Yamato 2202 story questions

Q & A from my March 7 discussion with Nobuyoshi Habara:

How and when did Katsuragi get to Planet 11?

Zordar sent her immediately after learning about Earth. The White Comet fleets couldn’t advance past the Garmillas fleet at the time (in the Magellanic Cloud) so she had to slip through on her own. Of course, this means Zordar had to have known about Earth during Yamato 2199, and we don’t get that impression in the beginning of 2202. So…it’s a story error.

What was the blue tunnel in Chapter 3?

When the Planet Stravase collapses, it forms a black hole. While rescuing Yuki, Kodai falls into the event horizon and the tunnel becomes a gateway to another dimension. Yamato fires its Wave-Motion Gun into the black hole, overloading it and reversing its gravity, allowing Kodai and Yuki to drift free.

Who is holding the knife (in silhouette) outside Katsuragi’s medical room in Chapter 6?

This was a trick. It’s Saito, but we’re meant to think it’s someone else because Saito appears to be out on a recon mission. In actuality, because Planet Zemuria isn’t rotating around a sun, light is constant and time doesn’t appear to pass. We think Saito is still outside, but he’s come back in and will go out again. This can be tracked in time stamps on monitors in the ship.

In the final battle, Yamamoto’s Cosmo Tiger 1 is hit and explodes, but the cockpit section tumbles free. How does she get back to Yamato?

In a deleted scene (which was too complicated to add), we see the cockpit section fly independently and land on the ship.

We see the blue tunnel again in the last episode. What’s going on there?

It’s a tunnel in time, where Teresa is showing images of the past and the future to Kodai. Images of the past fly upward and images of the future drop downward. The images were drawn by animators both on the Xebec staff and outside. Habara asked about a dozen of them to draw their favorite scene from the Yamato saga. Images from many stories can be seen, including Yamato 2520. When I asked Habara if these images will be published somewhere, he didn’t know. He regretted that he didn’t think to ask two other people to contribute images: Michio Murakawa and Tim Eldred. So close, yet so far…

With the Q&A completed, I had one more thing I wanted to talk about, and I’d brought some images on my laptop. As it booted up, I asked Habara if he had seen my Star Blazers webcomics here on Cosmo DNA. He had not. I explained what they were (Star Blazers Rebirth and The Bolar Wars Extended) and said I wanted to show him some specific pages. He leaned in and I showed him the following:

In this scene from BWE, Mariposa guides the ship into a mecha planet by mentally causing giant portals to open. When Habara realized why I was showing this to him, his eyes popped and he shouted “OH!” very loudly.

Katsuragi does the exact same thing in the final battle of Chapter 7.

In another scene from BWE, Frakken has given the crew a dimensional engine, allowing the ship to submerge and launch as if from water. Habara smiled widely.

In Chapter 7, Frakken and his submarines expand their dimensional energy to allow Yamato to submerge and launch as if from water.

Finally, the big one. In Star Blazers Rebirth, Trelaina shows Wildstar visions of the past and future – and other dimensions – in bubbles from across time and space. Now Habara was so amazed that he had to applaud.

In the final episode of 2202, Teresa shows Kodai exactly the same thing.

Habara enjoyed studying the images in each bubble, some original and some pulled from eclectic corners of the Yamato universe. He held out his hands to grasp mine and said he felt an amazing connection. I replied by observing that studying and thinking hard about Yamato for so long simply led us in to the same place.

He complimented my Yamato kung fu and I paid him back tenfold, telling how much we’ve all enjoyed seeing a Yamato story again for the first time, being reminded of how we felt when we were younger and it was all fresh and new. Habara blushed and said it was the greatest possible compliment he could receive.



Back to the travelogue

4 thoughts on “Yamato 2202 story questions

  1. Honesty I don’t really think that Katsuragi’s arrival clashed with the timeline. Zordar discovers Earth’s location by tracking Teresa’s Cosmo wave between December 2 and 8, Katsuragi arrives to planet 11 on the day of the attack, December 24, this means that there’s a 22 days window in which Zworder could create a Sabera clone and send her to Earth. Since the 8th floating continent is located in warp distance between the Earth and the gatlantis forces I’d say that it’s possible for Zordar to send her in time

Leave a Reply to Ben Boyle Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *