gundamwing-ellesmith:

Heero is very camera-shy and highly self-conscious. Also, he tends to keep his
voice down almost to a whisper.

That’s because during his training under Dr. J, his
every move was closely scrutinized and monitored, his every word and action
recorded and analyzed. Over the years, he had learned to keep his head and
his voice down. He never grew out of it, because he can never shake off the feeling of being
surveilled.

((Even years after the war, the guys know better than to point a camera at him and they often have to ask him to raise his voice when speaking. Most of them had suffered some hearing loss – as most MS pilots do – and Heero’s quiet tone often falls on “deaf ears”…))

lbro009:

It always makes me happy to see fan-works featuring Sally Po, so I
thought I would break my 10-year (!!!) fanart hiatus and contribute my own
(very) rough sketch. So here is my Sally with even rougher background details.
I might get around to sorting it out and colouring it one day…

And because there needs to be more talk about Sally Po, I am also
going to talk about her (a lot!)….

….I would go as far as to say she is my favourite character in
GW.  But I’ve often heard it said that
for a fictional character to be of interest, they have to have some sort of
vice or internal conflict going on, which over time, they resolve in one way or
another. Sally doesn’t really display any such melodrama and I would argue over
the course of the series, she is one of the characters who alters the least. So
why is she so compelling (at least to me)?

I think it exactly because she is NOT in a constant state of
internal conflict. In a show so glutted with tortured souls, romanticised
notions about war, peace, revenge, anger and confusion, sometimes, you just
want someone to cut to the chase and be logical and pragmatic. That’s Sally. Her
stance is that “Nobody wants to get
involved in wars but those that can fight, should fight.” She sees wars as
making playthings of peoples’ lives and fights for no other reason, in my eyes,
than to spare the involvement of those who are unable to stand up for
themselves. She seems to acknowledge war isn’t going away at that moment, so
there’s no point denying it. But you can, at least, be a force for good within
a situation you cannot immediately change. She is a breath of fresh air. Here
is an individual with common sense and decency, someone you can more or less
depend on to get things done and to do the right thing. Yes, Sally acknowledges
herself that everyone has their “own
sense of justice”, but sometimes, certain actions are just plain wrong and
for the most part, she doesn’t waste time philosophising about it all. She
inhabits many roles in the series and is multi-skilled; doctor, Alliance Major,
resistance fighter, battleship commander and finally, Preventer, as well as
having moments of being mentor and cheerleader. She can heal people, pilot
certain mobile suits, fly aircraft, shoot all the guns. Oh and throw a pretty
impressive punch. She has plenty of stuff to do- so no time for navel-gazing!

To be fair, you could argue her appearances in the show and
additional material are much sparser than many of the other characters, and her
roles spread so thinly, that she does not get much opportunity to go a little
nuts or display any emotional vulnerabilities. There is nothing to really
dislike about her and along with her range of abilities, does that make her a
sort-of Mary-Sue, a convenient jack-of-all trades type with no real depth? I
don’t think so. While not an obvious key player, I think her contributions are
definitely meaningful and without them, the other cast members may have made
different decisions and certain scenarios would have had disastrous (or at the
very least, more disastrous) outcomes.

The first notable difference would have been that in AC194, the L5
colony, A0206,
would
have been obliterated by the Alliance General, Septem’s, evil scheme to dispose
of the inhabitants using biological weapons. Wufei and his clan would have been
a part of this massacre. Sally defies this order and somehow gets away with it.
We see she has a moral compass and will not blindly follow orders if it will
cause harm to innocents.

In Episode 3, her first appearance in the show, we see this again,
as she balks at the idea of using harmful drugs on the young captive Heero. She
seems to sense Heero is an important individual. Who wouldn’t, when he arrives
at the hospital having survived, despite serious injuries (I wonder if the
broken bones she mentions refer to sites of previous breakages?) and he was
still alive and kicking after that epic fall? He made such an impression on her
that during Operation Daybreak, Sally throws her trust onto him and begs him to
disarm the missiles Lady Une was so intent on allowing to annihilate the base
and the surrounding area, without even rescuing injured personnel. Tsk, Une!

Sally is a character who does not hesitate to get involved if she
thinks there is a modicum of a chance for good to come of it. She even puts
herself in immediate danger without a thought if she feels it is required. An example
of this is her decision to defect and join the rebels in Former China (one a
side-note, I suppose that Former China must be more multi-racial as there are
many Caucasian looking people in the village scenes and Sally herself is blonde
and blue eyed.). At the beginning of Episode 12, she can be seen retreating
from an attack on a military base and once inside the getaway vehicle, her
comrade asks her what is the matter and states he is sorry to have put her in
so much danger on her first time home. Here, we see a brief glimpse of her being
pensive but she brushes it aside and explains it was her decision.

Later in the episode, she witnesses soldiers attacking a restaurateur
after he objects to them eating a meal and refusing to pay up. Instead of
standing by and thinking of her own safety, Sally brazenly mouths off at them,
openly disparaging of their presence in the region. Of course, she gets a
beating for it, though she puts up an admirable fight. If Wufei hadn’t leapt
onto the screen (where was he before this? Talk about last minute!) and
intervened, who knows what would have happened? The soldiers would have
probably got stabbed in the ass by the angry villagers’ pitchforks, at the very
least. I would have liked to have seen that just for the comedy value.

