Contrasting Gundam/Zeta Gundam to Seed/Seed Destiny

I recall seeing somewhere, it could very well be here on TV Tropes, that the "Cosmic Era" Gundam sagas of Mobile Suit Gundam Seed and Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny were intended to be modern revisions of the classical "Universal Century" sagas, Mobile Suit Gundam and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. However, whereas the Universal Century sagas are well-liked, to the point that the TV Tropes article on Zeta Gundam says it's typically considered the best Gundam series of them all, the Cosmic Era sagas are... pretty much hated by everyone, especially in the West.

So, I'm curious to see if a reasonable debate can be had as to why attempts to replicate what made Gundam and Zeta Gundam so good ended up failing in Seed and Seed Destiny.

As for me, there are two things that immediately jump to mind as to why the Cosmic Era sagas are regarded as inferiors to their "originals" in the Universal Century.

• Pacifism: Maybe because it came on the heels of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, I don't know, but Seed and Seed Destiny both pushed the "pacifism is the only right way" thing quite a lot in the series. Which isn't particularly appealing even when it's not coming from a Mary Sue Topia like Orb or Kira Yamato after his Messiah Creep into having an Omniscient Morality License. In Gundam and Zeta Gundam, the pacifist message is handled subtly - we don't have characters sitting around ranting about how "war is hell", we see that war is hell as lives are destroyed and people slain; good people, bad people, it makes no difference, war just devours them all indiscriminately.

• Character Hijacking: It's no secret that a lot of discontent is over how the characters from Seed end up basically taking over the show in Seed Destiny - we spend the first half of the series with Shinn Asuka being portrayed as the he- the protagonist, and then Kira Yamato comes back and officially the show's all about him now. It's particularly bad because Zeta Gundam is a pretty damn good example of how to have two "generations" of characters get along well. Characters from the original Gundam are present, and they have important roles to the story, but we never get the feeling that the show is anything other than focused on Kamile Bidan; Amuro Ray and Char Aznable are important figures in the Grypps Conflict, but they still aren't the show's focus.

Okay, those are my two possible reasons why the Cosmic Era failed to be a reboot of the Universal Century; what are yours?

Pacifism was only subtle in Zeta because all of the characters were shouting to the heavens about the glories of space. Plus it wasn't exactly on the heels of Wing; Gundam X and Turn A came out before it.

And don't get me started on character hijacking in Zeta. NO ONE care that Quattro is Char? How does that work?

I think you're mistaken in your assessment of SEED being a reboot of UC. It shares a lot of common elements, yes, but it's its own character. The 'reboot' of UC will be Gundam Origins, which is coming out god knows when.

(For the record, I'm indifferent on SEED)

edited 29th Mar '12 1:22:38 PM by Scherzo09

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

For the record, Zeta Gundam is very Love It or Hate It among the Gundam fandom. The people who like it really like it, and the people who dislike it really dislike it. The former group is generally larger than the latter, but Zeta's definitely not uniformly admired.

That said, the parallels between Zeta and Destiny are generally pretty superficial. Seed mirrors MSG very closely for the first half, but diverges wildly after that. Destiny shares a handful of elements with Zeta (specifically, the relationship between Shinn and Stella is pretty much identical to the one between Kamille and Four), but other than that they don't really have a whole lot in common beyond being a direct sequel.

As for why people disliked Destiny — first of all, it's worth mentioning that the Japanese fandom loves Destiny, so it's really only the Western fandom that has a problem with it. And that's the root of the problem, I think. Destiny was made entirely with the Japanese audience in mind — the one that loves Kira and Lacus unconditionally, among other things — and so the English-speaking fandom, which is much more ambivalent about Kira and Lacus, was pissed over their triumphant return to the spotlight.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

As someone who has done an entire V Ideo Series analying and criticizing SEED, and am working through reviewing every episode of Destiny as an ongoing video series, I can say this.

