It's a Gundam thread!

@kkhohoho: Where are my manners?

I was referring to Nena Trinity of Gundam 00, the Psychopathic Womanchild of that particular installment. It's an example I wanted to stress about times where we sometimes either forget or stress too hard about our favorite characters since I pointed out audience reaction.

As for Tomino's rantings and ravings, here's my two points:

1. While it seems that way, not every young seiyu or CV sounds the same as each other. The tones may be similar, but they are often coincidenal. That's the Japanese equivelant to the American viewer mistaking a skilled voice actor impersinating a celebrity and assuming the celebrity did a cartoon.

2. To each his own. Last year, I quoted a certain redneck wrestler's late 1994 ECW promo when he referred to that hardcore federation's style as "a bunch of violent crap" and still have a negative opinion of that show. However, Tomino is also of the age bracket where it is more than difficult to accept shows like Attack on Titan or Gantz as more than mindless bloodbaths. Ironically, you know the counterargument against Tomino generally rides on the fact that, in his heyday, he was the pioneer of the Kill Em All, so hopefully Tomino understood the irony.

edited 30th Aug '14 1:34:28 PM by JDogindy

Yeah, this discussion can get very zealous when it comes to characters they (don't) like.

I do not despise Quess Paraya.

Internet firestorm in 3...2...1...

And I don't find Quess as hate-worthy as...

Incoming Internet firestorm led by the Kool-Aid drinkers in 3, 2, 1...

If it's any consolation, you're not alone. I don't like Quess, but I don't dislike her either. When it comes to Quess, I'm just completely indifferent to her, though that's probably even worse than her being despicable. At least if a character's despicable, they're memorable, albeit for all of the wrong reasons. Quess doesn't even have that (dis)honorable distinction, IMO.

edited 30th Aug '14 9:20:20 PM by kkhohoho

For me, she strikes me as what would happen if you put a realistic thirteen year old girl into a massive mobile armor with huge firepower and gave her powerful psychic abilities she barely understands.

On another note, I'm hoping the next DWG includes Rakan and the Doven Wolf, and maybe adds the Neo Zeong as a new mobile armor.

edited 30th Aug '14 11:13:08 PM by NickTheSwing

@Nitarmy: And certain mecha as well.

I like the Impluse.

Cue the shitstorm of fans complaing It's The Same So It Sucks in 3... 2... 1...

I always considered the Impulse as the Strike Mark II.

It was homage to both.

@Nick The Swing

For me the problem with Quess isn't that she's a despicable character (she is, but Gundam is full of those). It's that she's in the way. CCA advertises itself as the Universal Century's grand finale, a capstone to the EF/Zeon conflict, and the culmination of the Amuro/Char rivalry. About half of it is that, and it's a lot of fun.

The other half, unfortunately, is taken up with Guyenei, Hathaway, and to a far lesser degree, Char, getting into a dispute over who is going to screw an obnoxious thirteen year old. In another series or movie, that'd be irritating, but might be salvageable. In this film, it bogs down the plot, and distracts from what I came to see to a point that I find unforgivable.

Quess is in the wrong film. If you want to contend that she's a realistic take on what would happen to a thirteen year old girl in that situation, I won't argue with you about it. I don't know that I agree, but it's certainly a point that you could reasonably make a case for. My issue is that realistic or not, I didn't buy CCA to watch her story.

@kkkhohoho

I don't know if being indifferent to a character is worse than hating them. I suppose it depends on whether you're supposed to hate the character or not. If you were indifferent to somebody like Ali, who you are meant to loathe with all your being, it would definitely be indicative of poor writing and/or you not caring for the series. Conversely if you're meant to like the character, but do not, it's probably a better sign (for the writers) if you are indifferent instead of flat out hating them (better to produce no effect than the opposite of the effect intended).

Of course with Quess, I have no idea if we're supposed to like her or not. Tomino seems to think we are, what with all the fuss made about her by Hathaway, and even Char (remember Char trying to call out Amuro on being "awfully cold to Quess"?), yet she's so singularly bitchy and whiny that it would seem to defeat the purpose.

@Nitramy

People who disagree with you are not members of a suicide cult nor are they necessarily dogmatic in their beliefs. I can't speak for everyone else, but I for one would appreciate it if you stopped throwing that expression around.

I see your point - she's simply in the wrong medium. People saw CCA to see the seemingly grand finale. Not for three men to argue about who gets Quess.

On a different topic, Victory Gundam really manages to be utterly baffling. We have a guy with an unhealthy fixation on wheels and his girlfriend, their death scene which is so melodramatic it turns into a joke on overly melodramatic deaths, Lupe Cineau's Shota Fantasies (one good reason Victory might well never get a western dub), and Fuala Griffon's confusing character arc.

I do not know what to make of this series. Is it supposed to be chauvinist? Feminist? Unfair to both genders at once? And just what is the deal with Zanscare nobility and those chortle-inducing wigs?

