It's a Gundam thread!

Tomino doesn't kill off many characters anymore, Turn A bad an extremely low body count for what it was.

It ended up quite good considering most deaths in the show had meaning. Turn A's ending was still more of a downer than any other Tomino Gundam series besides Zeta.

G-Reco however... Yeah.

Wait, Turn-A's ending was a downer?

The ending was actually quite happy as far as the world at large went. For the main characters, less so (and came out of left field too).

Aside from Sochie not winding up with Loran, Turn A's ending was pretty darn happy.

Oh, yeah, and Guin more or less got to be a Karma Houdini with Ghingnham's psycho sidekick chick. That was kind of annoying too.

Yeah, the plot resolves pretty well for the world at large, but most of the characters' individual resolutions are pretty firmly bittersweet. Sochie spends the entire series being an emotional punching bag, then basically gets abandoned by her love interest (Loran), her real sister (Kihel, who's off pretending to be Diana), and her fake sister (who goes off with Loran), leaving her entirely alone, and — just for additional fun — taking care of her insane mother. Loran seems to return Sochie's feelings for him (you don't kiss someone like that out of politeness), but seems to feel obligated to take care of Diana, who is dying young thanks to spending too much time in cold sleep. Kihel takes Diana's place permanently, meaning that she gets to make a real difference in the world like she wanted... at the cost of leaving everyone from her old life permanently behind, with Harry being the only one who actually knows who she really is.

So out of the five main characters, there's basically one entirely downer ending, one reasonably happy ending, and the other three are varying levels of bittersweet (though generally more bitter that sweet, in my opinion).

Quick question about the Gundam 00 dub. Chantal Strand voiced a character named Feldt Grace. Did she use her "little girl" voice for that role?

edited 12th Feb '16 8:13:07 PM by DS9guy

I'm not sure what voice you mean, but Feldt's dub voice never struck me as sounding like that.

It's definitely not as high-pitched as her Lacus voice.

edited 12th Feb '16 8:20:30 PM by DarkHunter

I first thought Lacus was like, 10 because of her general appearance and dub v oice.

Anyway, since SEED has kinda been brought up, I got my own question.

I love Azrael. Love to Hate, specifically.

I hate Djibril. Um, just hate him because he's a totally bad character in every way.

Why is this? After all, they are both evil crazy cackling cartoon villains.

I can think of reasons but I'd like to hear your guys' thoughts on why Azrael works and Djibril doesn't.

Topic came to mind when someone was talking about SEED and Destiny and said LOGOS continues on after Blue Cosmos and Djibril continued on after Azrael. It made me think "wow, what a shitty legacy that is."

Because behind the pettiness and the crazy-ness, Azrael is a good leader and manipulator.

edited 12th Feb '16 9:15:04 PM by heliosKAISER

Fashion sense?

Still haven't seen Destiny yet, but pretty much all Azrael has going for him is that snazzy-ass suit.

The difference is that Azrael is actually a credible threat. He has the druggies at his beck and call, and they manage to fight Kira and Athrun to a standstill consistently, and tear through anyone else they go up against, and he ends up in command of the Dominion, which is a dangerous warship it and of itself.

Djibril, on the other hand, exists solely to be a punching bag. The only thing he accomplishes in the entire series is destroying a half dozen PLANTs late in the game — too late to actually make a difference, and only after he's spent the entire series losing horribly. Not to mention that he's killed off almost immediately thereafter. I don't actually recall if it's implied or not, but given that Durandal immediately took possession of the superweapon Djibril used on said PLANTs, even that may have been something that Durandal allowed him to do because it worked out to his benefit, rather than something he legitimately accomplished on his own.

Basically, Azrael is dangerous while Djibril is pathetic.

Djbril actually has a higher kill count than Azrael. He kills lots of people with his Destroy rampage, and actually blows up a few Plants. But they're all faceless nobodies, and mostly off screen. All statisics.

Which just goes to show how important showing and not telling is, unfortunately Morosawa is of the believe that if characters just parrot a few lines a few times that's all they need to do and that is why Destiny isn't very good.

I thought he was enjoyable in how crazy he was, much like Rau and Zala.

Plus, Azrael has a motivation. It's genocidal racism but it's better than nothing, which is Djibril's motivation. This is why I said LOGOS really isn't a successor to Blue Cosmos. Blue Cosmos had a shared identity of being anti-Coordinator. LOGOS is just SEED's Illuminati and that's about it. They have no explanation or motives beyond "we're an evil shadow government."

The Coordinator/human conflict in SEED is one of its greatest strengths because it makes sense .Azrael benefits from that strength as it explains why he is how he is, at least in the broad sense.

edited 12th Feb '16 11:50:37 PM by Nikkolas

And his voice.

I prefer the dub voice.

HERESY.

No filthy gaijin can possibly match the King of Braves!

'Gaijin'?

Foreigner in Japanese.

Oh. Thanks.

Isn't "gaijin" considered to be very pejorative?

I mean, I doubt anyone here would get in trouble for using it, given that this is a site that doesn't care if it's users use the word "retarded".

And knowing that, do you think anyone would care how pejorative a non-English word is on an English site? Especially since it's not even directed offensively at another user.

edited 13th Feb '16 6:51:26 AM by amitakartok

Oh, hey, this is cool.

And this is a great read.