It's a Gundam thread!

It's done.

It is, but Episode 20 isn't there.

Interview with Yukata Izubuchi, which has these gems:

edited 17th Jul '16 7:05:42 AM by HallowHawk

A Gundam fanbook showing what Gundam ladies female Japanese fans admire most.

edited 18th Jul '16 3:41:31 AM by Nikkolas

How did Cima get so high?

Finally got a chance to look at those previews that were posted last page.

On GBF Try: animation looks good, mecha design is interesting, but it looks to be more of the same in terms of "spam special attacks to victory". Plus more inexplicable harem around Sekai. Meh. I'll watch it, but I'm not especially excited about it.

On IBO season two: I'll comment on that on in the IBO thread rather than having that discussion here.

I'll ask, which are you more looking forward to?

Definitely IBO. GBF Try is very much okay but not great; I'll watch it but I'm not super excited about it. IBO, on the other hand, is freaking fantastic and would be the best Gundam in ten years if not for the existence of the original GBF.

Okay this is probably clear bias speaking because of my love for IBO but I totally agree with you there.

Izubuchiiiiiiiiii

The Gundam Movie trilogy is being put up on gundam.info's youtube channel for 6 weeks.

Most and Least relatable Gundam Heroes.

Domon being on the Most list is...questionable. Shiro is a good choice for #1, though.

Also I agree with the article that Heero isn't easy to relate to. Good thing that wasn't what he was there for.

Setsuna should replace Kira, though, or expand the Least list.

edited 22nd Jul '16 10:51:18 PM by Nikkolas

Eh? Its not even a poll... just some random person's opinion, worthless.

Pretty striking bias towards 90s(-ish) series, too. Kira might be annoyingly perfect, but at least he's in a series that emphasizes characterization— Banagher has a lot of the same issues but is in a show that replaces dialogue with platitudes. And Heero is the most human of his archetype

Kira? Perfect?! Have we watched the same show? He's very skilled, but in no way would I ever call him perfect. During SEED, he became practically obsessive of making sure he could protect the Archangel to the point where he was only a shell of his former self. And during SEED Destiny, he questions if he's doing the right thing and admits that he doesn't know what else to do.

Kira's certainly far from perfect, but I think there's a case to be made that the narrative treats him as such even as it reveals his flaws. Seed and Destiny very clearly expects the audience to root for Kira, even when he's doing stupid shit. (It's basically the same thing I get annoyed about regarding UC shows treating Zeon more sympathetically even while they're being evil bastards.) The attitude the story takes is "you should approve of his actions because he's doing the best he can, even if he's only causing more problems in the end". Nevermind the fact that everyone else is also only doing what they think is best (even if they're rather more catastrophically wrong than Kira ever is), the story is very forgiving of Kira and not so much of anyone else.

Maybe it's just me being dense, but I never saw such a bias. I just saw how the characters interacted on and off the battlefield. Then again, I generally take shows at face value.

In the original SEED no, it was as critical on him as it was on everyone else. Destiny however very much so and a tiny bit in the SEED Remaster with the infamous change.

I dunno. Destiny wasn't exactly portraying Kira in a good light (especially in 28) until it was clear he was right that Durandal was up to something, and Shinn had embraced his hate to the point of being irrational.

The only hiccup after that was the story not really seeming to realize that Requiem was kind of also his fault.

Basically, Kira and the Three Ships Alluance's role in Destiny is a tale of two halves. In the first half, they're a bunch of hot-headed, self-righteous idiots who respond to a complex, murky situation with maximum aggression, and manage to make it even messier. In the second half, they're the solar system's wise, sensible benefactors, the only voices of reason in a world gone mad.

There's a couple of problems with this, from a narrative perspective. First off, there's no connective tissue. First, they're idiots, then they're heroes, with not transitional period or acknowledgement of their mistakes. The impression the audience has of them being self-righteous fools isn't gently scraped away, we're just supposed to understand that these smug dimwits are our heroes now. It makes it much harder for them to gain the positive reaction that we're clearly supposed to now have to them.

Second, the revised TSA is just too good, in every regard. They're too virtuous, removing the complexities that had made the central conflict of the show interesting and turning it into a simple tale of saints forcibly educating the misguided. They're also too skilled and powerful, removing much of the tension from a show that was already dangerously low on it thanks to the incompetence of the Earth Federation. What should have been (and was hyped as) an even, no-holds-barred smackdown between the two mightiest forces in the solar system turned into another one-sided stomp. When you have a faction of noble, virtuous people who solve problems through violence, that violence should at least be exciting.