Where the hell did that come from? He asked you to stop misusing a phrase, so you accuse him of running to the mods and bring up unrelated stuff about Gundam Seed? Seriously, just... What?

@Nick The Swing

If she were in a different film/series, I doubt I'd like her, but I wouldn't think she was the worst thing ever. As is, not only does she take up half a movie for no good reason, it's a movie I was really jazzed for.

Victory...I just don't know what was up with any of that. My best guess is that Tomino was just throwing things onto the paper and seeing what worked.

Though on that last bit—in my experience sexism is pretty much automatically unfair to both genders at once. It doesn't matter if you're an MRA loon or a radfem crazy—once you stake out a position that extreme, odds are good that you're going to offend both genders, especially if your views are gender-essentialist.

In order to avoid derailing the thread with another discussion of Tomino's issues with women, I'll end by saying aren't Roux and Elle great, empowered female characters?

edited 31st Aug '14 9:56:09 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Eh, they're alright. They're certainly a step-up compared to most female Gundam characters, but I'd hesitate to number them among the Greatest Female Characters in Anime (TM), or anything like that. Again, I'm indifferent to them. Well, mostly. Roux was kind of cool.

Oh I wouldn't put them up there either in terms of anime in general. In terms of this particular franchise though, they're very, very good, particularly given that they hail from an eighties show. The fact that the show allows Roux to manipulate and take advantage of her stalker, without ever losing sight of the fact that he is the one who is entirely in the wrong here, makes me quite glad.

Though her last line to him, 'I will never forget that you loved me', does ruin a fair chunk of that. No, Roux, he was a creepy, possessive stalker. You knew this. You took advantage of it. Please don't go back on all that now.

It's like how Stella's death scene went in entirely the wrong direction regarding her relationship with Shinn. Love confessions and naked space hugs aren't a great ending to an arc that until then appeared to be about Shinn finding a surrogate little sister.

As I've said before, it's best if you view Victory as the product of an unstable author, because it's very hard to explain some of it any other way.

If you're sour about how CCA starts, the original novel, Hi-Streamer, starts with a lot of stuff. To quote Mark Simmons:

And here's more from Simmons:

Sources are here, and here. As to why we never got those tidbits from Hi-Streamer animated, probably Executive Meddling.

edited 1st Sep '14 6:34:05 AM by HallowHawk

Honestly, what I want to see now is an OVA covering all of the stuff from the CCA books that they cut out from the movies. Heck, CCA should have been a longer OVA from the get-go, judging from all that was left out on the cutting room floor.

I was sort of meh on the Quess subplot in CCA, but I didn't find it offensively horrible or anything. Yeah, it took some screentime away from the main Char/Amuro plot, but the movie needed a B-plot of some sort for pacing reasons, and honestly the whole thing would have felt a little weird without the UC standard "war's heating up again? Time to recruit some fresh-faced teenage newtypes!" thing. The execution was lacking, but I don't think the concept was terrible.

That said, out of that subplot, my ire is directed at Hathaway rather than Quess. Quess is a confused kid with a bad home life trying to deal with powers she doesn't really understand by latching on to the closest thing she can find to a father figure. She's annoying, but her situation is understandable. Hathaway is the one who should goddamn know better.

I dunno, they could've just given more depth to Amuro vs. Char, or instead of creating a bunch of new characters, bring in existing ones like Sayla, Kamille and Judau.

Give the dude a break, it's not atypical for kids his age to go all Leeroy Jenkins for the slightest chance of *wiggles extended pinky finger suggestively* that sort of thing.

You could chalk it up to more of Tomino's time-honored go-to trope of "female charms make men do stupid things", but that's par for the course.

Not that I dislike Hathaway any less because of it - it's understandable, but still. Sheesh.

@laculus

I can forgive some of Stella's death scene, because the love confession is coming from Stella rather than Shinn. The fact that she was apparently crushing on him, doesn't mean he didn't view her as a substitute sister. The naked space hug, conversely, I could have lived without.

You're right about that line of Roux's. Though since she pulls the trigger anyway, I don't mind overly much.

@Jovian

What bothers me about Quess is that we don't really see her bad homelife. Yeah, her stepmom clearly dislikes her, but given that Quess is a sociopathic little twit who is willing to betray planet earth so long as a guy she likes is telling her too, I can't say I blame her. I wouldn't want that kid for a stedaughter either.

I agree the film needed a subplot, but surely they could have had something more interesting.

Do kids that age sometimes do stupid things? Sure. But I can't think of too many who throw away their entire lives for a girl who is not only a hateful little twit, but is also an active participant in a plot to render the Earth uninhabitable. I remember thirteen. I can safely say that, had I found out my crush at the time was planning to, I don't know, nuke the city, I wouldn't have tried to save her. I'd have called the police. And if the police shot her in the process, I wouldn't be out for revenge.