Fanfic / A Feddie Story

It is UC 0079, early February, and Zeon forces have landed in Mexico and are pushing up towards Texas. Federation mobile suits are but a dream. It's up to the Federation's tankers to hold the line against Zeon's Zakus now.

Load sabot! Target Zaku, direct front!

A Mobile Suit Gundam fanfic by Night, A Feddie Story follows Earth Federation tank commander Jeannette Montange and her crew through the early One Year War.

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Examples

• Action Girl:
  • Jeannette for the Federation, to the point that General Revil gently pokes at the failure of her male counterparts when he congratulates her for the six Zaku kills her tank got during the retreat across the US.
    "The Federation has need of women of your caliber. Men too, if any happen to turn up."
  • Cima Garahau for Zeon, who is shown fighting her Zaku without its main camera, and is consistent in thinking clearly and calmly under pressure; she never loses her cool as a delibrate contrast to her appearance in Stardust Memory where she's had years to contemplate her wrongdoings and had her face rubbed in it by enemies and allies alike.
• Anti-Air:
  • The Federation uses the Talon man-portable missile system. Also of note is the SkyWatcher AA vehicle, a Type 61 tank chassis repurposed to mount a high-speed turret with two 60mm cannon and several Talon missile tubes.
  • Zeon does not have a dedicated AA vehicle, and it hurts them a lot. Zakus are able to defend themselves against relatively slow-moving and unmanueverable aircraft like the Federation's dedicated close-air-support Mongoose...but against high-performance aircraft like Tin Cod heavy fighters or Don tactical bombers armed with heavy guided missiles, a Zaku caught in the open is depicted as being almost helpless. Their only defense is to hide in tall buildings, deep canyons, or under a rainforest canopy.
• A Father to His Men: Cima, weirdly enough. She can't be described as motherly in any way, and she can be harsh when major breaches of discipline occur. But they're her Marines and she means to get them out alive if she can. This does have an element of Pragmatic Villainy: Cima at one point thinks to herself that her unit was all recruited from the same colony, and if she leads them into a bloodbath she'll never be able to go home again. This has an element of irony for those who know Mahal's eventual fate in the Gundam canon.
• Armor Is Useless: Played straight and subverted depending on what's going on. The armor on a 61A3 tank is proof against Zeon small arms and even their shoulder-fired rockets most of the time, but offers no meaningful defense against a Zaku's machine gun. Zaku armor can withstand tank kinetic penetrators and shoulder-fired rockets depending on where it's hit, but at least for early versions used to invade Earth, is no defense against 150mm HEAT rounds from Federation tanks. Unfortunately they're very rare because there wasn't much call for them before the invasion.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: Noting that the Federation lacked such a vehicle, and particularly an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, the story introduces the M74A6 Wolfhound, a variant on the Type 74 Hovertruck introduced in 08th MS Team. It's described it as having full-length armor rather than open-topped back, heavier armor, and an extra pair of impeller fans. It also has a turret with a 60mm cannon configured for five-round burst and either a wire-guided or laser-guided antitank missile system.
• Being Evil Sucks: Cima seems to carry significant self-loathing over the G3 gas attack. She also reflects on how the gas attacks were incredibly destructive to Zeon morale and boosted the EFSF to fight with insane bravery at Loum.
• Boyish Short Hair: Jeannette wears a pixie cut that's completely hidden by her helmet usually. This is justified by the requirement for armor crew: long hair is a safety hazard when dealing with the Turret Monster's tendency to grab things and pull them into the moving parts of the tank. Jeannette's first thought, when she sees Cima Garahau's long hair, is that it means there are no moving parts inside a Zaku cockpit.
• Cool Big Sis: Jeannette's preferred style with her own tank crew. She's not above gently teasing them, uses nicknames with them and happily accepts their own for her. She'll also scream or snap at them, something she will never do to anyone else; for good or ill, these are the people she cares most about.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Federation tanks never willingly attack Zakus in the open field. They'll dig in and wait for the enemy to come to them, set up ambushes, rush in to hit them before they can disembark and then conduct a fighting withdrawal, use line-of-sight blocking terrain like forests or towns or cities to cover their movements, deploy smoke to hide themselves, and hide in parking garages or storefronts or under highway bridges where the tall Zakus can't see them well.
  • Zeon use their Minovsky Particle coverage to ruin Federation radio networks with more skill as the story goes on; at first you can tell they're coming hours in advance when the radio starts to fuzz out or certain equipment stops working. Later on they reduce the lead time until literally just before contact to increase the element of surprise, and still later they don't start using it until after they've tried to spring an ambush.
  • The Earth Federation Air Force is sometimes shown to pound on important Zeon units around the clock, for days on end; the purpose of this isn't so much to cause casualties, but to break the unit psychologically: the sensation of helplessness caused by being unable to fight back or stop the bombs falling combined with an inability to sleep or get food.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The 211th Armored's first meeting with a Zaku team is strongly implied to have been against elements of the Mastodon Battalion, with Zolomon Ringo and David Lister having destroyed at least a company of tanks on their own. It's implied, from the signature move, that bit characters' Chan and Gutierrez tank was taken out by Zolomon himself. Only five tanks of forty-eight survived, and only Jeannette's actually brought down a Zaku.
