Gundam Wing Lady Squee
For me, who was first introduced to Gundam Wing through fanfiction, it was a real shock to actually watch the series and realise that the female characters were actually
a) Present
b) Important to the plot (some more than others, but the same can be said for the male characters)
c) In possession of different personalities
d) Personalities which were not solely dependent on their “designated male”.
e) Heck, some of the women were more developed as characters than some of the men!
I fell for them all. Some more than others, but to a certain extent I appreciate every single Gundam Girl. So here is my love post. Warning: Image-heavy.
(And please, if you don’t like one or more of them, could you please save that for the quarter million webpages where you’d get a chorus of “Word!” if you said so? This is my squee. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harsh it.)
(Also, I didn't cap these myself. I found them somewhere - if I can remember where, I'll put it up.)
We start with Relena, because she’s awesome.
When we first met Relena, she was a sheltered schoolgirl. She found an unconscious boy on the beach, and was thrown into a completely different world.
Even that early on, she showed signs of who she would become.
It takes a special type of person to protect the guy who threatened to kill her.
Then her father died, and her world was turned upside down.
And the next time she was threatened with a gun, she gave him reasons not to fire.
Relena started speaking out against what she saw as unfair, and impressed the series’ resident Machiavellian mastermind.
She rebuilt her birth parents’ kingdom and started a school for future world leaders - all of them girls, for some reason.
When her country was invaded, she surrendered to protect the inhabitants. (Also, she actually lost her composure and snapped at Dorothy to stop it with the mindless flattering.)
Then they made her Queen of the World, and she surprised them by not acting like a proper puppet, but actually convinced the entire Romefeller Foundation of Stodgy Old Men to change their policies.
Then she went to space to stop her brother from blowing up the planet.
Then she took over her father’s job (but in a new government) and became a workaholic. We see her working on her birthday. Her sixteenth birthday.
Here is Relena right after elbowing a kidnapper out of the way to address the people in the Movie.
And here she follows a grand old Gundam tradition and slaps some sense into her captor.
We now continue with Lady/Colonel/Saint/Who knows Une.
Une doesn’t get as bad a portrayal in fic as the rest of the women. That’s because she’s hardly ever in any fic. I don’t get it. Here we have not one, not two but three personalities to play with!
There’s the Colonel, who’s brutal and tough and morally questionable, and a complete hardass. She’s capable of laying a tactically sound plan, manipulate the Gundam engineers into surrendering, and is not above ordering the attack on a civilian school. Yeah. I didn’t much like heras a person to begin with, although I thought she was a good character. She got even more fascinating, though.
Her other personality is what the fandom calls “Saint”. She’s sweet, soft-spoken, gentle, compassionate, and a very good diplomat who manages to get the Colonies on to her (read: OZ and Treize’s) side.
Then she got shot.
And was in a coma.
And woke up, saved Treize’s butt,
saw him get himself killed anyway, surrendered Earth, was forgiven by Relena for killing her (Relena’s) father,
and seemed pretty sane.
In the movie, she was in charge of the Preventers. Here, it seems like her personalities have fused - she’s till tactically and militarily clever, but she’s got her gentler personality’s people skills.
And let’s face it. The woman is drop dead gorgeous.
Continuing with the OZ ladies, here’s someone who’s short, dark and cute as a button - the one, the only Hilde Schbeiker.
Hilde didn’t get as much characterisation as many others. What we know about her is:
She’s a mobile suit pilot
She’s capable of changing her mind on the spot if something offends her morals
She ended up running her own scrapyard
She wasn’t afraid to risk herself to get important information to the Gundam Pilots
She likes the circus
She’s a right bundle of energy.
Moving on, we have the lovely and talented Lucretia Noin.
When we first met Noin, she was a mobile suit instructor.
She wasn’t very happy when her soldiers got killed.
And not when she underestimated her foe and got defeated, either.
She helped bring about a revolution, but wasn’t happy that it had to be so bloody.
So it fits that she began working for Relena (at Zechs’ request, but I think it suited her.)
Here Noin is rescuing Sally Po.
Noin was a good enough pilot that she managed to hold her own next to the Gundams in nothing but a Taurus suit (for comparison, the Gundams regularly cut through the Tauruses like butter).
