Alita, or in the original Japanese version, is the title character and the main protagonist of Yukito Kishiro's cyberpunk manga series Gunnm (known as Battle Angel Alita in the English translation) and its sequels Last Order, Mars Chronicle and Panzer Kunst Chronicle.
Originally a Martian cyborg named , Alita is known for her fighting prowess as a practitioner of the powerful cyborg martial art and her racing skill at , the most popular sport in the western district of Scrapyard. Her background and past history were briefly hinted at in the original series, but were not explored until Last Order and more extensively in Mars Chronicle, which reveals that in her previous life she was highly instrumental in creating the world within which the manga series are set. During the 10th ZOTT, Alita is entrusted the relic "Fata Morgana" by Caerula Sanguis, which grants her direct access to the quantum supercomputer Melchizedek and makes her the Last Order agent.
Last Order reveals that Alita has been a cyborg since she was three years old, while Mars Chronicle reveals that she has been a cyborg her entire life since "birth". She has been shown in a human body twice – during the dream sequence after Bigott Eizenburg halted her imminent execution and offered to recruit her as a TUNED agent, she appeared as a young human woman wearing the long-sleeved white top and pants of an institution. In the epilogue of the original series, years after sacrificing herself to save Zalem from crashing down to Iron City, Alita was regenerated as a fully flesh-and-blood woman with long black hair and appeared to be taller than her typical height.
In the original manga, "Alita" was actually the name of her adopted father Daisuke Ido's black pet tomcat, who died a month before he found the remains of cyborg girl in the huge junkyard. The cat makes an appearance in the manga as part of a dream that Alita experiences while being trapped in Desty Nova's Ouroboros program. In the dream, Alita is named "Gally" while the cat is named "Alita". The side story "Holy Night" reveals that Ido took the original "Alita" in shortly after he arrived in the Scrapyard, at least five years before he found the cyborg Alita in the junkyard.
Conception and creation Character Alita's appearance is that of a beautiful young woman of average height with shoulder-length dark hair. Although she used several cyborg bodies, her height has tended to remain consistent. The Japanese version of Angel Redux has a lineup of several characters in Last Order and shows that she is around tall in her Imaginos 2.0 body. Beginning with her TUNED body, Alita's face features permanent eye black, although it did not appear in her first Imaginos body. In the 1993 OVA she is depicted as having red eyes and black hair. While her face is fair-skinned, the rest of her body has typically been a metallic grey.
During the course of the story Alita wore several outfits. In her first cyborg body, this consisted of casual wear in the form of a shirt, track pants and sneakers. After gaining the Berserker Body, she switched to attire more appropriate for a hunter-warrior (bounty-hunter) that featured black sleeveless leather catsuit with fingerless gloves combined with brown knee-high boots and a light yellow trench coat. In Gunnm: Martian Memory, the trench coat is omitted.
Her Motorball body is depicted as being purple, with the number "99" in yellow on the cover of the third manga volume ("Killing Angel"), the 3D special and in Gunnm: Martian Memory. When not on the track, Alita wore dark pants over the lower half of the body, while switching out the upper half, over which she wore a jacket as well as dark fingerless gloves. While using her second civilian body she is first shown wearing a hat, a short black dress, light-coloured jacket, dark fingerless gloves, dark pantyhose and dark boots. She later wore a sleeveless dark top, dark elbow pads, dark fingerless gloves, jeans, and white shoes.
As a TUNED agent, Alita wore a black bodysuit with body armour, over which she typically wore a cape. Two illustrations that initially appeared in Business Jump and are reproduced in the Guncyclopedia depict the bodysuit as being red while the armour is white. The cover illustration of volume 5 of the Gunnm: Complete Edition depicts the bodysuit as being black and the armour a light green. In Gunnm: Martian Memory the bodysuit is a dark green with the armour in a lighter shade of green. Her signature weapon is a sword known as the Damascus Blade, which consists of two separate blades joined together.
Personality
Alita is known for her fierce determination and willingness to back this up with force when necessary. This is in stark contrast to her docile personality when she was a young girl, as she was much less certain of herself and tended to rely on her companion Erica for support. Nonetheless, she developed into a highly competent Künstler who was assigned to carry out Operation Maulwurf in ES 386, when she was 16. After she was caught and sentenced to atmospheric drop as punishment, she lost most of her memories and temporarily her personality after atmospheric entry and crash landing near Star City.
When she was discovered two centuries later by Daisuke Ido and resuscitated, Alita's initial personality was that of an innocent teenage girl. However, after she saved him from the mutant woman, she began to instinctively recall her past Panzer Kunst training and also became much more confident and independent. Against Ido's wishes she decided to become a hunter-warrior in order to rediscover her memories through fighting. Alita has proven highly resilient as she has had to face her inner doubts and fears many times but has been able to rebound each time and reaffirm her belief in herself.