Following this encounter, Sally has no problem admitting she is
weak, when Wufei states she should not be fighting. She doesn’t appear to have
any sort of ego issues. She is practical and accepts that when a person is
weak, they need help and there is no shame in it. To her, strength lies in the
conviction of a person’s heart (this makes me want to belt out that Michael
Bolton song from Disney’s Hercules; “A hero’s strength is measured by his
heaaaaaarrrrrtttt.”). She demonstrates the ultimate example of it by being
willing to throw away her own life, walking unarmed towards an Aries suit,
which takes aim at her (and curiously misses the shot!). Her only hope of
survival is if the pilot continues to be a crap shot or if she can convince
Wufei to step up to his responsibility to fight for the oppressed. Perhaps she
might be spared in the process. And it works.  

Afterwards, she says: “The
important thing is that my heart is in it (or strong).”  Wufei seems inspired by this. We even get
a wee smile from the lad. Sally is
good at inspiring others and seems to be able to reach people with her
sincerity. Here is a woman who will go as far as to risk her own life for just
the slight chance some good might come of it. She says this herself in the episode
where she sneaks into an Oz base and tries to destroy Sandrock, coming face to
face with the Maguanacs. She states; “I
don’t care what happens to me.” And in turn, once they realise they are not
enemies, her courage inspires the same in them. Auda states; “We need to be at least as brave as that
lady just was.” (English dub). That is not to say Sally never makes
blunders; in setting off the explosions on Sandrock, she almost killed the
Maguanacs and herself and made the assumption that Quatre’s wishes, a pilot she
had never met, would be identical to what Heero might favour. This was a pretty
extreme thing to do based on an assumption, however it’s understandable that
she would view Oz having possession of the Gundam as a negative thing.

Sally is also someone who, though she can work well alone, thrives
on connecting with others. She has no shortage of mercenary and ex-Alliance contacts
around the globe to help her achieve her various objectives, it seems, and says
to Heero: “Fighting by yourself is so
lonely.” In addition, she instantly bonds with Lucrezia Noin, each sensing
the other is a friend, and later, Noin looks to Sally for motivation and
reassurance on Peacemillion, feeling more deflated about the battle ahead than
her (Sally has not found herself in love with a terrorist threat to Earth,
which certainly helps). Sally, for her part, seems unwavering in her support of
and belief in what the Gundam Pilots represent and expresses this. She sees allying
with them as the only path that will prevent herself from going astray.  Her comment in Episode 29 about the words
“righteous” or justice”, depending on the version, suiting the pilots (despite
expressing her hesitance to use those terms) and her complete faith in them,
could be viewed as slightly naïve. I mean, she has met only two G-boys at this
point (and has only had a face-to-face conversation with Wufei), she can’t know
them so well as to make such extreme statements (a bit like when she comments
about Heero having changed from his “abrasive personality” – she hasn’t had a
conversation with him, so how does she know his personality?). But perhaps, in
it all, she is simply acknowledging there is little else coming morally close
to the Gundam Pilots around at the time. I think they’re the best she’s got to
hope in, so, being pragmatic, she does.  

Overall Sally is no sensible, shallow, boring know-all, and indeed
sometimes she doesn’t know-all and relies on the help of others a great deal. I
think her wit as well as her wisdom is another factor that contributes to her
likability, as well as her pleasantly flirtatious manner. In a show that is
largely serious in nature, it is refreshing to have moments of humour and Sally
has the subtle, wry kind that does not come across as goofy. She even keeps her
sharp wit when in a tight situation; “I
might just tell a lie so that you’ll free me…” (to Noin). I am sure from
that moment on, Noin, decided they would get on famously as allies. I love
seeing them interact in Endless Waltz as the ultimate dream team.

Having said all that, I have to gripe a little about Sally’s
portrayal. There is so much about her we don’t get to know. Her true age, for
one. Some (much older) official sources say 19, some 22 and more recently, 27,
so who really knows?  She has no
backstory, aside from her cameo in Wufei’s Episode Zero. But that’s okay;
that’s what fandom is for. And despite all of the above being true about her
lack of personal drama, I do enjoy seeing more vulnerable sides to her in
fandom portrayals because we all have our moments, right? Regrettably, it is
harder to find Sally-focused material, so it is always a treat to come across
some.

But one thing that is certainly not a treat; can we talk about her
roles in Glory of Losers and Frozen Teardrop for a brief moment? The former,
from what I have gleaned, cuts out some major Sally (see what I did there?)
scenes, such as her time in China, presumably because it wasn’t deemed
significant enough, which is a shame. In FT, I was hoping that, seeing as her
‘daughter’, Kathy Po appeared to be one of the protagonists, we might find out
more about Sally. From the scant amount of translated material and discussion
threads I’ve followed, I discovered that Sally makes bad coffee and her daughter,
Kathy is not actually her biological child, but a clone of Sally’s assassinated
mother, who was also creatively named Katherine. This just strikes me as weird.
But I can live with weird if not for the fact that from what I have read of
translated material, Sally is missing because she is dead. Yep, dead. DEAD!!
Apparently killed on duty. Yes, you read that right, out of all the original
characters in the series, the writer has to kill off Sally. Awesome Sally has
to suffer a ‘by the way’, footnote type of death. I am still hoping someone
will come along with a different translation and tell me it’s not true, that I
can’t read and I have it all wrong (anyone??), but as of yet, I haven’t read
any such thing to dispute this sad fact.

So, I guess those of us who would like a different ending for her can
live in our little headcanon worlds, where Sally gets the recognition and
appreciation she deserves. So if you have any such titbits to offer, please send
them my way. Fics, art, thoughts, the lot. Thus ends this ranty ramble…I hope
you like the pic!

*(Quotes may be slightly inaccurate due to my memory. But the gist
is there. Any other inaccuracies are due to the wine consumption while I wrote
this.)