It's a Gundam thread!

well, both F91 and Victory were made before Gundam A Us were even a thing, so I think you can see them as trial balloons of a sort.

I think Unicorn could've been a really good addition and in various ways is, I just thing it's desire to spin this conspiratorial retcon about an EF illuminati drags it down a lot.

Eh, the main problem with Unicorn is that it tries to extend the Zeon story after CCA, which well and truly closed the issue. The fact that it did it with ham-handed retcons and had numerous other issues aside, the fact that it turned CCA's definitive "THE END" into a "to be continued" was annoying all by itself.

Now, a story set between CCA and F91 and helping to bridge the gap between the two I could have gotten behind, but it would have to start with "after the final collapse of the militant Zeon movement..." and move on from there. Something involving the internal politics of Side 3 as their integration back into the Federation around UC 0100, possibly involving Minerva, definitely had potential. But not "Zeon's back and stronger than ever" a few years after they were dead and buried once and for all.

And that will likely never happen. Japan just has this massive hard on for Zeon that cannot be beat.

It's why despite Unicorn's clunky retcons and questionable story Japan still ate it up and wanted more because "Woo more Zeon!"

It's why very few fans care about post Zeon UC.

I don't get the massive appeal of Zeon. I like em ya, but as the Black in the Black and Gray.

My stance is still that CCA didn't feel nearly as conclusive as people say it was, although I'm becoming more and more aware that Unicorn wasn't exactly the best solution either.

Also, Ghost finished? :O

Unicorn was not.

Tweaks could be made to make it better.

Such as removing Zeon and Laplace's box. Made this a secret war of the Federation and another org that hated them.

I'd say cut down the Sleeves to just a ship or three, a couple of worn and stripped-down mobile suits of various ages, the only threat being two or three cutting-edge or mothballed prototypes they managed to nick from who knows where, and really emphasize just how broken and out of their element they are. Hammer home how pathetic they've become, how they're fighting a war that ended long ago for a cause that was never legitimate, and have that reality thrown in their faces. Have them go back to Side 3 and get laughed off. Have some of them go mad and have to be forced down, because they have no idea how to move on when the rest of humanity has long since done so.

Have them sincerely believe they're doing the right thing, and then show them just how wrong they are.

In the end, one of them is unable to cope and self-destructs in a vain attempt to take something, anything with him. Some fight back, but are simply subdued. The rest give up without a fight, cast away their prior allegiance, and walk away, never to be seen again.

tl;dr: Hit the audience with a hammer with the words "END OF AN ERA" written on it until they're bruised and bloody. xP

I think that that would erase the show's central theme of the sins of the past, though. The war is over, but people still keep fighting, because they know no other life. Zeon died in Char's Counterattack, but that still leaves an enormous corpse stinking up the room and twitching all over the place, and the Federation, too, is a corrupt, crippled wreck.

Unicorn is an epilogue to the original Universal Century run, showing how humanity might take the opportunity that Amuro left them and start healing again, even as the shattered remains of the old world try to drag them back to the bad old days. It occupies a fairly important role in the story of the Federation and Zeon.

edited 30th Jun '16 6:25:28 PM by Iaculus

Well then shrink the Neo Zeon and give them less shit.

Also if we want evil Federation, less Pillage and Rape, more alternatives. Pillage and Rape is overplayed.

Most of what the Sleeves have is fairly justifiable for the largest of the remaining groups picking over Neo Zeon's insane hypertech from ZZ and CCA. The Kshatriya is a baby Queen Mansa that's pretty nice, but not quite as good as the real deal. The Neo Zeong is an Alpha Azieru with extras. The Rozen Zulu is a regular grunt suit with arms borrowed from a dead-end prototype from the start of NZW 1. The Sinanju is an early (and very inferior) prototype of the Unicorn stolen from Anaheim. Only the Rozen and the Neo Zeong's Newtype technology are a step beyond anything we'd ever seen before, and I'm prepared to believe that, too, was stolen in the raid on Anaheim. Everything else is a motley assortment of ancient junk.

The Sleeves may have some cool toys, but they do still feel like a shadow of Neo Zeon's former glory, especially when compared to ZZ. A Doven-Wolf, for instance, could beat the Rozen Zulu like a rug, and those were mass-produced.

In a war both sides always end up doing shit stuff to the other side and causing lasting resentment to the opposing populous. The Federation could have been all sunshine and rainbows like the Three Ships Alliance but still have created people like Shinn opposing it.

