Gundam / Tear Jerker

The entire Gundam franchise is full of moments that will have you reaching for the tissue box...

Note: All series under the "Subpages" list have separate Tear Jerker pages. Use those pages to add examples from those series.

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

Subpages

Series without their pages

Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack

There are at least two for this movie. The first is when Hathaway kills Chan for killing Quess when he was trying to save her and had pretty much succeeded. Chan was awesome and her death was sad indeed.
The biggest one is when Amuro dies trying to stop Axis from hitting Earth, and the Redshirt Grunts on both sides try to help. They succeed, but many lives are lost in the process, and Amuro (along with Char) disappeared (the record being that they're both KIA.
Quess's death. She was just a troubled girl from a dysfunctional family who got played like a piano by Char. All the bashing she gets doesn't help it either. Yoshiyuki Tomino himself agrees, so much so that he specifically used the fifth of the Gundam EVOLVE shorts to give Quess her own Revised Ending where instead of being tragically and needlessly killed, Amuro is able to reason with her and she leaves the battlefield to save Hathaway.
Kayra Su's death. She was being held hostage by Gyunei in an attempt to defeat Amuro in his Nu Gundam after a battle that resulted in her mobile suit being destroyed but her being capture in the escape. Gyunei warned Amuro not to try anything funny, as he was holding Kayra in the palm of his mobile suit hand, but Amuro mistakenly let loose his fin funnels as a diversion to try stop Gyunei. Gyunei clearly sees what Amuro is doing and hurls Kayra's body into space, blaming Amuro for her death. After Amuro kills Gyunei in the resulting fight, he recovers Kayra's body and brings it aboard the Ra Cailum while shouting at Astionage Medoz (the ship's mechanic and Kayra's lover) to not look, and poor Astonage understandably bawls. What makes the whole scene worse is that Kayra whispered to Astonage that she loved him before launching (which he didn't hear, sadly), and then Astonage dies just minutes after her body is returned, in an explosion outside the hangars. What makes Kayra's death so tragic is how easily avoidable it was — Amuro wasn't actually trying to cause a diversion when he released the fin funnels, he was fully complying with Gyunei's demands to disarm and had every intention of surrendering in exchange for Gyunei sparing Kayra's life. But since the fin funnels were so new and so different from the funnels he was familiar with, Gyunei assumed they were just radiator plates and that Amuro was trying to trick him, leading him to jump the gun and kill Kayra. Not that things would have ended much better had Amuro actually been captured, mind, but there's a good chance Kayra at least would had survived.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team

The death of Ginias Sahalin]]. More than the death itself, his exchange with his sister Aina, where he mentions how their mother walked out on them and Aina asks him if he designed the Apsalus as a sort of metallic womb to replace their Missing Mom.
The scene in Episode 8 of 08th MS Team, during Shiro Amada's proving grounds recon mission which would serve the purpose of proving he was not a traitor. He ended the mission firing a bazooka into a Zaku cockpit, killing the pilot inside, who had previously been established as a conscientious and more-or-less friendly person. Even though both she and Shiro were forced into the situation due to extenuating circumstances, it was the despair on Shiro's face before he fired the bazooka that was the real hit: due to his growing relationship with Aina Sahalin and his understanding that one's side was not related to one's humanity, he had promised himself that he wouldn't kill anyone. In the end, he found himself personally pulling the trigger, betraying the promise he had made, and all to end the life of someone who really didn't deserve it.

Gundam 0080

The final episode, when Bernie dies trying to save the colony from a nuke that's already been stopped, fighting against his romantic interest Christina without either of them knowing it, and almost manages to win the duel despite being hopelessly outclassed piloting a repaired and poorly armed Zaku against her new Super Prototype Gundam, with his death unfolding right in front of Al, a boy who had looked up to him like a kid brother. Then there's Bernie's last video, and the new school ceremony—the whole of episode 6, in short.

After War Gundam X

Jamil's reunion with Lucille, albeit through Tiffa.
When Tiffa gets kidnapped by someone from the SRA, Garrod literally loses it. He does get better afterward though.
When Garrod finally rescues Tiffa from the clutches of the SRA and helping Paula get back at them for their attack on Satellicon in yet another Moment of Awesome.
Nichola going calmly towards his death, fuelling Lancerow's Heel–Face Turn.
Roybea's visit to the tombstone of the girl who gave him his Gundam.
Witz's conflict with his family.