In Last Order, she suffered a mental breakdown when she discovered that her brain had been replaced with a brain bio-chip and her body was subsequently dissolved by Super Nova's Seca attack. However, after Melchizedek called out to her failing consciousness she responded, allowing her to be resurrected after fusing with Tunguska and absorbing its wormhole core. Her personality has become markedly more cat-like and mischievous, a physical manifestation of which is a tail that she chose to transform from a piece of Tunguska that was stuck to her rear end.
Background From flashbacks in the original series, and further elaborated on in Last Order and Mars Chronicle, Alita remembered that she is from Mars and that her original name is Yoko. As a young adult, Yoko was part of a group of Künstlers whose final mission was to target Earth's orbital ring during the Terraforming Wars. At the penultimate moment, her comrades were ambushed by an unknown opponent. Yoko escaped, but was left to crash onto Earth. This event was later retconned by Last Order and Mars Chronicle, which elaborate more on Yoko's recruitment and activities as a Künstler.
Early life Originally codenamed HK-BR035, Yoko was "born" in Cydonia in ES 370 during the crumbling Archduchy Era that was plagued with civil wars, as a maske tumor extracted from a woman named Nollin Sonann and grafted into a mechanical body, and is the only known successful case of such experiments that produced a healthy, viable subject. When the villain Baron Muster (Nollin's vengeful brother) learned of her existence, he took her away and named her Yoko, and used her in a conspiracy plotted with Marquis Maruki Baumburg to overthrow Cydonia's ruling queen Kagura Dornburg. As a result of Muster falsifying records to state that Yoko was Kagura's daughter (and thus had a claim to Kagura's throne), Yoko was abducted by the Cydonian armed forces and forced to walk across a minefield as a means of execution. As Yoko was unable to walk because she was too young to properly control her mechanical body, a sympathetic one-eyed girl named Erica Wald volunteered to accompany her. After walking together for a hundred paces, Yoko and Erica were rescued by a group of Panzer Kunst warriors, who slaughtered the soldiers. Left in the care of a nomadic medic named Finch, Yoko and Erica were left at an orphanage in the Flammarion town of Mamiana, which was later attacked and massacred by the renegade Papagei Corps. Yoko and Erica were the only two survivors (spared only for political propaganda purposes) and were later picked up by Finch, who returned half a day late and missed the slaughter. When the canopy membrane maintaining Mars' atmosphere was ruptured by an explosion, Yoko, Erica and Finch were rescued by Baldachin Association Gärtner Mui, who demanded they sacrifice their lives to restore the pillar that supports the canopy. However Mui was then contacted by her superior, who ordered them released according to a prophecy that one (or both) of Yoko and Erica would become the chosen one that could change humanity's direction.
Later, Finch was contacted by a woman called Kyoko Bima, who claimed to be Yoko's long-lost mother but in reality was an agent hired by Marquis Maruki to keep Yoko under custody. Yoko spent the next year living a happy comfortable life at the Baumburg Mansion under the watch of Kyoko, who actually developed a genuine maternal bond with her. When Muster came to visit Maruki to discuss their plan, Erica, who had become Muster's apprentice, plotted for Kyoko and Yoko to run away with the help of two bounty-hunters. However, in the chase, the bounty-hunters were killed and Erica stabbed Kyoko dead before both girls were retrieved by Muster and Maruki. Later Muster's assistant Zoe revealed to the girls that Yoko was not genetically related to Princess Kagura and her real genetic mother was Muster's late sister Nollin.
After impressing Künstlers with her combat skill thanks to accidentally ingesting the Leaf of Nagendra, a rare Martian artefact, Yoko was admitted into the mercenary organization Grünthal alongside Erica and was trained in Panzer Kunst at Grünthal's Mauser School, although she might also have received training on techniques from the Schneider School and possibly the vanished Gossen School. However, as teenagers the two childhood friends had a falling-out, which resulted in Yoko mortally wounding Erica during a sparring. As an intermediate Geselle level Künstler, Yoko was recruited into the Mauser School's covert op unit Kammer Gruppe, and earned the nickname "Yoko von der Rasierklinge" ("Razorblade Yoko") for her ferocious efficiency in combat. In ES 386 during the height of the interplanetary Terraforming War, the 16-year-old Yoko was picked to carry out Operation Maulwurf against the Venusian-Earth alliance, and managed to infiltrate Ketheres and upload a virus into the supercomputer Melchizedek. This disrupted the navigational systems of the five Leviathan-class colony ships, destroying four and killing 450,000 civilians, as well as causing a complete Gestalt breakdown in Melchizedek's organizational processes, from which it never fully recovered. After this event (known as the Camranh Tragedy), Yoko was captured by Caerula Sanguis and tried as a class-A war criminal, and was sentenced to death by immolation via atmospheric drop as punishment. Due to special protocol built into her cyborg body, Yoko's brain survived atmospheric entry, but crash-landed near Star City where she lay in suspended animation for almost 200 years.
Depiction Battle Angel Alita