It's a Gundam thread!

You can argue that. But I will argue that Tekkadan actually has little to do with the overall reform, Mc Gillis so far isn't trying to prevent a war from ever happening ever again, the Child Soldiers are treated much differently and are not glorified in what they do, no colonies are accidentally blown up, and the peace party gets to live.

Gundams from space land on earth and start attacking the world powers which causes the Big Bad to rise and beat the Gundams, then the Gundam Pilots eventually get back together to fight beat the big bad in space while one faction fights the other faction. Which series is this?

I mean come on, even the operations to trap the Gundams at the start were the same. Katharon = Treize faction, GN-X = Taurus etc I could go on and on and on. The big thing was 00 was a hell of a lot better written than Wing and had inspiration in it's changes unlike SEED did at the start.

IBO has more in common with Aldnoah.Zero than any Gundam.

edited 30th Apr '16 7:03:20 PM by Memers

The Gundam Pilots in Wing had little personally to do with it either; they spent the first half of the series being unwitting pawns of Treize (again, how Tekkadan played into Mc Gillis's plan). The only made progress to the extent that they supported Relena's initiatives, which is the same with Bernstein.

Ald.Noah is way more like 0079 than anything else.

The specific circumstances of child soldiers from the colonies supporting an idealist to reform the Earth Sphere I feel is something they intrinsically share.

I felt like Tekketsu took most of it's notes from 0079 and 00

In Wing, the Gundam boys really didn't do much on a macro level. The plot was really more about the interactions between Treize, Milliardo, and the Rommefeller Foundation, with Relena as a surprise outsider making effective use of the power those three players handed to her, and the Gundams as powerful, difficult-to-direct pieces in their game.

There's a lot of parallels with Wing. A bunch of warped, exploited child soldiers are sent to Earth to oppose the aristocratic government on vague revolutionary grounds by a sinister space-based cabal. They find their own identity by rallying around a naive young aristocrat who slowly manages to rise above the many, many people trying to use her and becomes a major power in her own right. Meanwhile, a masked ace of their aristocratic enemies becomes half-friend, half-foe as he incorporates them into his own ambitions, becoming the true architect of the new era they're creating. The 'magic' of the setting is also purely technological, a device that turns people into extensions of the weapons they pilot and demands a high price in return.

There's also strong Zeta parallels, with Gjallarhorn as the Titans. Edmonton was basically their Dakar Day, and Ein was their Jerid. The Alaya-Vijnana System is also extremely close to Cyber-Newtype technology in theme, if not in specific function. Meanwhile, Mc Gillis was pretty much the purest 0079 Char in the entire history of Char clones - literally the only difference was that he lacked his inspiration's crippling fear of responsibility.

Saying that IBO 'has the least in common with all the rest of the Gundam series out of all of them' seems like a pretty weird thing to claim given stuff like Turn A, G, and, if we want to go for the big guns, Build Fighters. It's a diverse franchise, and IBO is honestly pretty close to the mainstream.

Well yeah, on character interactions Tekkadan's crew certainly reminded me of White Base, which is a good thing. Orga's sorta playing the Bright Noa role of trying to be the 'adult' member of the crew when he's still just a twentysomething himself; the only major difference is that he and Minazuki have a co-dependent relationship instead of the antagonism that Bright and Amuro often had.

I'd say the most novel thing about IBO is that it focus much more on the human element of the narrative, instead of just waxing political and philosophic. It of course does that as well, but there's a much better balance than a lot of previous shows.

I'd say Gjallarhorn is as much UESA/OZ as it is Titans, but those organizations are pretty interchangeable anyways.

I like how you mention Char's fear (or even active disdain) of responsibility, that's becoming increasingly clear in the Gundam the Origins anime, which I've really been enjoying.

edited 30th Apr '16 7:12:48 PM by ScherzoPrime

@Scherzo

The Amuro/Lalah relationship does not offend me the way that the Four/Kamille one does. That said, do I look at them and think, what a wonderful couple, I completely buy into the notion that they are in love? Not particularly. I can accept their Newtype powers made them feel a connection, and that said connection completely screwed things up later. Anything further, not really.

Most of the similarities between IBO and Wing are fairly superficial. Yeah, Kudelia is fairly Relena-ish, but Gjallarhorn doesn't have much in common with Oz besides being vaguely Blue Blood themed and being "Earth-based bad guys" (which is... basically every Gundam where the bad guys aren't the space colonies), and the only parallels between Mika and Heero/Setsuna is being The Stoic. Most notably, unlike the other two, Mika is very much a pragmatist who doesn't really give a damn about the big picture and only worries about the situation right in front of him. Both Heero and Setsuna are idealists who choose to become Gundam pilots because their worldview requires them to make big changes to society. Mika just kills people that Orga tells him to because that's his job, and doesn't really care past that.

