentionally crashes his remaining DRAGOONs into different parts of Destiny's armor (like they're improvised Sword Bits, or Grenade Bits, or something). Destiny is engulfed in pink neon space smoke as it explodes piece by piece.

- Suddenly, Destiny's remaining arm reaches out of the smoke and opens its hand. Shinn screams "Someone has to stop you!" Destiny's posing exactly like its first NG 1/144 model kit box art, but now it's all skeletal and screwed up.

- Destiny blasts Strike Freedom with its palm canon from several dozen meters away in its defiant final attack because THE PALM CANNON IS A RANGED WEAPON.

- Shinn directly targets SF's cockpit, but Athrun frantically flies in at the last second and just barely yanks Destiny off-center. The beam diverts as it's shooting and ends up slicing through part of SF's reactor housing.

- Destiny and Strike Freedom mutually absolutely destroy each other in their decisive final fight scene somewhere around episode 40 (after only partaking in a couple of battles by themselves)

- Shinn pilots a patched together Destiny Impulse for the rest of the series. Kira spends a lot of time in a hospital bed after Strike Freedom's reactor goes into meltdown in its destruction.

- Destiny Impulse is strongly suggested by Yolan and Vino in this version. (Those two mechanic guys on the Minerva who were set up like they were going to be the new Sai and Tolle at the beginning of the show, before Sunrise completely changed their minds on what the plot of the show should be about and basically turned them into cameo characters that only appear in a couple of random scenes toward the end.) After Shinn returns from the Strike Freedom fight, they're kinda bickering in the background behind Durandal and saying "Yeah, we TOLD YOU getting rid of the modular design for Destiny was a bad idea!" They're much more relevant in this version. Much more like Kid from Gundam X.

Episode 42-ish and onward:

- Djibril's EA is kaput but the Archangel characters still side with Cagalli/Orb

- Durandal and Meer publicly announce the Destiny Plan.

- Endgame Durandal is nowhere near as one-dimensionally evil as his original version, but he still commandeers Djibril's Requiem cannon, and that creeps Cagalli out

- Orb and remaining EA personnel work together to close in on Requiem. EA destroys their own death weapon.

- During the Requiem battle, Rey kills Roanoke, but Roanoke mortally wounds Rey, leaving Blast Impulse disabled

- Rey sacrifices himself holding ZAFT's ground long enough so Durandal can shoot Neo Genesis at the cluster of enemy forces gathered around Requiem. "I guess we showed you you're wrong, Rau. *fade to white*"

- Cagalli (who's now fighting in space with her Oowashi Akatsuki) throws everything she has left at Neo Genesis

- There's an extra scene where Athrun is transporting Meer to a safer location away from the active battle zone. Meer's really mopey because she thinks her actions specifically are what got her idol killed. Athrun's not feeling too high on it either, but he tries to encourage her by saying "You're just trying to do the right thing." The colonies needed a "Lacus" to lead them while the real one was chilling out on a private beach, and now they need a "Lacus" more than ever. Meer comes back with "But wasn't she trying to do the right thing?" Athrun doesn't have an answer.

- Sting and Auel get last minute upgrades called Cosmo Chaos and Astral Abyss. Gaia gets a what-if upgrade in the MSV line called Galactic Gaia

- Very Angry Kira drags himself out of sickbay and demands the Archangel crew jerry rig him a "new" mobile suit/armor using the remains of original Freedom Gundam (the one Athrun slashed apart in Berlin) and leftover parts from one of the destroyed Meteor Units from the Eternal's wreckage. Let's call it Frieden Comet.

- Archangel and Minerva do their spinny thing and blow up each other's engines, causing both to crash into the moon

- Sting and Auel find the Archangel after it crashes. They're in super-ultra-combat-kill mode with their final boss phase of Extended drugs. They're systematically going after the weakest-guarded targets they can destroy. They blame the Archangel for the battle against ZAFT falling apart, and they remember the Archangel cast was Djibril's original target to begin with.

- Luna is killed using Saviour Gundam to protect the downed Archangel while arguing with Sting and Auel to stop being so crazy.

- Sting and Auel also die during Luna's defense

- Minerva and Archangel are in communication with each other after they crash. After Luna leaves her mortal orbit, everyone on the Archangel hears Meyrin screaming and bawling her eyes out over the radio because her sister got killed. Murrue and co. start to consider the ZAFT perspective

- Kira destroys Athrun's Providence Justice, killing Athrun. And I mean like super, super, undeniably dead. Like Mwu's original death scene but you see like a hundred of Athrun's shattered helmets floating out in space.

- Athrun destroys Kira's Weird Freedom Zeong Thingy, causing Kira to lose an arm

- Gaia Impulse's battery starts running out and Stella leaves the battlefield to resupply at the Messiah/Neo Genesis

- Final battle is Shinn in Destiny Impulse vs. Cagalli in Oowashi Akatsuki

- Cagalli gets on direct radio with Durandal, telling him Hey Guy I Understand What You're Trying To Do But The Giant Gun Is Kinda Scary.

- Durandal says "Hmm."

- Neo Genesis starts blowing up. Shinn is terrified because Stella just returned there.

- The explosion turns out to a controlled demolition sequence that separates Messiah from NG and only destroys the NG portion.

- Orb's fleet shoots off their flares, signalling the ceasefire

- Gladys doesn't die. She and Murrue exchange captaining stories and become BFFs

- Epilogue: Murrue & crew join a new ZAFT outpost built in Orb. There's a scene with Murrue marching out on the Orb docks to accept her new Captain position and apprehensively looking at her feet as she wonders what kind of batch of complete ZAFT strangers she's going to be commanding. Unexpectedly, she hears Miriallia and Dearka saying "Hi!" Murrue looks up and sees it's just her same old crew of Archangel goons wearing ZAFT uniforms.

- Kira is missing. Shinn is now a whitecoat with a Destiny upgrade. 40% of humanity has adopted some version of the Destiny Plan. The world still thinks Meer is Lacus and everyone is pretty ok with Durandal.

- Sequel show gets made: Gundam SEED Eternity

- New protag. This time maybe it's one of the Berlin survivors like everyone was calling for back in 2005.

- OP sounds like "Inherit the Force" by TM Revolution

- First episode is Kira with a prosthetic arm going undercover to break into Orb's base and steal a joint Orb/ZAFT-designed mobile suit called Honor Gundam. It has the Nu Gundam color scheme but it combines the aesthetics of Strike Gundam and Impulse Gundam.

- Episode 8 of Eternity is called "Meer" and revolves around her deciding to reveal her identity and Lacus's fate (which she partially blames herself for). The preview bit for ep 8 is different characters trying to convince her not to do it, but then you just hear Rie Tanaka saying "A mountain does not move."

- One of the villains is a purple-haired guy with a mask who pilots a purple Aegis/Regenerate fusion called Vengeance Gundam. Cast Akira Ishida as his VA. But who is he?

- Spoiler: The villain is an illegitimate son of Patrick Zala who's come out of the shadows to claim the lost birthright of his younger half-brother (Athrun). HIS team were the Zala remnants who caused the colony drop at the beginning of Destiny. And BOY does he have an arc. (I just have no idea what that arc is.)