MS IGLOO

Both the first and second series of this are filled with these. The first has one at the end of practically every episode, as test pilot after test pilot is lost, their accomplishments being in vain, with Zeon sinking further and further into defeat. The kicker comes in the final episode, wherein, at the end, Oliver, Monica, and the rest of the Oggo recruits seemingly die in a Last Stand against far greater numbered Federation forces. Thankfully, however, simply put, they don't. Oliver succeeded in making a CMOA out of it, nonetheless. He made the enemies think he's Char!
MS IGLOO 2, however, has so far dished these up in the same manner with no respite, and it's made worse by just how bad the Federation's situation is, at least in the first two episodes. Barbarry's futile last stand against an unaccounted Zaku and Hermann's out-of-the-blue and ignoble death mere moments after exacting revenge against his nemesis - quite freshly in the wake of the former telling his major that he collected the dog tags of as many fallen comrades as he could to make them live on in his memory, and also in the wake of him lamenting yet again that he was the only one who survived, and in the wake of the latter telling his tank driver that he has neither home nor family to return to - has made this series downright depressing, with some claiming that it's on V Gundam's level in that department.

Gundam Narrative

Rita's fate. Foresees the colony drop on Sydney and warns people about it, saving a lot of lives. Then she and her Newtype friends agree to lie to everyone that only Rita is a powerful Newtype and the other two are much weaker than they actually are, resulting in her being dragged away by the Newtype Labs for some Playing with Syringes, ultimately ending up with her becoming the Phenex' Haunted Technology. A further dose of tears is administered at the end that Rita saw this chain of events coming all along but went along with it anyway because this was the only way she could get herself and her friends in a position to stop Zoltan.
Zoltan Akkanen, continuing the tradition of unfortunate Cyber-Newtypes. Made even worse by him fighting not because of brainwashing, but because all the suffering he went through only to be declared as a failure sent him off the deep end so badly that he genuinely believes humanity deserves destruction. Even at the end, when he's pushing the Neo Zeong so hard that he's literally bleeding out of every orifice, he refuses to stop. Jonah is forced to put him down, with Zoltan flashing a genuinely happy grin when he sees the incoming death blow.
The revelation that the uplifting ending of Unicorn ended up accomplishing nothing in the end. Mineva revealed the truth of Laplace's Box to humanity, without any bias for either side, exhorting it as a message of hope for humanity to look forward to their future... and literally nobody cared. Humanity just shrugged and went back to business as usual. Made even worse by the additional revelation that the psycoframe, the miraculous technology that saved so many lives in Char's Counterattack, Unicorn and now Narrative, has been declared Things Man Was Not Meant to Know by the Federation and put under lock and key because humanity is not ready. Humanity was unknowingly on the threshold of The Singularity but rejected it out of fear of the unknown. And as we see in chronologically subsequent works, the potential in humanity Banagher came to believe in died with him and his friends.
The ending song of the movie, with the lyrics pretty much spelling out that by this point in time, the Universal Century is just too broken to ever fix. Too much pain, too much destruction, too much unresolved past grievances between the various groups for things to ever get better, to the point where the singer outright asks if there's any hope left in this world.

Other AU Works

As unlikely as it may seem, the PS4 game Gundam Breaker 3 throws up one of these without warning. There's a computer virus spreading all over the place, and one of the victims is actually Info-chan, the cute robot helping out a cranky old lady running the Local Hangout arcade - and she's gone batshit, trashing all the machines and mocking the heroine's A-Cup Angst. The resident Gunpla scientist says outright that she may have to be reformatted, but the old lady says she'd have to relearn her job from scratch - and then she actually says "I'll kill you, and then myself". That's the part when you realise that the old lady is going through the equivalent of learning that your most loyal pet and lifelong companion has to be put down.

Tear Jerker / Gundam

Subpages

Series without their pages

Previous

Index

Next

Tear Jerker / Gundam

Edit Locked

Subpages

Series without their pages

Previous

Index

Next