If I were to do similar kind of review guide in the future of say, Zeta's episodes, I'd probably be just as critical of it. truth is both CE and UC had stupid stuff happen.

my problem with Destiny is just how the characters and the plot was written. the Shinn v.s. Kira thing really never bothered me as much as other characters having completly been dropped the ball in terms of character writing (e.g. Cagali ORB, the start of the new war.) and the like and the flawless victory and the way Kira and Lacus went about spreading their message.

However, looking at Zeta, the way AEUG spread it's message about "Space is the future, you can't evolve if your soul is weighed down by gravity" stuff is just as obnoxious and contrived as SEED's "stop fighting and agree with Lacus or else message." Because Zeta treated C Har an awful lot like Destiny treated Lacus.c in that case it's actually arguably worse when Char is being mindlessly shilled by people who know who Char is and what he did in the OYW. Lacus is just an annoying Minmay-clone that just happens to be way more preachy than Minmay.

And you know the really hilarious part? for someone who gets shilled so much, Char sure does lose fights pretty often in Zeta, it really seems like he had to use Kamille to win fights for him and he was mostly a designated speaker/leader. Kind of like Lacus's working relationship with Kira. Both of them are relatively "powerful speakers", and both of them use an ultimate lifeform to be their millitary lynchpin (Kira being the Ultimate Coordintor, Kamille having the "best newtype abilities") and to just say some talking points on a cue card while they're fighting the enemy leaders.

in any kind of sci-fi war story, pushing the "good guys" one rhetoric as "the only sane choice because everyone else who disagrees are evil by comparison" is not terribly great writing, and both CE and UC are guilty of it. If there is going to be a bright future for mankind, it's not going to be one of rigid conformance, and trying to drive those who disagree into silence, that starts to sound eerily similar to a cult, doesn't it?

edited 29th Mar '12 7:06:14 PM by Clawshrimpy

Did Destiny even get a dub? I don't think they really considered the Americans at all when making it.

Pretty much my sentiments really. To be honest, if anything, SEED's message is better than Zeta's because its actually applicable to real life. It sometimes feels like Tomino lives in a world where his Fantastic Aesops are taken for granted as true.

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

Most of SEED's problems can be traced to just problems with execution and backstage politics (and I'm not just talking about how Morosawa acted, but like things like Sunrise saying "Hey Dearka needs to switch sides because not enough people are buying Buster kits" or "GIN Ns just aren't Zaku enough to get strong sales from UC fans, I Know, let's actually do unsubtle Zaku re-tools in the sequel series!")

Zeta I think really shows how UC wasn't perfect and how Tomino's writing steadily got worse as his depression increased, until he throughly tried to get his own franchise to crash and burn in Victory.

edited 29th Mar '12 9:07:47 PM by Clawshrimpy

As one of the few people who actually liked Destiny I can say that I did not notice any "character highjackings." The only one I'm willing to concede is Cagali, and even that is nothing compared to what Zeta does to Amuro, Hayato, etc. with it's "Char is so awesome, let's move to space message." I can justify what happened to Cagali if I try real hard (she's a girl with a tyrannical streak trying to run a democracy). I cannot justify the business with Char.

And you know what? Destiny does some things better than Zeta. Not everything, but some things. Let's take the Four/Kamille and Stella/Shinn relationships. The Four/Kamille relationship just doesn't work for me. It's based on them knowing one another for a couple of hours. Moreover the show desperately wants me to be cheering for Kamille when he tries to save Four, but they make her so utterly evil ("If I can't have my memory fuck you all!") that I could not care less. Actually that's wrong. I did care. I wanted her dead.

Now, Shinn and Stella, also knew each other for a few minutes. However, we as the audience have known Stella longer and have a good idea of how she operates. More importantly, it makes sense psychologically. Shinn's a broken kid with a Big Brother Complex. Stella's a terrified little girl looking to be protected. I'll buy that they'd latch onto one another like that. Better yet, the show never sets you up to believe that this will end in anything but tragedy. Stella's got a 12-hour lifespan without her drugs, and is a mental wreck. She's going down.

