It's a Gundam thread!

Really doesn't stop Emma from kicking all kinds of ass WAY more then Fa so it moot.

I don't generally consider people like the White Base crew or the Argama crew newtypes in the same way people like Amuro, Kamille, or Judau are. Though they do show some signs of newtype ability, it's more a reflection of the "main" newtype than it is a development of their own self. Remove the main newtype from the situation and I don't think any of the rest of them would display any newtype abilities. Alternatively, they're just really really weak newtypes, to the point where their powers only really manifest when dealing with other, stronger newtypes.

Actually, that'd be pretty interesting fanfic fodder. A crew of really weak newtypes — they can't pull off any of the newtype shenanigans like Amuro et al, and they can't use any newtype weapons like funnels or bits, but they have enough talent to work together really, really well. Obvious final boss: an actual full-strength newtype. I bet you could fit it in somewhere during 0087 or 0088 pretty easily. Given my predilections, I'd probably have them be an EFF crew fighting the Titans and/or Axis.

In other news, I've been holding off for a while since I moved recently and wanted to make sure my finances were settled before I made any big purchases, but I ended up ordering a bunch of Gundam blurays from Right Stuf. They're really releasing a ton of stuff — MSG, Zeta, and the first half of ZZ are already out on bluray, plus the rest of ZZ coming in July and Gundam Build Fighters in August. Gundam Evolve, Turn A and the first half of Gundam X also out on DVD, with the rest of Gundam X also scheduled for July. ZZ and all of the DVD releases are subs only, but GBF actually includes the Animax dub. I'm not optimistic that it's any good (Animax isn't known for its high quality dub work), but I'd buy it even if it was sub only, so an English track i just a bonus.

Also looking forward to seeing how they decide to officially transcribe the name of the female protagonist that isn't Elle in ZZ. I've seriously seen that girl's name rendered in so many different ways, and the fandom never really settled on one over the other. Roux Louka seems to be the most popular (that's what she's called on our ZZ page) , but I've seen pretty much every imaginable version of those general syllables, with a generous helping of Japanese Ranguage to make things more interesting.

edited 9th May '16 6:05:20 PM by NativeJovian

I'm so glad that I'll finally have an official copy of Gundam X in a few days (the first half that is)

Gundam X is fantastic and is one of the less well-known shows in the fandom, which is a shame. Even other shows that never got a North American release until recently (like Turn A, or Victory, which still hasn't gotten one, though it was on Right Stuf's list) tend to be talked about more often. Probably because they're both Tomino works, and Victory is part of the UC timeline, so it's more "visible", as it were.

When Gundam X comes up, it's usually people misinterpreting the ending as saying that newtypes are mutant freaks and/or don't actually exist.

It was one of my favorites as a teen. I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

What turned me off the last time I tried to get into it was the protagonists being scavengers. One of things I like most about Gundam is the military and geopolitical angle (fictitious as it is); it kinda loses something when that's missing, to me at least.

Roux Louka is consistently given that name in Dynasty Warriors Gundam.

The geopolitical angle is still a big part of Gundam X, it's just not immediately obvious in the beginning. Though they're theoretically Disaster Scavengers, they pretty much operate like an independent military unit, except that they're following their own plan instead of taking orders from above. The people they end up fighting against are generally military was well, except in the very beginning. As the story goes on, the more world-spanning stuff starts getting introduced.

I was not a fan of X. There were parts I liked, and Garrod's a pretty likeable kid, but I couldn't stand the rest of the cast.

I will say I'm more interested in checking out X than Turn A, even though I dug what I'd seen of Turn A (I love the fucking Steampunk aesthetic of the Post-Post-Apocalyptic society), because I just know at some point it's going to take a turn for the decidedly Tomino and frankly I'm kinda done putting up with that. But I was afraid X would just be villains of the week stuff until the last act where they go into space.

Honestly I don't really like most of Tomino's works. The only stuff he's done that I actually liked were MSG, ZZ, and CCA. Zeta and Victory were dark, depressing messes. F91 and G-Reco were confusing, poorly-paced messes. Turn A wasn't actively offensive, and had some interesting elements, but ultimately it was long and plodding with very little payoff and a really stupid ending. So that's three that I liked, four that I disliked, and one that I was indifferent on — and the last one I liked was made in 1988. I'm not sure if he's received ever-more Protection from Editors since then, or his style has just evolved over time and went in a direction I don't really care for.