She was working for the Preventers in the movie.
And then went off to terraform Mars.
Having finished with OZ, I think we’ll move on to Dorothy.
Sometimes I imagine the writer of Gundam Wing sitting there, thinking: “Hm, we need to do these episodes for the political part of the plot, but Relena has to be successful, and that doesn’t add much conflict - how to spice it up?” And wham bam, Dorothy Catalonia was added to the series.
Dorothy likes to fence. With fencing foils AND words.
She was the granddaughter of the leader of Romefeller, and an expert manipulator.
She went to space to observe the battle up close...
But still tried to stop Zechs when he went too far.
She mastered the Zero system.
And revealed that she actually hated war as well.
In the movie, she shamed the public into standing up to Mariemaia and Dekim’s army.
Sticking with the blondes, here’s Sally Po. (Who wasn't part of the Tarot deck, so she gets a different picture.)
Sally was an Alliance soldier
Who became a guerrilla leader
And travelled around collecting Gundams that had been left behind (no, really). (I kind of love that she was considered a big enough threat that her enemies held a briefing session specifically on her. )
She went to space and rammed a spaceship with another spaceship.
In the movie, she was a Preventer.
And infiltrated the enemy to rescue a bunch of hostages.
One of those hostages was Catherine Bloom.
Cathy is a circus performer, a knife thrower
and an acrobat/linedancer.
She teases emo pilots to get them to cheer up, makes soup
And will leap right into a two tonne death machine to punch someone in the face if they need it.
And remember, if you upset her adopted baby brother, she will cut you.
Only appearing in the movie, here’s Mariemaia Barton/Khushrenada, an eight-year-old would be world dictator.
Mariemaia held long, complicated, quite smug speeches while she was in charge
But learned to know fear (which I unfortunately don’t have a pic of, because her face was fantastic), and got shot saving Relena.
In the end, we see her in a wheelchair with Une at a gravesite - probably Treize’s.
Others
Relena’s (adopted) mother
Relena’s fanclub
Iria Winner
Sylvia Noventa, who told Heero “Bitch, please. If you wanna die, do it yourself - don’t ask me to shoot you just because you killed my grandfather. Coward.” Well, more or less.
And...that's it for now.
a) Present
b) Important to the plot (some more than others, but the same can be said for the male characters)
c) In possession of different personalities
d) Personalities which were not solely dependent on their “designated male”.
e) Heck, some of the women were more developed as characters than some of the men!
I fell for them all. Some more than others, but to a certain extent I appreciate every single Gundam Girl. So here is my love post. Warning: Image-heavy.
(And please, if you don’t like one or more of them, could you please save that for the quarter million webpages where you’d get a chorus of “Word!” if you said so? This is my squee. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harsh it.)
(Also, I didn't cap these myself. I found them somewhere - if I can remember where, I'll put it up.)
We start with Relena, because she’s awesome.
When we first met Relena, she was a sheltered schoolgirl. She found an unconscious boy on the beach, and was thrown into a completely different world.
Even that early on, she showed signs of who she would become.
It takes a special type of person to protect the guy who threatened to kill her.
Then her father died, and her world was turned upside down.
And the next time she was threatened with a gun, she gave him reasons not to fire.
Relena started speaking out against what she saw as unfair, and impressed the series’ resident Machiavellian mastermind.
She rebuilt her birth parents’ kingdom and started a school for future world leaders - all of them girls, for some reason.
When her country was invaded, she surrendered to protect the inhabitants. (Also, she actually lost her composure and snapped at Dorothy to stop it with the mindless flattering.)
Then they made her Queen of the World, and she surprised them by not acting like a proper puppet, but actually convinced the entire Romefeller Foundation of Stodgy Old Men to change their policies.
Then she went to space to stop her brother from blowing up the planet.
Then she took over her father’s job (but in a new government) and became a workaholic. We see her working on her birthday. Her sixteenth birthday.
Here is Relena right after elbowing a kidnapper out of the way to address the people in the Movie.
And here she follows a grand old Gundam tradition and slaps some sense into her captor.
We now continue with Lady/Colonel/Saint/Who knows Une.
Une doesn’t get as bad a portrayal in fic as the rest of the women. That’s because she’s hardly ever in any fic. I don’t get it. Here we have not one, not two but three personalities to play with!
