ACZIC - Arthurian Myth - Electrosphere.info

AUTHURIAN MYTH
Actual information is in white, while the parallels in Ace Combat Zero, written by - m o b i u s 5 -, are in red text.

The Round Table:
In the legend of King Arthur, the Round Table was a mystical table in Camelot around which King Arthur and his knights sat to discuss matters crucial to the security of the realm. In some versions, the wizard Merlin also has a seat.

There is no "head of the table" at a round table, and so no one person is at a privileged position. Thus the several knights were all peers and there was no "leader" as there were at so many other medieval tables. There are indications of other circular seating arrangements to avoid conflicts among early Celtic groups. However, one could infer importance on the basis of the number of seats each knight was removed from the king. Perhaps at each meeting King Arthur let his knights be seated at random without knowing where he might sit that day. The siège périlleux ("dangerous chair") was reserved to knights of pure heart.

Solo Wing makes a point of all the pilots being on equal ground, no ranks or affiliations to hinder them. The main point of the round table was that all were equal, there was no head.

Tauberg's Excalibur:
Excalibur is the mythical sword of King Arthur, sometimes attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Great Britain. Sometimes Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone (the proof of Arthur's lineage) are said to be the same weapon, but in most versions they are considered separate. The sword was associated with the Arthurian legend very early; in Welsh, the sword was called Caledfwlch.

In surviving accounts of Arthur, there are two originally separate legends about the sword's origin. The first is the "Sword in the Stone" legend, originally appearing in Robert de Boron's poem Merlin, in which Excalibur can only be drawn from the stone by Arthur, the rightful king. The second comes from the later Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, which was taken up by Sir Thomas Malory. Here, Arthur receives Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake after breaking his first sword in a fight with King Pellinore. The Lady of the Lake calls the sword "Excalibur, that is as to say as Cut-steel."

This is an important one, we all know the story of the sword in the stone, what most of us don't know, is Excalibur is not the sword in the stone, it was a sword given to Aurthur by the lady of the lake. Multiple quotes from ACZ state that cipher "pulled the sword from the stone". Regardless, Excalibur was a sword that was feared and admired, and wreaked havoc on those who stood in it's way, in this sense, Excalibur was a fitting name for the superwepon in ACZ.

Glatisant:
The Questing Beast, or the Beast Glatisant (Barking Beast), is a monster from Arthurian legend, the subject of quests by famous knights like King Pellinore, Sir Palamedes, and Sir Percival. The strange creature has the head and neck of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a hart. Its name comes from the great noise it emits from its belly, a barking like "thirty couple hounds questing".

The first accounts of the beast are in the Perlesvaus and the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin. The Post-Vulgate's account, which is taken up in Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, has the Questing Beast appear to King Arthur after he has had an affair with his sister Morgause and begotten Mordred (they did not know they were related). Arthur sees the beast drinking from a pool just after he wakes from a disturbing dream that fortells Mordred's destruction of the realm; he is then approached by King Pellinore who reveals it is his family quest to hunt the beast. Merlin reveals the Questing Beast had been borne of a human woman, a princess who lusted after her own brother. She slept with a devil who had promised to make the boy love her, but the devil manipulated her into accusing her brother of rape. Their father had him torn apart by dogs, but before he died he prophesied his sister would give birth to an abomination that would make the same sounds as the pack of dogs that killed him. The beast has been taken as a symbol of the incest, violence, and chaos that eventually destroys Arthur's kingdom.

From day one I thought it funny that a Belkan base was named after a monster symbolizing Incest... I'm a bit confused by the symbolism here, all I can gather is possibly just a statment of Belkas tyranny and overall evil? Any help here?

The Hydrian Line:
Hydrian is most likely a respelling of Hadrian, a defense line separating Great Britian from Scotland

Hadrian's Wall (Latin: Vallum Hadriani) was a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of Great Britain to prevent military raids by the tribes of Scotland to the north, to improve economic stability and provide peaceful conditions in the Roman province of Britannia to the south, to define the frontier of the Empire physically, and to separate the unruly Selgovae tribe in the north from the Brigantes in the south and discourage them from uniting.

Supposedly King Arthur and his troops stood ground on this line and fought over a hundred knights, I've had trouble confirming this though...

There's no parellel here, only a direct reference. It's a defense line.

Avalon Dam:
Avalon (probably from the Celtic word abal: apple) is a legendary island somewhere in the British Isles, famous for its beautiful apples. The concept of such an "Isle of the Blessed" has parallels in other Indo-European mythology, in particular Tír na nÓg and the Greek Hesperides, the latter also noted for its apples.