I, on the other hand, have yet to watch a Tomino work that I didn't like.

The Tomino works I like are MSG and Turn A. The former is a brilliant criticism of war and created the real robot genre. The latter is just incredibly well written and unique.

Zeta has good fight scenes and some good drama, but it relies too much on Newtype space magic. Not to mention that it's pretty damn sexist even by Gundam standards.

I don't remember much of ZZ, but I do know that they underused Haman and, while there is some good stuff inthere, there's a lot of boring crap too.

CCA is a good action movie, but it suffers because the circumstances behind Char's Face–Heel Turn are kind of brushed over. I have no problem with Char going evil again, but it should have happened with more fanfare than the narrator explaining that Char revealed that he was alive and declared war on Earth.

I've seen F91, but I literally remember nothing about it except for Darth Vader Iron Mask and his Giant Flower mobile armor.

I could never finish V because it was too grimdark. Other than that, my thoughts on it are largely the same as my thoughts on Zeta.

I haven't seen G-Reco, but from what I understand, just about everything but its animation is mediocre.

Char's Face–Heel Turn is brushed over because he never actually changes sides. He's fighting for the same thing (which is "fuck the Earth Federation (and the Zabis are jerks too)", roughly speaking) in all three of his appearances. The only difference is that in Zeta, the good guys are pissed at the Titans too, so Char's willing to side with them as allies of convenience. For Char it was never about good and evil, it was about Earth vs Space (and Zeon Deikun vs the Zabi family as the true representatives of the Space side of the equation).

It always sort of confuses me how so many people miss that.

Char does display significantly more morals in Z than CCA. And I have no idea why he suddenly cares about his rivalry with Amuro again

I was writing up something about my thoughts on Tomino's series, but it basically boiled down to thinking that he's good with ideas but terrible at writing. And doesn't realize this

I think 0079 it's the other way around, at least given what I've learned from the Origin so far which actually has helped me understand Char a bit better. He never seems 'truly' passionate about Newtypism or his Father's ideals; he just fallback on them because that's what's expected of him; not to imply that he's any sort of a victim but rather he's just intellectually lazy, and will fall back on the easiest excuse to justify his anger and bitterness.

edited 10th May '16 3:42:48 AM by ScherzoPrime

Char only displays morals when it's convenient for him. He ends up working with a lot of former (and future) EFF, and he hopes to convince the next generation (as represented by Kamille in particular) that Zeon was awesome until the Zabis fucked it up, which is why he spends a lot of time talking about "souls weighed down by gravity" and carefully distinguishing between "Zeon" and "the Zabi family" (while most other people don't really give a shit). But he never really commits to the cause, and has to be pushed into taking a larger role as Char Aznable instead of being an anonymous pilot as Quattro, and when things go south he bails rather than tough it out.

Re: Tomino, I largely agree there. I put him in the same category as George Lucas in that he can come up with some really great ideas, but his work is best when he develops the high-level concept but lets someone else take charge as director, etc.

I'd agree with that. A big part of Char's character is that he's not actually passionate enough about his beliefs to stick to his guns on them, but he thinks his dead father would want him to and can't bring himself to just let it go like Sayla does. So he infiltrates the Zeon army pre-OYW with an assumed identity and a vague idea of getting revenge on the Zabis and returning Zeon to its true ideals, but doesn't really think it through and eventually settles for "meh, at least I can kill the Zabis". During Zeta he ends up involved with the AEUG, but actively avoids becoming one of its political leaders until it's basically forced on him, and even then utterly fails to turn and active armed rebellion against the Earth Federation into the sort of spacenoid independence movement that his father would have wanted. By CCA he's just tired of the whole damn thing and decides that, one way or another, he's going to go out with a bang.

That and he's just really pissed at Amuro about Lalah meanwhile Amuro has moved on with life and is just like "Yeah no that's stupid."

And the whole "Souls weighed down by gravity" thing doesn't last long does it. Some people preach it but everyone else is pretty much just "Ignoring that".

