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And then there's this...

Throughout the Ace Combat series, the player characters of all the games say next to nothing. We know they give commands and acknowledge orders, and may even on occasion offer a very terse opinion if prodded by their wingmen, and yet no personal knowledge whatsoever is ever asked or offered. Even their names seem to be taboo for the their wingmen, although surely their name must be known. Meanwhile, the other members of the squadron happily chew the fat during even the most hectic battles, offering their insights on the human condition, their state of mind, and their concern for the people they cherish. Why the dissonance? The squadron leaders can talk. So why do they choose not to? So the player can ease into their skin no matter who they are? To avoid pinning a particular outlook or walk of life on the person whom the player is presumably meant to become? No. That's just a side-effect of sorts.

Look what happens to these wingmen, for a moment. In AC04, the happily gabbing Mobius Squadron is whittled down to a single silent member, and the air forces at large continue to take heavy casualties in every significant engagement. In AC 5, Chopper, known for his penchant for chatter, is the only wingman to die in combat. Nagase, a close second to Chopper thanks to her unbridled love of soapboxes, suffers a heroic BSOD and narrowly escapes both death and capture. Grimm feels content to mention his family no more than three times, and, although he never suffers any plot-based injury, he is generally regarded as the weakest link of the squadron. In AC0, PJ remains tightlipped about his significant other despite constant prodding by his colleagues, and manages to keep up with the era's greatest ace pilot. The moment he explicates his affection, he is brutally slaughtered. And in AC6, Shamrock constantly motivates himself through his hardships with talk of his adorable wife and daughter- who both end up dead, a state of affairs he will have to deal with from a wheelchair. You might be forgiven for thinking this is all coincidental, rather than a pattern.

But to recognize a pattern is to prepare oneself to avoid it, and the greatest pilots in the series must have realized this trend on some level. It's not particularly clear whether their preternatural skills helped them intuit and enforce a code of silence for their own safety, or if the reverse is true- that knowing to shut up and keep your face low would transfigure them into invulnerable heroes! But what is clear is this: Mobius 1, Blaze, Cipher and Talisman, were never shot down, never made a face-heel turn, were incomparable even within their own elite units, and led their units to determining the outcomes of four different wars- that we know of. They knew that drama and fate were real, living, and vindictive forces in the world of Strangereal, and they rode that superstition to the edge of space, and back to earth, safely.

They probably weren't doing it for themselves, either; no one alive that wanted that level of skill or renown for its own sake could ever keep their jaw shut long enough to attain it! I think it's safe to say that they had seen what became of the prolix: they become ashes. And so do their loved ones. These four aces may well have their own individual motivations for ending up in the cockpit- duty, money, prior military commitment- but at the end of the day, I'm sure they just wanted to make it home alive! And to an intact home with a living family! In fact, the very history of Strangereal would seem to confirm this: how the hell did the entire planet manage to develop such a fantastic over-reliance on air and space power and maintain such supernaturally-skilled air corps unless, after a solid century of worldwide warfare, the heroic silent aces simply began to out-breed the Choppers and Shamrocks of their respective wars? Especially if this morbid ritual has been going on since Belka first revolutionized air combat in the early 1900's?

Strangereal is an odd place. Technologies we can barely produce on any scale or in any number are all but commonplace by 2010, in a world where a nation's armies might flee in terror of the retribution of the ghosts of four demons. It is not at all difficult for me to believe that, for the soldiers and citizens of such a world, maybe a little genre savviness could be a mightier weapon than any railgun or sky fortress, a weapon made all the mightier for the world's apparent blindness to it, much to the detriment of its citizens... and to players weary of Nagase's constant moralizing.

*shudders*

Here's an interesting bit of information, regarding Ace Combat Zero.
Anyone who's played it will know that the player's current Ace Style will dictate which ace teams Cipher will end up fighting, for example, either Rot, Grun or Indigo on the first mission in Airspace B7R. Well, since there's no canon source of what Ace Style Cipher more closely followed, all official sources state that he fought all of the ace teams at the same time.
That would mean that in the first mission in B7R, canonically, Cipher fought four Rot Typhoons, four Grun Hornets and four Indigo Gripens. AT THE SAME TIME.
Same goes for Operation Battleaxe, when he actually fought eight Schwarze MiG-31's, four Silber F-16's and a Phantom and four Schnee Super Tomcats and a Prowler. AT THE SAME TIME.
Finally, he also fought eight Sorcerer F-15S/MTD's, eight Gault Su-47's and four Wizard F-16XL's and four YF-23's. AT THE SAME TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME

Move over Mobius One, Cipher is the greatest ace ever to take to the skies of Strangereal.

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