The point of Unicorn was that there is a point where you gotta let that past go and look forward to the future.

Yeah, the big thing that the sleeves had were skilled pilots that were vets of 4 wars.

edited 30th Jun '16 8:15:54 PM by Memers

I wasn't arguing against Feds doing awful things. Just something other than Pillage and Rape which I feel is getting generic. Maybe denied food or draconian laws with watch. Maybe warcrime weapons.

The big thing was the upper echelons of the feds were apathetic and didn't care about what their lower echelons were doing to the locals thus the unprosecuted rape and pillage. That apathy plot element that continued from CCA.

Denying food and forcing laws would imply they cared.

edited 30th Jun '16 8:33:36 PM by Memers

The problem with the Sleeves as they're depicted in Unicorn is that they're treated as the leftovers of every Zeon faction left over since the end of the One Year War, when Char's Neo Zeon was never that. The original Zeon — as in, the descendants of the Principality's military, whether we're talking the Axis forces or the various remnant groups holding out in the Earth Sphere — were destroyed by around 0088, when Haman's Neo Zeon imploded and the Federation mopped up the mess. Char's movement in CCA appears to consist of a new generation of would-be revolutionaries who are motivated by discontent against the Federation rather than loyalty to Zeon. Char's base of operations is a colony populated by refugees, and about the only person we see in his forces who would have been old enough to have actually fought in the One Year War is Rezin, who is a psychopath along the lines of Yazan Gable and Ali Al-Saachez who almost certainly cares less about why she's fighting and more about the fact that she gets to fight in the first place. Char's forces also have an entirely new crop of ships and mecha, and they don't seem to be based on anything from Haman's arsenal in particular so much as a fresh design in the general Zeon style.

In other words, Char's Neo Zeon has virtually no connection with previous Zeon groups. He appears to have new backers, new pilots, new technology, and new goals. Basically, Zeon as an organization died with Haman, and Char's defeat in CCA was the death of Zeon as an idea. It was the final rejection of Deikun's "Earth is for losers, space rules" philosophy (and the various messed up versions of it that arose over the decades), and it's no accident that the antagonist factions in F91 and Victory have different origins and different rationales.

Then Unicorn comes along and has all these remnant groups with all these pilots and all this hardware just lying around. Where the hell was all of that during CCA? Even if most of the hardware was outdated to some extent, Char certainly could have used the pilots — Char's men get slaughtered in CCA despite outnumbering Londo Bell something like four to one because, with a few exceptions, they're a bunch of idiot kids in cut-rate mecha fighting an elite military unit in the newest high-performance machine to roll off the Federation assembly lines. If Char had had the forces we see the Sleeves using available to him, he certainly would have used them in CCA.

And that sums up the problem with Unicorn in a nutshell. It's wedged into the UC timeline because stuff in the UC timeline is popular, rather than because it makes any damn sense. It has to retcon things up and down in order for its plot to work in the first place, and its supposedly Earth-shattering revelations all come to nothing because the timeline doesn't allow for it.

edited 30th Jun '16 9:35:43 PM by NativeJovian

Well I think at the end of CCA, 2 or 3 of Neo Zeon's Battleships are operational when Axis does... whatever it did, and I think Full Frontal's fleet is only those ships that went to ground following the war. I think that's where a lot of the Sleeves came from as well.

Full Frontal touches on the fact that Zeonism, as it exists, is not a coherent set of beliefs but a hodge-podge of different ideologies bound together by hatred of the EF. I think in that regard you don't give Unicorn enough credit; I think it does a better job than CCA in showing just how absolutely ideologically bankrupt Zeon is a political force. A literal Char Clone is using the last Zabi, his mortal enemy, as a symbol to unite the colonies in a fucking trade cartel, while the average rank-and-file Zeke keeps fighting only because they've sunk so much of their lives into their hatred and resentment they wouldn't know what to do if they just let go. I think given how CCA pretty much botched being a grand finale to UC; Unicorn would've been a great send off it weren't, again, for Laplace's box.

It does stagger belief a bit to believe that there are hundreds of sleeper Zeke MS units waiting to activate on Earth. I think it'd been much more believable if it were just Loni and the Garancieres team.