There’s the Colonel, who’s brutal and tough and morally questionable, and a complete hardass. She’s capable of laying a tactically sound plan, manipulate the Gundam engineers into surrendering, and is not above ordering the attack on a civilian school. Yeah. I didn’t much like heras a person to begin with, although I thought she was a good character. She got even more fascinating, though.
Her other personality is what the fandom calls “Saint”. She’s sweet, soft-spoken, gentle, compassionate, and a very good diplomat who manages to get the Colonies on to her (read: OZ and Treize’s) side.
Then she got shot.
And was in a coma.
And woke up, saved Treize’s butt,
saw him get himself killed anyway, surrendered Earth, was forgiven by Relena for killing her (Relena’s) father,
and seemed pretty sane.
In the movie, she was in charge of the Preventers. Here, it seems like her personalities have fused - she’s till tactically and militarily clever, but she’s got her gentler personality’s people skills.
And let’s face it. The woman is drop dead gorgeous.
Continuing with the OZ ladies, here’s someone who’s short, dark and cute as a button - the one, the only Hilde Schbeiker.
Hilde didn’t get as much characterisation as many others. What we know about her is:
She’s a mobile suit pilot
She’s capable of changing her mind on the spot if something offends her morals
She ended up running her own scrapyard
She wasn’t afraid to risk herself to get important information to the Gundam Pilots
She likes the circus
She’s a right bundle of energy.
Moving on, we have the lovely and talented Lucretia Noin.
When we first met Noin, she was a mobile suit instructor.
She wasn’t very happy when her soldiers got killed.
And not when she underestimated her foe and got defeated, either.
She helped bring about a revolution, but wasn’t happy that it had to be so bloody.
So it fits that she began working for Relena (at Zechs’ request, but I think it suited her.)
Here Noin is rescuing Sally Po.
Noin was a good enough pilot that she managed to hold her own next to the Gundams in nothing but a Taurus suit (for comparison, the Gundams regularly cut through the Tauruses like butter).
She was working for the Preventers in the movie.
And then went off to terraform Mars.
Having finished with OZ, I think we’ll move on to Dorothy.
Sometimes I imagine the writer of Gundam Wing sitting there, thinking: “Hm, we need to do these episodes for the political part of the plot, but Relena has to be successful, and that doesn’t add much conflict - how to spice it up?” And wham bam, Dorothy Catalonia was added to the series.
Dorothy likes to fence. With fencing foils AND words.
She was the granddaughter of the leader of Romefeller, and an expert manipulator.
She went to space to observe the battle up close...
But still tried to stop Zechs when he went too far.
She mastered the Zero system.
And revealed that she actually hated war as well.
In the movie, she shamed the public into standing up to Mariemaia and Dekim’s army.
Sticking with the blondes, here’s Sally Po. (Who wasn't part of the Tarot deck, so she gets a different picture.)
Sally was an Alliance soldier
Who became a guerrilla leader
And travelled around collecting Gundams that had been left behind (no, really). (I kind of love that she was considered a big enough threat that her enemies held a briefing session specifically on her. )
She went to space and rammed a spaceship with another spaceship.
In the movie, she was a Preventer.
And infiltrated the enemy to rescue a bunch of hostages.
One of those hostages was Catherine Bloom.
Cathy is a circus performer, a knife thrower
and an acrobat/linedancer.
She teases emo pilots to get them to cheer up, makes soup
And will leap right into a two tonne death machine to punch someone in the face if they need it.
And remember, if you upset her adopted baby brother, she will cut you.
Only appearing in the movie, here’s Mariemaia Barton/Khushrenada, an eight-year-old would be world dictator.
Mariemaia held long, complicated, quite smug speeches while she was in charge
But learned to know fear (which I unfortunately don’t have a pic of, because her face was fantastic), and got shot saving Relena.
In the end, we see her in a wheelchair with Une at a gravesite - probably Treize’s.
Others
Relena’s (adopted) mother
Relena’s fanclub
Iria Winner
Sylvia Noventa, who told Heero “Bitch, please. If you wanna die, do it yourself - don’t ask me to shoot you just because you killed my grandfather. Coward.” Well, more or less.
And...that's it for now.