Even Char's feud with Amuro is largely ignored during Zeta. What it feels like to me is that Char is convinced that he has an Epic Destiny to accomplish Great Things in the world because he's the son of Zeon Deikun — he doesn't particularly want one, but he thinks he has to have one out of a combination of feeling obligation toward his father's legacy and being narcissistic enough that he feels he's an Important Person and refuses to just give the whole thing up and go lead a normal life. At the end of MSG he's trying to murder Amuro over it until he loses that fight and bugs out to Axis, then in Zeta he doesn't really care because he's busy nursing his grudge against Haman instead, and by the time CCA rolls around it's high on his list again because... well, honestly, I'm still not entirely sure of Char's motives in CCA. I'm not convinced that Char knows his own motivations. The fact that the characters are that complex is one of the things I like about CCA, actually.

And the "souls weighed down by gravity" thing is really only in Zeta, yeah. Char tries to use it as a rallying cry for the Spacenoid cause, but no one except Kamille really picks up on it. Everyone else's attitude is pretty much "yeah, whatever" and dismissing it as Char being Char. Which is a pretty accurate take, in my book.

The souls weighed down by gravity is the entire purpose of CCA.

Char is going to make the earth uninhabitable so that everyone has to go to space instead, which then people won't be held down by earth. He is more playing the part required than actually believing that though and too bad in the end it does nothing to end the fighting from any angle.

Only Zechs has been the successful Char clone to go the Peace Through Cuban Missile Crisis level of holy shit we gonna die let's stop thing.

edited 10th May '16 8:09:06 AM by Memers

I don't think Char ever truly beleved in the "Gravity Souls" thing. He just used it when convenient, such as converting a young newtype to follow his ideology.

And making the Earth a uninhabitable nuclear wasteland of eternal winter seems a bit counter productive to the whole "Gotta let the world heal" message he's pushing.

Char is inconsistant as hell in CCA. Sometimes he acts like he's using it all as one big smokescreen just to fight Amuro again, but at the end when Axis is falling he seems really passionate about wanting it to happen despite the outcome of their battle.

I suppose it boils down to however you want to praise Tomino UC Gundam was written by the seat of their pants, with sequels coming out they had no idea they were gonna be doing when writing the earlier material. Char doesn't seem to care about his father's ideals in 0079 because they had no clue he would be heading a Zeon of his own with that as the battle cry 9 years later. Same with Quattro in Zeta. When Zeta started they didn't have a clue CCA was coming.

And CCA was above all else just an excuse for Amuro and Char to fight again on the big screen and they'd write it however they needed to get that to happen. It was even written with the intent that you didn't need to see Zeta and ZZ and could jump right from 0079 to CCA.

Well from what I can glean from watching ANT it seemed like AEUG is sort of broad coalition of nominally pro-Spacenoid interest groups; ranging from Anti-Titan dissidents, to ideological Zeke fanatics, to the unscrupulous lunar backers who mainly care about there still being a war for them to profit off of. But they do seem legitimately PRO-Spacenoid, not just anti-Titan, as I distinctly remember them discussing how they wanted to develop Colonial infrastructure more and continue the migration of humanity to space. It definitely had a political agenda of making the colonies the nexus of political power in the EF. I think the coalition couldn't survive the death of the Titans though, and probably fractured between Moderates and those who supported the more radical policies of Axis and Neo-Zeon; which I think in the end discredited the AEUG a spacenoid political group.

I think 0083 aside, one of the big reasons behind the EF Civil War and later Zeon Wars is a sort of 'Second-Wave Space Colonization' following OYW, since Operation British (and later Stardust) continued to degrade the ecological carrying capacity of the Earth, forcing mass migrations of millions of people who had been used to a relatively comfortable existence on Earth before the war and probably were in general more white-collar than the original settlers. It also to me explains how political Zeonism could still be popular despite it basically being discredited by the genocidal nature of the OWB; since new wave colonizers didn't directly experience (or have parents that experienced) Zeonic hypocrisy, it becomes easier to by into (like historical revisionism about Stalin by those who didn't actually have to live under him).

Well fucking up the Earth to Char is a way of fucking over Amuro; I think his motivations in CCA are entirely petty; he wants to grind Amuro's desires into nothing to how HE was more deserving of Lalah's love.

edited 10th May '16 12:59:46 PM by ScherzoPrime

If Axis falls, it means that Char has won by default. That's why he wants it to happen.

His desperation is less "Why aren't you letting me genocide the planet?! WHY?!" and more "Oh, for fuck's sake, I was this close! THIS FUCKING CLOSE!!!"

edited 10th May '16 1:34:51 PM by amitakartok