That's something that becomes more plausible in the context of ZZ as well. Judau and his crew ran into a hell of a lot of Zeon remnants and their friends and family Hiroo Onoda'ing it up during their trip across Africa, and that's just one small part of one continent. The Federation is in exceedingly poor shape after the Titans take over most of their military resources and then get obliterated, and most of their territory is a lawless wasteland in the late Universal Century. That's discounting anyone who might have started some colonisation-work during Neo Zeon's brief conquest of Earth, too.

edited 1st Jul '16 4:18:47 PM by Iaculus

Yeah, there are definitely some of Char's Neo Zeon still on the lam post-CCA, but it's nothing like what we see in Unicorn. Char's entire force in CCA consists of a Rewloola battleship, a bunch (like a dozen) Musaka cruisers, a mess of Geara Dogas (around 50, given his fleet's mobile suit capacity — 4 each for the Musakas and 10 for the Rewloola), and a handful of specialty mecha (two Psyco Dogas, the Alpha Azeru, and the Sazabi). All of the advanced units and most of the Musakas are destroyed, leaving the Rewloola, a couple Musakas, and some Geara Dogas.

The Sleeves are supposed to be the remnants of Char's Neo Zeon, but they have access to way more than just what Char's survivors escaped with, including a ton of stuff from Axis and original Principality forces which Char never seemed to have access to. (Admittedly many of the OYW-era stuff is from leftover remnants rather than official Sleeves members, but the Sleeves are still on good enough terms with them to essentially say "we need you to abandon everything and go do a mission for us" and their response is "sure, we're on our way".)

Just to hammer home how ridiculous the Sleeves are... Char had one notable ace (Rezin), one cyber newtype (Gyunei) and a natural newtype he recruited by happenstance (Quess), plus himself. He had a bunch of cheap ships and mecha (two of them modified for newtype use), his own Sazabi, and one mobile armor. So call it four aces and four special mecha. The Sleeves had an ace (Angelo), two cyber newtypes (Marida and Full Frontal), and a natural newtype (Loni, though again, she's technically with the remnants) plus half dozen ubermecha (Angelo's highly customized Geara Zulu and the Rozen Zulu, Marida's Kshatriya, Full Frontal's Sinanju and Neo Zeong, and Loni's Shamblo), and a bunch of upgraded limited production run models like the "Royal Guard" Geara Zulus (not to mention the Geara Zulu itself, which was an upgrade to the Geara Doga). So that's four more aces, six advanced mecha, and a number of other improved models.

In other words, the Sleeves had more and better pilots and equipment than Char's Neo Zeon forces did, despite supposedly being remnants of Char's Neo Zeon, not to mention way more reserves to call on in the form of older mecha and their pilots that were apparently just sitting around during Char's campaign in CCA.

The impression I got from ZZ was that Axis has called up pretty much all the surviving Zeon remnants in the Earth Sphere and put them to work. Axis was the legitimate successor to the Principality of Zeon, after all — if those remnants were waiting for anything, it was Axis's invasion of Earth. They had no reason to remain hidden and every reason to throw their lot in with Haman. And while most of the heavy lifting of fighting Axis falls to the AEUG and Karaba during ZZ, the EFF does show up in force (sporting shiny new GM IIIs, to boot) in the final episodes. Given that no Zeon remnants show up in CCA, I always took that as an indication that a revived EFF made a clean sweep of the Earth Sphere this time, and that there weren't any Principality or Axis forces left. Granted, it's certainly possible that a small group somewhere kept their head down and managed to hold out, but certainly nothing like the numbers and equipment we see in Unicorn. I mean, Jesus, the Sleeves have their own asteroid city in Unicorn. If that was a thing in CCA, why the hell was Char based out of a Federation colony instead?

edited 1st Jul '16 5:15:02 PM by NativeJovian

I mean, I do personally agree that Marida is just there to go "Oh look a Plu Clone, remember those from ZZ?" But I mean my read was that there were plenty of veteran pilots in Second Neo-Zeon War (either disaffected AEUG or Zeon diehards), it's just that they weren't relevant to the plot. Since Unicorn is, relatively speaking, a smaller scale conflict (in essence an insurgency) spread out over a longer period of time, we can get to know more pilots as principle characters.

To me the only kit the Sleeves/Remnants have (besides the blatant MSX pandering in episode 3/4) is the Kyshatriya and Shambloo. The Geara Zulu is just a marginal upgrade on the Geara Doga, and the Sinanju was captured from Anaheim. I think they did a decently good job showing that this is an asymmetrical conflict; that the only reason the Sleeves have a chance is because the EFSF is not (and does not want to go) on a full war footing.