Finally, I wish people would stop complaining that Shinn isn't Kamille. He's not supposed to be. I told my younger brother about how people whine about Kira replacing Shinn as the good guy. His response was "But Shinn was never the good guy. You want him to be the good guy, but he isn't." That's the difference. Kamille's a troubled kid who has people (Emma, Amuro, Henken, Bright, and sigh, Char) who want him fixed. As a result he gets better and becomes this Newtype messiah figure. Shinn's a troubled kid surrounded by people who either a) can't help him (Athrun, Luna, Gladys) or b) want him to stay broken (Durandal, Rey). What a shocker, he devolves into a Well-Intentioned Extremist Hero with an F in Good Antivillain.

Different shows. Both are good. Even if you hate Destiny assess it on its own merits, and not how it measures up to Zeta.

Exactly, I feel both shows are flawed in their own ways as science fiction works. and they were both I feel not particularly enjoyable for different reasons. While I am tempted to cut Zeta a little more slack, because some of the mis-steps could be seen as just an adage from the year it aired, there's definitely a limit to that kind of thing, because some of Zeta's mis-steps are so major it doesn't matter if it was 1985 at the time. So the level i can cut it slack is limited.

but the same could be said for the issues with Destiny, I'm willing to realize that the reason there were so many re-used scenes was because Morosawa turned in scripts late, but I feel that some of the issues with the story were so large, it's kind of hard for me to be able to give Fukuda and Morosawa the benefit of the doubt, especially whenever Fukuda had one of his PR disasters on Twitter.

That being said though, Tomino was the very definition of "PR disaster."

edited 29th Mar '12 9:46:02 PM by Clawshrimpy

Also what's this stuff about everyone hating the CE. Destiny is widely disliked in the States. SEED, on the other hand, has large numbers of fans. The OP is kind of overstating his point.

To be fair, the heavily edited "Gundam SEED: Laser Tag Edition" that aired on Toonami did not buy the show any favors.

edited 29th Mar '12 10:29:06 PM by Clawshrimpy

That's something I really agree with. Tomino's writing got really weird as UC went on. I agree with a friend that CCA was more focused due to the whole Char Vs. Amuro thing, but the Spacenoid rhetoric is soooo suffocating, as well as Tomino's gender politics which unnecessarily pop up way too often.

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

Eh, CCA still raised a lot of questions and spawned a lot of debate, particularly Quess and Hathaway being annoying, and things like whatever happened to Char and Amuro.

Some fans were like "They have to be alive! Sunrise can't make more money off UC if they're dead!"

Others insisted they were dead.

but the truth is simply we don't know

Also I still cant believe Char's stupid decoy ship balloon things actually worked.

Tomono had weird views on a lot of things... like Children. Watch Zambot3 sometime if you wanna know what I mean. that's about the only show he did that I'd say is just straight up awful with no redemming qualities except maybe the ending.

edited 29th Mar '12 11:30:01 PM by Clawshrimpy

Just saying it was better, still had "its soul weighed down" by all the Spacenoid rhetoric.

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

Yep. It pretty much was. Although Char's heelturn sort of makes all of the shilling of him in Zeta sound kinda stupid in retrospect. I suppose only a great and wonderful man would doom a planet to nuclear winter.

Suppose it was Tomino's way of fixing it, and Probably why the shilling of Char is less prominent in the Zeta movie.

edited 29th Mar '12 11:45:40 PM by Clawshrimpy

Yeah, its pretty much been entirely excised.

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

I think it's pretty wrong to say that Seed is disliked. Yeah, a lot of western fans doesen't like it but it was a HUGE success in Japan, and it's referenced a ton.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

Destiny as well, a Impulse vs Freedom Shout-Out showed up on Baka Test of all places.

Kira and Athrun still show up on popularity polls too.

(For the record before this devolves into the standard bash Destiny thread with locks and bans that it always does... I liked Seed a lot and I did like Destiny just not nearly as much as other Gundam series.)

edited 30th Mar '12 3:41:02 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

I should note that conceptually I actually like Destiny more than Seed. The execution is terrible, but the... stuff of the story is much more interesting than Seed's rather simplistic (and occasionally nonsensical) war story. Fllay was pretty much the only interesting thing about Seed, while Destiny had at least a couple more interesting bits.

