Gundam Reconguista in G

That seems like circular reasoning to me. He's fighting them because he knows they're bad news, and he knows they're bad news because he's been fighting them? I'm also not convinced that you can tell what tech is taboo and what isn't just by looking at it. Certainly mobile suits in and of themselves aren't taboo — the Guard uses them, too. Actually, Bellri hasn't expressed much concern about taboo tech at all, considering the G-Self is probably taboo and I wouldn't be surprised if the Megafauna is either.

The Megafauna is taboo and Bell knows it

Military mobile suits are flat out taboo, as is basically all military tech. This isn't spelled out until later but it's just background info, not a spoiler.

EDIT: Disregard, everything I said in this message was wrong.

edited 28th Mar '15 11:51:18 PM by DarkHunter

I just watched 26.

I really liked the use of Jaburo as the final battleground, but overall, the ending felt a bit rushed, but they did manage to fit what they could into it, I guess. But holy shit, I'm surprised they didn't show any ramifications to the Crescent Ship fucking ramming into the ground to kill President Nicchini. Like, holy shit, that does not feel much like something you put in the epilogue portion of a story.

The whole bit with the Crescent ship was meant to be humorous. It's like how a lot of comedy movies have the Jerkass character suffer some kind of indignity in the final scene. The President doesn't die, by the way.

edited 30th Mar '15 4:19:59 PM by reconguista

The final battle between Mask and Bellri was not bad at all. Otherwise... wow. This show was one hell of a disappointment. A longer episode order might have helped Tomino write a plot that made more sense and develop the characters without jarring shifts in tone. It also would have helped explain the power-ups for Bellri's G-Self that seemed rushed at best and undeserved at worst.

As it stands, however, Reco is a colossal disappointment and a sign that perhaps Tomino should either be in charge of a longer series or be given more time to condense his stories. Build Fighters Try had its own issues, but I have to say that there's only one winner between the two Gundam series that aired over the last two cours.

edited 1st Apr '15 6:23:19 PM by sanfranman91

Honestly, I liked the series in concept. The problem is 26 episodes isnt long enough to tell this plot.

Or that he should have an actual writer do the writing

Eh. I think this series will be vindicated by history, like Turn A was. I also don't see why there has to be a "winner" between Build Fighters and Reconguista. They're two completely different shows that are both good in their own way.

I haven't watched all of Recgonuista in G yet (I'm following it on Youtube), but is how I've felt about Tomino since about... everything post-CCA. George Lucas has the same problem — they come up with great concepts and an interesting premise for their works, but fail on the execution by refusing to delegate other parts of the creative process to people with greater talents in those areas.

I have watched all of Reconguista in G and I feel the same way. I liked the ideas behind it but the execution could of used alot more work. It also tried to fit too much into 26 episodes. There were a couple of parts that felt a bit rushed.

Yeah, but some of the ideas were pants on headed stupid as well. The reason for the prejudice against the Kuntala for one. {/facepalm].

Yeah, the Kuntala wasn't the best idea in the show. Great sudden shock value but when you start to think about it the idea doesn't make a lick of sense at all.

Watchin this show and Build Fighters back to back is like night an day. It's funny how the light hearted spinoff looks better then the serious mainline story.

I'm havin a really hard time gettin involved in the story. The characters...are idiots IMO. The settin ain't doin it for me either and it doesn't help that the suit designs are kinda subpar. Like look at the G-Self. It has elf-antlers. WHY DOES IT HAVE ELF-ANTLERS?!?

Just watched episode six. Shockingly, if you continue to fight against your allies, you might kill someone you're friends with! I've been complaining about this for like three episodes, why are we supposed to be shocked when it actually happens?

In any case, there goes one of the only characters who made any damn sense.

You're like a broken record. Every week you make the same complaint, and that complaint always seems to stem from your failure to pay attention to what you are watching.

And every week you suggest that I only dislike it because I don't "get" it. At least I have the excuse of having a new episode to react to each week.

Still, I'll bite. What exactly should I have noticed that would have negated the "Bellri is an idiot for repeatedly fighting his allies and then being surprised when he ends up killing one of his friends" complaint?

It's very easy to become insulated from the consequences of your actions in warfare, especially warfare as abstract as giant robots shooting each other. Bellri already had a brush with this with Cahill, but, being a self-centred teenager, he only thinks of that guy as 'reason the hot redhead is mad at me', and has been rather distracted by all these big mechanical monsters trying to kill him since then. His Newtype moment with Dellensen (c'mon, it's the UC, this isn't a spoiler) was the first time it actually got personal for him.

I'm aware of that, which is why I'm calling him an idiot. "He's just a teenager" doesn't strike me as sufficient explanation for the fact that it never seemed to so much as cross his mind that if he keeps fighting people from the Capital, he might eventually end up killing someone he knows. Not even after he fought Dellensen the first time does that occur to him even as a possibility.

If you're going after someone with giant robots wielding live weapons and it never passes through your mind that maybe someone could get hurt, then you're an idiot well past the "lulz teenagers" point. I could buy "lulz teenagers" as an explanation if he had, say, thought about it but been confident enough in his piloting skills that he thought he'd be able to keep himself in one piece without having to kill anyone on the other side. But that's not how it was portrayed at all.