I think that it's helpful to think of NZW 1 as the One Year War 2.0, a massive resurgence of Zeon as a political and military presence that ended in them splintering into a bunch of scattered but very resilient factions. Except that it was an even bigger deal than the One Year War, because they had even more ludicrously powerful technology and actually won before self-destructing. That's a serious recipe for a powerful but diffuse lingering presence all across the Earth Sphere - the Zeon remnants who'd been holding on since the One Year War just had to go back to doing what they'd always done, but with bigger guns, more troops, and a greater faith in their cause.

Char's Sweetwater faction makes most sense as one of multiple splinter factions that rose to prominence as the heirs to Zeon - he's an important but highly divisive political figure who rallied a small fleet of supporters for a mad quest to relive the glory days of his youth. Making a serious effort to rally a proper organisation, drawing together all the scattered remnants of Haman's empire, is completely antithetical to his character - he simply wants enough firepower on his side to grab and deploy a superweapon and lure out Amuro. His lack of interest in ensuring a technological advantage is best exemplified by him leaking the Sazabi's plans so Londo Bell could develop the Nu Gundam.

Frontal, on the other hand, is literally built to create consensus. His entire job is to be a figurehead for everyone who believes in spacenoid independence to rally around. That means carefully developing ties with other groups and building up his faction's arsenal from the shattered remains of Neo Zeon. He's not the kind of guy who'll just go 'fuck it' and make with the extinction of all life on Earth before gathering all the firepower and talent he can.

It's very easy to imagine that people like Angelo and the Garencieres crew were just in the wrong part of the Earth Sphere, and Char was just too impatient to bring them in before putting the Axis drop in motion. In fact, given how self-sabotaging he was being at that point, I wonder if he even had much interest in bringing in talent. Quess was very much a recruitment of opportunity, for instance.

The problem is that pretty much every Neo Zeon pilot we see other than Char and Rezin is young and inexperienced. We see things like a Neo Zeon mook bouncing off a chunk of asteroid after confusing it for a decoy and Gyunei accidentally shooting down a Geara Doga because he's not paying enough attention to what he's doing. There's literally nothing in CCA to suggest that Char's Neo Zeon was associated with any of the previous Zeon movements, while the Sleeves are mired in it.

As far as their upgrades go, that's admittedly more of a nitpick, but if you're going to do a story about a remnant, then they should be a remnant, not stronger than ever. 0083 had its share of problems, but it did a good job of showing that the Delaz fleet was suffering from being on their own for a few years — kitbashed stuff like the Dra-C and the fact that Cima's marines used machine guns rather than beam rifles, for example — even while they used the stolen GP-02 and the donated Neue Ziel. One or two high-powered mecha backed up by a bunch of outdated and poorly maintained suits (as contrasted against the Federation's latest and greatest high performance models) is a good balance of putting up a good fight vs showing that they're on their last legs.

I'd be more willing to take that interpretation if we ever actually saw any Axis remnants... but, outside of Unicorn (which has pretty much zero respect for established canon), we simply don't, ever. They don't appear, they're not mentioned, they aren't even speculated on. The main reason why so many Zeon remnants stick around for so long after the OYW was that the Federation barely scraped out a win in that conflict, while Axis was well and truly crushed (after coming really close to winning outright).

The simple fact is that Federation didn't actually defeat the Principality militarily — they put them on the defensive until the Zabis killed each other off and the Principality suffered a political collapse due to a leadership crisis. The new government of the suddenly reinstated Republic of Zeon realized how terrible the war was for their nation, so they sued for peace immediately, which the Federation was willing to grant because they were suffering a leadership crisis of their own after most of their highest ranking officers died during the last few weeks of the war. When individual Zeon military units decided (not entirely wrongly) that the people running the Republic were usurpers betraying the Zeonic Cause and refused to stand down, there wasn't much that the Republic leadership could actually do about it, and the Earth Federation was busy bringing the EFF into the mobile suit era while simultaneously recovering from the fact that more than half of its population had been wiped out, so they were generally willing to let sleeping dogs lie and didn't put much effort into rooting out Zeon remnants that were mostly just hiding in remote areas and growling at anyone who came too close.