And while I like Zeta more than either of them I do agree that Stella worked a lot better than Four. (kind of shitty plot-element that it is)

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

Sayonara Zetsobu Sensei has a Shout-Out to Seed too.

"No, the Singularity will not happen. Computation is hard." -Happy Ent

Oh yeah that Yzak Yaoi doujin (which got replaced in S3 with a Tieria doujin) that shows up..... as well as the Halloween Episode [1]◊.

And I will tell ya what I liked Destiny a lot more than AGE which is airing right now.

edited 30th Mar '12 3:53:33 AM by Raso

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

I think it's worth noting to that on some level all Gundam shows ape MSG at the beginning. SEED certainly isn't the only one. Heck, even Zeta starts with the "highjacked Gundam on super-special warship" business; that's practically one of the core elements of the franchise.

Gundam runs on expys, plot references, and internal shout outs. Calling out any one show on its comparison to one of the others is kind of silly.

EDIT: I'll also throw this out here—I'm Canadian. In the anime geek community that I'm a part of most people I know liked, or were ambivalent to, Destiny. My brother, my girlfriend, her sisters, a couple of my male friends, we all liked it. Even a fanatical UC fan I've met through one of my classes at university seems pretty okay with it. I'm not saying I've never met anyone who hated SEED or Destiny, but most of them were guys whose first introduction to the series was Wing and are mad that Kira isn't a "stoic uber-badass like Heero." Most Canadian forums my girlfriend and I have visisted rank Kira, Athrun, and Shinn pretty high on character polls.

I don't claim to speak for all of Canada, of course, but I'd be curious to see how the overall reaction to CE here compares to overall reaction in the US.

edited 30th Mar '12 9:58:51 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Agree just look at Char Clone...

Sparkling and glittering! Jan-Ken-Pon!

To be fair, I think Zeta originated the idea of Gundamjacking.

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.

That's about opposite of my experience. Most of the people I've meet who loathe Destiny are the fans of the original UC who view it as a terrible Zeta rehash.

Really, CE is sort of interesting in that the conflict doesn't really end. In UC, the antagonists are always decisively defeated by the end of the series (well, except Zeta and Axis, but the Titans were definitely dead). CE, on the other hand, just has the two main factions fight each other to a standstill and then give up out of exhaustion. Both CE series end more on "the fighting's stopped... for now, at least" rather than "we killed the bad guys, hooray everything's fixed forever". CE is also much, much better at Grey-and-Gray Morality than UC ever was, which I find hilariously ironic because most UC fans praise its supposed rejection of Black-and-White Morality to the skies (nevermind the fact that it's tremendously clear who the good guys and who the bad guys are in UC, far more so than ZAFT vs OMNI).

My biggest complaint about CE is its pretty blatant Japanese nationalistic message. (This is also likely why it's hugely popular in Japan.) They've gone on record as saying that Orb is an idealized Japan (Pacific island nation with few material resources but tremendous technological advantages? Yeah...), and they go out of the way to show that America is cartoonishly evil. Yeah, that's a great way to court the international market there, Sunrise — portray your biggest foreign audience as a nation of idiots and assholes.

edited 30th Mar '12 4:56:38 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I think if anything that's probably my biggest annoyance with SEED, how much Orb is portrayed as a Mary Suetopia. I mean, I don't argue that the show portrays it as completely perfect, but I kind of wish its flaws were more self-evident. Wasn't like some Compilation movie or Manga collection entitled "Orb The Nation Of Peace"?

Gray-and-Grey Morality to me (at least in how it relates to UC Gundam) is not so much making both sides morally ambiguous to the point that you can't tell who should win. Obviously the Feddies are the better side when you take all things into consideration. To me its showing that both sides have reasons for fighting that are understandable as well as flaws, even if one side is demonstrably better. (Though I have NO idea what they were going for with Zanscare; I suspect Tomino just didn't give a fuck at that point.)

edited 30th Mar '12 5:34:59 PM by Scherzo09

These are the words that shall come from my mouth. I shall be known for speaking them.