  • The Battle of Saint Paul goes the other way, as the Zakus of First Independent Marine Battalion are lured into a town swarming with Federation infantry. A whole fireteam of six Zakus is annihilated in seconds by ambushing infantry with shoulder-fired rockets.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: One man on foot, even with a rocket launcher, cannot threaten a mobile suit. Twenty men on foot with rocket launchers, however...
• Death from Above: The most effective weapon in the Federation arsenal against Zeon is consistently their aircraft, both on a strategic and a tactical scale. From the bloody knife-fighting with Federation close-support aircraft to the incessant pounding of Depp Rogg heavy bombers to the flash of wings and smoke trails of inbound missiles that signal the presence of a Tin Cod fighter, the Earth Attack Force looks to the skies when they are afraid.
• Doomed Hometown: Jeannette's gunner, Ritchie Smith, was visiting family on Earth when his colony was gassed by Zeon. Adding insult to injury, it was later the colony used during Operation British's Colony Drop. Ritchie is portrayed, from Albany and onwards, as being driven by a need for revenge. One of his earliest lines in the first chapter hints it.
• Easy Logistics: Generally averted. Federation units can run on regular gas, so they frequently "live off the land" and refuel from local gas stations, but ammunition often becomes an issue when on extended campaign, especially in the matter of ammunition types: only HEAT and Sabot are useful against Zeon mobile suits, and HEAT in particular is in very limited supply. The need for units to stop and sleep on long trips also comes up, and some vehicles have to be abandoned on the retreat across the US because they broke down and couldn't be fixed before the rest had to move on.
  • Because of increasing losses among their vehicles, it's noted that by the time the remains of 211 Armored, 215 Mechanized, and 233 Mechanized reach Minneapolis they have several commandeered buses tagging along to carry people whose original vehicles broke down or were destroyed.
  • The loss of Kennedy Spaceport briefly causes the Zeon units pushing on Eastern Canada to grind to a halt, afraid they'll run out of ammunition.
• Man on Fire: Knight One-Four's commander exits his flaming tank, himself on fire. He rolls on the ground briefly before Knight One-Three's gunner shoots him with the coaxial machinegun to prevent him suffering.
• Mercy Kill: As described in Man on Fire, Knight One-Three's gunner shoots the commander of Knight One-Four, who is burning to death. Jeannette describes it to her own gunner as "That was mercy." and while she tells Knight One-Three's commander not to let her catch the gunner doing that again, she adds that she's not saying it was wrong.
• The Nicknamer: Of her crew, Jeannette only calls Cat Williams by his actual first name (probably because she couldn't think of a way to shorten it). Her gunner, Ritchie Smith, is always referred to as "Rich" by her, and her second driver, Michael Miller, is "Mikey".
• Nonuniform Uniform: Jeannette is usually described as wearing a tank top, with her uniform shirt tied around her waist by the arms. This a concession to fact that her tank's air-conditioning isn't run much because it makes the tank stand out more in thermal viewers. She wears her hair cut short in a pixie cut and the regular uniform pants and helmet, though, as normally required. It's only in the New York campaign that sees everyone in standard cold-weather gear, including Jeannette.
• Once an Episode: Ritchie says Professor Minovsky managed to ruin something. Lampshaded by Jeannette at one point, who comments she's glad Minovsky is dead or how much Ritchie hates the guy would be worrisome.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • One of the recurring themes on the Zeon side is that extreme ruthlessness and brutality towards their enemies or conquered peoples isn't going to help Zeon win the war, and often actually hurts them. Cima Garahau and Garma Zabi are obviously willing to be ruthless. They just use it on people who don't toe the line when it comes to being nice to the Earthnoids.
  • Cima responds to one of her subordinates wrecking a town pointlessly by ordering his arrest and noting he carries a sidearm. She then directs that both the subordinate and his personal weapon be given to the townsfolk for thirty minutes.
    After that, if he is still alive, secure him for transport to California Base and proper court martial. If not, secure his body for transport home.
  • Garma Zabi orders the evacuation of New York rather than letting Gihren kill the people as well as destroy the city, justifying it by arguing that such an act of mass-murder will make the Federation fight harder and his forces are already stretched.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Garma Zabi, who commends and promotes Cima for choosing to withdraw rather than gut her unit with an uncertain chance of victory. He's similarly responsible for the kinder, gentler Zeon behavior on Earth...because he knows that there are too many people on Earth for Zeon to try to rule them through force or even fear.
• Tank Goodness: The story is essentially the last stand of the tanks against the encroaching Humongous Mecha. As the author is fond of pointing out, in the knock-down drag-out between Zeon's mobile suits and the Federation's tanks during the Odessa Campaign...the tanks won.

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