That is something from real life. Fighter pilots in WWII sometimes had trouble shooting at planes if they managed to see the pilot. It was easy to disassociate the act of killing a person when you're shooting at a plane.

Specifically to G-Reco, would Bellri have known that Dellensen was in the Capital Army? Last time they met he was Capital Guard, right?

Dellensen was part of the first attack of the Capital Army against the Megafauna, and Bellri recognized him during that battle.

But that is a different matter from this. They know they are killing, but they dissociate the act. Here, the act isn't dissociated, it simply does not seem to occur.

G Reco's entire "everyone is new at this" act honestly doesn't hold water. Everyone is stupid at this, certainly, but the mere existence of all this Universal Century tech and nobody has a training manual? Nobody has a history book of the right sort? I, personally, probably own several dozen books that could teach more about how to run a war than any of these morons know. The technical information to build weapons seems to have all survived just fine and part of the point they seem to want to make is that was ultimately far more dangerous.

It's like they burned all the Clauswitz and Max Hastings and kept all the "Idiot's Guide to Mega Particle Beam Weapons and I-Fields".

It's like they burned all the Clauswitz and Max Hastings and kept all the "Idiot's Guide to Mega Particle Beam Weapons and I-Fields".

That's pretty much exactly what happened. See, the important thing to remember here is that G-Reco does not take place in a naturally-developed society. It's Moon-Moon writ large, an attempt at a low-tech utopia made possible by its designers' privileged access to exceptionally high tech. It's a top-down dictatorship by the Rosario Ten council of the Venus Globe space colony, which controls society by threatening to cut off nations' power if they break its taboos. Information is heavily controlled, to the point where even permitting sufficiently-advanced astronomy will get your country sanctioned, because looking too hard at colony technology like the Globe's Towasanga supply depot will start giving the savage Earthnoid untermensch funny ideas.

The catch is that the technology necessary to run an operation like that can be weaponised very, very easily, and that's what the bored, idealistic rich kids of the Venusian G-IT Labs did, with the help of some secret and very illegal archaeology missions to dig up surviving UC tech so they could figure out how you were supposed to kill people with it. Everyone else's taboo-violating superweapons are basically Imported Alien Phlebotinum smuggled in from Venus by another bored Venusian who wanted to kick humanity out of its stagnant, peaceful rut. That's why they don't really get how to run a military or even properly operate their gear - they're basically an Amish community who all got handed nuclear bombs with red 'PUSH HERE' buttons, and then had Donald Rumsfeld elect himself as their bishop.

Of course, there are degrees of competence between the factions, so let's run it down:

The Capital are the purest example of the Amish with nukes. They've never needed a military before because of their enormous soft power - if anyone does something they don't like, they can just turn off the taps and starve their country to death. Then suddenly their client states stop caring about the taboos and get shiny new weapons from... somewhere, and their new head of intelligence is going 'hey, the natives are getting restless, and they have these scary new bits of kit (which I don't know anything about, honest), so maybe we should try for military superiority for once, and I know just where we could find some cool stuff...'. They have no idea what the fuck they're doing, but their astonishingly powerful technology compensates for that, and stomping the little guys sure is fun.

Ameria has the closest thing to a proper military with combat experience in the setting thanks to their brushfire wars with Gondowan, and they're conservative enough with their suit tech to integrate it well into their existing tactics (although they're mostly shit at space combat because they're totally new to it), but they've got the Saudi Arabian disease. Their military is seen as a source of easy, low-risk glory for the children of their ruling elite, and it plays merry hell with their chain of command. The Megafauna, for instance, basically operates on 'do whatever your captain orders you to... unless Lieutenant Niccini has (what he thinks is) a better idea, or Ensign Surugan runs off and does something stupid again'.

Towasanga is in much the same boat as the Capital, but has a couple of advantages - better understanding of its tech and a low-intensity civil war giving them something vaguely resembling combat experience. They're still severely out of their depth, though.

The G-IT Labs are a slightly more socially-conscious version of the Ghingnham Faction from Turn A. They're not so much a military as a war appreciation society, a disorganised bunch of kids with enormous theoretical knowledge of weapons and warfare, but zero experience in applying it in the real world. Their weaponry is incredible, and I would suspect that a few of them have sat around smuggled copies of Clausewitz behind the bike sheds, but it all goes straight out the window when they face actual, experienced soldiers.

I haven't gotten that far into the series yet, but while I can buy "cultural inexperience at actual warfare" as an excuse for a lot of stupid shit on a bureaucratic level (in fact, it'd be a great reason to have an utterly unnecessary WWI-style meatgrinder war of attrition instead of a modern industrial war, since they haven't twigged to the fact that blowing up the enemy's factories will win the war faster than killing their soldiers), but not for making individual characters act like idiots.

Hell, I complained for three episodes that Bellri was literally fighting against his allies on behalf of his enemies for no damn reason, but the plot seemed content to let him do that (until suddenly it wasn't and oh look now it's angst o'clock). There's an enormous difference between "we as a culture are bad at war because there hasn't been one in living memory" and "I personally have never fought in a war before, therefore I am unable to see the obvious consequences of my actions".