Avalon is sometimes referred to as the legendary location where Jesus visited the British Isles with Joseph of Arimathea and that it was later the site of the first church in Britain. This location of the Isle of Avalon is usually associated with present day Glastonbury.

It is also said to be the place where the body of King Arthur is buried. He was supposedly brought there via boat by his half sister, Morgan le Fay. According to some legends Arthur merely sleeps there, to awaken at some future time.

This one was very obvious, a place of reckoning, the final destination. The V2 waits for when it can rise to cleanse the world. It sleeps again to re-awaken in AC5. If you remeber either Sorcerer or Wizard makes a speech here, probably a refrence to the great church idea.

ADFX-01 "Morgan":
In Arthurian legend, Morgan le Fay, alternatively known as Morgaine, Morgain, Morgana and a slew of related name variants, is a powerful sorceress and sometime antagonist of King Arthur and Guinevere.

Morgan is the daughter of Arthur's mother, the Lady Igraine, and her first husband, Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall; Arthur is her half brother by Igraine and Uther Pendragon. Morgan has two older sisters, Elaine and Morgause, the latter of which is the mother of Gawain and the traitor Mordred. In Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and elsewhere, she is married, unhappily, to King Urien of Gore and Ywain is her son.

This is just a small refrence they threw in. Either that or it's just a crazy coincedince...

Hresvelgr:
In Norse mythology, Hræsvelgr (Corpse Swallower), is a giant. According to Vafþrúðnismál the wind is a product of Hræsvelgr sitting at the end of the skies in eagle shape, beating his wings. Hræsvelgr is believed by some to be identical to the eagle that sits in the crown of Yggdrasill, but the primary sources do not confirm this.

Hræsvelgr's name is sometimes anglicized as "Hræsvelg", "Hraesvelgr" or "Hraesvelg". The common Danish form is "Ræsvelg" and the common Swedish form is "Räsvelg".

Cipher/Zero Connection:
It seems Cipher and Zero (I mean the title, "Ace Combat: Zero") has some connection. A cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption (and the reverse, decryption) — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternate term is encipherment.

The original information is known as plaintext, and the encrypted form as ciphertext. The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it; it should resemble random gibberish to those not intended to read it.

The operation of a cipher usually depends on a piece of auxiliary information, called a key or, in traditional NSA parlance, a cryptovariable. The encrypting procedure is varied depending on the key, which changes the detailed operation of the algorithm. A key must be selected before using a cipher to encrypt a message. Without the same key, it should be difficult, if not impossible, to decrypt the resulting ciphertext into readable plaintext.

"Cipher" is alternatively spelled "cypher"; similarly "ciphertext" and "cyphertext", and so forth. The word descends from the Arabic word for zero: ṣifr or ÕöÝúÑ, like (the Italian) zero (which remained in use for 0, the crucial innovation in positional Arabic versus Roman numerals) but soon was used for any decimal digit, even any number. There are also etymological roots to the Middle French word cifre, and the Mediaval Latin cifra, both of which probably originated from the Arabic root. While it may have come to mean encoding because that often involved numbers, a theory says conservative Catholic opponents of the Arabic (heathen) numerals equated it with any 'dark secret'.

SOURCE:
Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
Official Ace Combat Zero Website
Namco CH Ace Combat Zero Website

http://www.gods-heros-myth.com/ (Arthurian Section)

ACCREDITATION:
Originally posted by - m o b i u s 5 -

QUOTE (Grastens 7 @ Jul 11 2008, 08:49 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Glatisant... incest... Belka's tyranny...

Inferences on the symbolism of Glatisant:

I think that it has something to do with the remote location of the instalment, that the base is really massive when it was promised to be smaller... and, isn't it the source of nuclear inspections? Or, are there not nuclear weapons in proximity of that site, if not at the base itself? Weapons of that nature would tear Belka apart when the seven nuclear bombs were set off on home soil.

the questing beast represent something that a knight should strive to acheive (defeat the monster), but at the sametime was a reminder of a great wrong had been commited. Arthur sought after the questing beat with pellenor, despite it being a reminder of his own great wrong.

in ACZ, attacking Glatisant base is something that, as a soldier, you have to do in order to do your duty. but at the same time, it represents a great wrong in that you are assisting with the transition between fighting a defensive war with Belka, to invading Belka itself. Defending ones self is rarely evil, but attacking another is. by attacking the base, you are commiting the first act in an aggreesive invasion of Belka.

at least, IMO. i haven't played much ACZ.