Mika and Heero actually follow similar arcs, though Heero gets further along his (because IBO is only half-done). Remember that Heero doesn't start the show as an ambitious idealist. He starts it as a traumatised, emotionally-dead murder-machine who's just looking for a good way to die and thinks Operation Meteor might be it. It's only through connecting with Relena that he begins to develop his own ideals and think of a bigger picture. Mika is a little way further along at the start - he already has the friendships that Heero needed to develop with the other Gundam pilots - but he's still basically just Orga's pet attack dog (you can draw some interesting parallels between Orga and Doctor J, the reluctant father-figure who needs his deadly young charge's skills but hates what it's doing to his humanity) and it's Kudelia who starts to bring him out of his shell and convince him that he can be more.

I'd say the aristocratic conservatism plays a major role in both Wing and IBO; whereas in say Zeta it's more just tyrannical fascism.

A bit of a late thing to point out, but the upcoming Call Of Duty Infinite Warfare looks to be the closest thing to an FPS Gundam game:

Story Summary:

"A futuristic story that casts players as Captain Reyes, a "Tier One Special Operations pilot" who pilots one of "Earth's last remaining warships," indicating that this 13th game in the hyper-popular Call of Duty series will be on a scale larger than its its Earth-locked predecessors.

Reyes will be battling the forces of the Settlement Defense Front, an insurgency that seceded from the suitably sci-fi-sounding United Nations Space Alliance over the issue of Earth's colonies.

Our home planet has been stripped of its resources at this indeterminate point in the future, leading humans to rely on colony production, but the fascist SDF — hardened by difficult lives on asteroids and new worlds — want to take the goodies for themselves. Infinity Ward says battles will be fought both on the ground and up in space, putting players at the controls of jet fighters and spaceships with "few visible load times.""

So the bad guys are kinda Zeon who just want all the resources for themselves.

What did this UN thing do so wrong to piss them off enough to attack earth?

Call of Duty: Universal Century.

@L Dragon 2 Didn't Titanfall do this already?

C'mon, like a COD game could even be original in its homages.

Very good point.

Have now seen up through ep 41 of Zeta.

I actually honestly feel really bad for Reccoa.

And, Emma kind of strikes me as a bit of a hypocrite. I mean, she's bitching about Reccoa for acting on her emotions and at Kamille for having a (pretty understandable IMO) emotional reaction to the shit going on around him, but she's the one getting all slap-happy today. And if we want to talk about the ideals/beliefs that led her to defect from the Titans to the AEUG, I'm pretty sure that on some level that involved some subjective feelings-based judgment calls, too.

I mean, do I condone what Reccoa's doing? Hell no. But at least she has the self-awareness to know that she's doing horrible things in the name of horrible people, and is on some level disgusted with herself for it.

....or, hell, I'unno, maybe I just have a weakness for crying women. >_>

Last time I checked Emma didn't betray the Titans for reasons that boil down to 'A man I liked wouldn't put his dick in me.'

edited 9th May '16 12:56:22 AM by heliosKAISER

The way I saw it, Emma was calling out Reccoa and Kamille for being ruled by their emotions exclusively.

Emma changed sides when she saw the atrocities the Titans committed, and realized that she couldn't tolerate their actions. That's, of course, at least partly an emotional response, but it's emotion for other people, backed up by moral logic.

Reccoa on the other hand changes sides purely to satisfy her personal emotions, and Kamille does have a big problem with letting his emotions get the better of him throughout the series.

Emma's emotions affect her decisions of course (I doubt there's any human that isn't true of), but she doesn't act on them exclusively, doesn't let them control her.

As for feeling sorry for Reccoa... well, I can certainly understand her desire for love and acceptance, but betraying your friends and joining up with genocidal oppressors strikes me as kind of a massive overboard reaction to being denied that during wartime, certainly not a morally justifiable one.

edited 9th May '16 2:40:45 AM by DarkHunter

Oh, I definitely agree that it's overboard and not morally cool (although given Scirocco's passive Newtype mind-whammying aura, maybe I'm a little convinced of exactly how much of it is "her fault").

Still think that Emma herself was going overboard too, though.

edited 9th May '16 4:40:39 AM by EvaUnit01

Can anything Post Calamity-related be discussed here now?

Remember that Emma doesn't know about Scriocco's mind control powers. All she sees is Reccoa abandoning them and joining up with the mass-murdering regime because Char wouldn't bang her. At that point Emma is entitled to say whatever she wants about Reccoa.

....wait a sec, Emma's the one major Argama pilot who isn't a Newtype, right?

She's a newtype but she's weak, I think lol

Pretty bad when Fa is stronger than you in some way.