What version of SEED Destiny were you watching? Because what I saw was the Archangel staying under everyone's radar after the attempted assassination of Lacus Clyne until Cagalli asked Kira to help her get ORB out of the conflict. If she hadn't, then they'd have likely continued to stay out of everyone's way as they gathered information on what was going on until the first Destroy shows up.

I thought it was kind of interesting how despite Kira being arguably the most powerful character in the setting it wasn't all that helpful when you aren't willing to do anything drastic and the enemy is someone you can't shoot in the face.

For all of Kira's grunt disabling he fails at just about every objective until the battle of Orb, and even then he mostly lucks out that they get Orb back because Zaft conviniently killed anyone opposing Cagalli.

It was the ORB intervention and what followed that was the problem. The Second Bloody Valentine War began in mysterious circumstances, and took place between an Earth Federation that had gone maximum fascist and opened with attempted genocide, and a ZAFT that had a decent casus belli (the attempted genocide, plus earlier acts of aggression by the EA), and had shown itself to be markedly less prone to cackling evil, but seemed to have a mad-on for the TSA for... reasons. It was, in short, the sort of blender that you absolutely did not want to stick your dick into, until you had a solid grasp of the situation and whether ZAFT were friend or foe.

Cue Kira charging in, antagonising both sides, and making the battlefield even more dangerous and chaotic because his sister was upset. You can argue that that's a psychologically plausible move, but you can't argue that it's a good or smart one, and it casts him in a decidedly antagonistic light that makes it more difficult to accept his abrupt switch to being entirely wise and righteous in his use of force later on.

The Second Bloody Valentine War began when ZAFT forces murdered tens of million of people on Earth and then landed troops in the affected areas without the Earth Alliance's permission while blaming everything on terrorists but offering no proof that this was so. The Earth Alliance, believing things had picked back up where they had left off at the end of the First Bloody Valentine War (ie, both sides enacting their Final Solutions), responded in kind.

Neither side was being saints, there, but ZAFT was clearly the one that restarted the hostilities, not OMNI.

Regarding Kira, I disagree that the show portrays him as being an idiot and then suddenly doing the exact right thing. The thing with Kira and co is that, being effectively an independent power beholden to no one, they're free to act on behalf of what they see as the greater good, rather than in order to advance any one faction's national interest. His attitude the whole time is "stop fighting, you morons!" — it's just that for the first half of the show, he can't make it stick, while in the second half he can. The show's pretty clear that Kira's always trying to do the right thing, it's just that for a while his efforts don't amount to much.

Antagonizing both sides is what Kira did in Seed and it turned out to be the right call. Naturally he'd do the same thing here, without waiting for both sides to turn genocidal so he can feel like he's maximumly morally justified because why let more people die in the meantime. He's not as effective as in Seed because they're forces are diminished since Freedom might be the most powerful mobile suit, but Kira also has no Justice Strike Buster and a squad of Astray's for backup anymore, just Cagalli who's an average pilot and a critical asset, and a one eyed Andy in a grunt suit. But even still he either tries to snip the war in the bud right away or risk waiting for death rays to start flying.

Genocide isn't what Durandal is actually after though, and Kira doesn't seem to realize that for awhile, so his actions ended up being not as critical as he thought.

Still though, Kira's intervention at sea did save more lives in the long run, even if nobody really seems to care because they value Heine over thousand's of faceless Orb guys. Kira's even hindering himself in the long run by doing this, because his life would have been much eaiser if he'd just allowed Yuna and the EA loyalists or the Minerva crew (or both) to die.

The Break the World incident was caused by a renegade Coordinator faction whose backers we never discover. Furthermore, ZAFT has (and happily shows) video footage of its troops trying to fight the terrorists and save the world, only to be hampered by EA forces. Even as omniscient viewers, we can only suspect Durandal of having a hand in it, and it being a genuinely unsanctioned act that he simply turned to his advantage remains a perfectly valid theory.

The nuking of the PLANTs, meanwhile, is an explicit EA action that took place before their ultimatum to the Coordinators had expired, giving them no legal grounds for an attack, let alone genocide. Their actions were totally indefensible in a way that ZAFT's during and after Break the World weren't.

Sure, we the viewers know that ZAFT was fighting to stop the Junis 7 drop, and Logos knows because they had troops there, but as far as anyone else knows (the not-Logos parts of the Earth Alliance included), ZAFT pilots in ZAFT mobile suits dropped a colony on them, then ZAFT started invading Earth. ZAFT claims that both a) those guys who dropped the colony totally weren't with us, honest, and b) we're only here to provide humanitarian aid, we promise — but it's hard to blame anyone for not believing them (video evidence or not).