When Axis (the largest by far of these Zeon remnant groups) showed back up in the middle of a Federation civil war and successfully maneuvered the two opposing factions of the EFF into virtually wiping each other out, they managed to accomplish quite a lot toward the military conquest of the Earth Sphere despite being a much smaller force than the Principality could field at its height and being burdened by low-quality mecha (the best the could produce at remote, makeshift manufacturing facilities) and generally unskilled pilots (who were largely rookies, compared to most EFF pilots being veterans of the One Year War and the frequent skirmishes since). This worked out pretty well for them despite attempts by the AEUG and Karaba to slow them down, until Axis collapsed into a civil war and largely decimated themselves much like the EFF had done. When the dust cleared and Haman emerged the victor, the EFF proper finally showed up — having spent all the time that the AEUG bought them in rearming itself after being devastated by the AEUG/Titans conflict — and murdered the hell out of anything with a mono-eye.

This time they had the means and the motivation to actually go through and clean house. Axis' reappearance had drawn the surviving Principality remnants out of hiding, which meant that the EFF could get rid of them at the same time as they got rid of the remaining Axis forces — not only did doing so finally put an end to a problem that had been plaguing the EFF for almost ten years by this point, it also provided some much-needed legitimacy for the Federation in the eyes of its citizens, who had just watched them tear themselves to pieces and then come within a hair's breadth of being conquered by a foreign power. The EFF needed to show that they were willing and able to shoot the hell out of anyone fighting under a Zeon flag in a way that they really didn't post-OYW, and none of the reasons that they let things slide in 0080 still existed in 0088.

edited 1st Jul '16 9:38:32 PM by NativeJovian

That's why next to no one in the sleeves were really vets of Char's Neo Zeon. What we see were the remains of Haman's Neo Zeon, which is why Mineva is even with them. Haman used the body double of Mineva while she sent the real one into hiding, the sleeves were a part of that.

Char's faction was almost completely new and he apparently spent years building it after Zeta, after the defunct plotline of ZZ was shelved for Glemy to do it from the inside of Haman's Zeon.

And I dont know on that whole 'Unicorn did not respect the source material' thing, it handled almost all the previously hanging threads left over from the other series. Primarily Mineva, the status of the Republic of Zeon, and set about more of the Federation Apathy that is seen in later UC gundam series as well as explained why.

edited 1st Jul '16 10:27:41 PM by Memers

So, this is really just an argument on whether or not we're willing to believe that there were enough of Haman's people left scattered around to form the Sleeves by 0096, right? Because this is one of those situations where my suspension of disbelief is still hanging on by a thread. Do the Sleeves have a little too much to work with for a ragtag fleet of leftovers? Probably. Were all these resources crammed in for the sake of selling toys, having neat cameos, and basically every other reason that isn't "it fit the narrative"? Almost certainly. But it doesn't really bother me enough that I can't overlook it- at least to focus on other concerns like, y'know, Laplace's Box.

I don't know really how to account for Char's pilots being inexperienced in CCA, though I think Iaculus' explanation is pretty decent. Like I said before though the sheer amount of Earth remnant Zeeks that sortie to attack Torrington Base in episode 4 is ridiculous.

I don't think the Geara Zulus are problematic because, like Char with Sweetwater, Full Frontal had a safe harbor with Palau, which finance their operations and acquisitions as well as hiding their fleet. And Anaheim, if nothing else, has been established as completely unscrupulous about who it designs and builds mobile suits for. (My fanon has been that Neo-Zeon designs as de jure earmarked for the Republic of Zeon.

At anyrate, Laplace's Box aside, I think Unicorn is a great wrap-up of Zeon as the antagonist faction because it essentially has the last scion of the Zabis renounce political Zeon as a workable solution to solving the Earth Sphere's problems; you can also see that in Banagher's declaration at the end of episode 6, something to the effect of "I'm going to make things better for everyone! Not the Spacenoids, not the Earth Federation, for everyone!"

Now if they make an anime about fucking Mars Zeon after this, then yeah, they're dredging the bottom of the barrel.

edited 2nd Jul '16 6:54:47 AM by ScherzoPrime

Speaking of Unicorn, what does anyone think of what I wrote here three pages back?

I have always gotten the feeling UC Gundam was "Pro-Space" and "Pro-Newtype." (but not Newtypism) So I agree with you. From what I've heard of Late UC, the EF becomes utterly useless and ineffective anyway. Humanity is branching out and tying it to the old, dying planet is dumb.