Old post draft is OLD. (Also LONG.)
I wrote this like a year ago as a kind of celebration because I'd finished the entire Universal Century. Except that I hadn't finished the entire UC - there was still aaaaaaall the manga left, and Unicorn had just come out. And now there's still aaaaaall the manga left, and I'm saving Gundam Unicorn for when it's all finished, because I do not have the patience to wait... what, half a year? between each installment.
So, without further delay. In timeline-chronological order. Beware the Cuts: There Be Spoilers Beyond. And I still boggle over how wordy I got.
Char's Counterattack was rushed, weird, and all over the place. Char's desire to do a colony drop just seemed to come out of nowhere. I would give a lung for a ZZ remake with the original plan for Char and Neo-Zeon/Axis included. Overall, I gotta say that even though I like Char more than Zechs, Zechs's storyline felt quite a bit better executed than Char's. All those radical shifts in goals/ideology/general mindset between series didn't do him any good. I mean, he'd already lost me when he flew into a rage over Mineva Zabi's wellbeing in Zeta Gundam, and just when I thought I'd gotten a grasp on his new approach to life and the universe... CCA happens. And wanting Lalah as his mother figure? What the wut?
That said, I liked that they took some time out to explain the workings of funnels and the psychoframe, and I think it would have done the preceding series good if this had happened a little sooner. MSG was good with that sort of stuff, I felt, but Zeta seemed to just dump all this crazy new tech on us without bothering with any explanation whatsoever. I can only assume a psychoframe of some kind is what allowed for Camille's stunt in the final battle of Zeta? And Psycho Gundam's effect on Four? Of course, everything we learned about the psychoframe in CCA turned surreal again before the end, but that's just what happens when you hand stuff like that over to newtypes. I LOVE NEWTYPES. Holy crap, each new installment just goes and makes them better. Sure, there are some leaps in the logic of it sometimes, but I love the concepts behind them so much.
CCA also had a bunch of interesting characters, and I am a sucker for that kind of endings. I just can't help it. *TEARY-EYED* And to top it all off, Gundam's small VA pool will never stop being amusing. Hi Trowa! Hi multiple Duo-grunts! And yay, Quatre's back again. Astonaige and Anna Hanna (the blond mechanic/jill-of-all-trades with the ponytail who's been around since Zeta - yeah, I know, I had to get her name from the gundam wiki too) are still there. And look, it's Cameron Bloom! Aww, he's pretty cool. I wonder where Beltorchika is supposed to have gone, though. Probably got tired of Amuro's lingering bouts of teenager-ness. Which is a good thing too, because the Gundam Love Curse is at full force again. :(
You know, whatever whackiness he may get up to, I really love Gyunei just for this: "When people like the captain [i.e. Char] get angry, they start destroying colonies." And you're there to make sure that doesn't happen? How, by getting him to drop asteroids instead? XD Oh, and he finally cleared up that whole thing about Char liking little girls. I kept wondering where that meme came from. (Because let's face it guys, it's just not true. The youngest girl he ever kissed was Lalah, who really was not that young - and besides, he was barely older than her at the time.)
I honestly would have liked to learn more about Gyunei. He was interesting. And Chan. She was nice. And Rezin the Snarktastic. And... you get the idea.
CCA marks the definitive end of the Earth Federation vs Republic of Zeon conflict. After that point in time, all the new enemies are no longer Zeon-offshoots, but completely new would-be space empires. Which is not a bad thing, but Gundam F91 suffered from having too little time to flesh out the new situation, and while Victory Gundam was set so far into the future that connecting back to the near-forgotten Zeon era would have been pointless, I would have liked just a tad more emphasis on the historical perspective of the Earth-Space conflict, for old time's sake. Gundam's narrator is usually pretty good at that, but Victory's was disappointingly vague.
The first thing that stood out to me about the new enemies was that both times, the bad guys' MS looked so different from the Zeon's. The Cosmo Babylonia of F91 had really creepy heads like gass masks; the Zanscare's in Victory looked like humanoid bugs. It was pretty cool. :D They had very different Weapons of Mass Destruction in the finale too. No more colony drops, but terrifying swarms of Bugs (F91) and a collosal mind-control machine called the Angel Halo (Victory). Very cool. Sadly, they have also abandoned the time-honoured tradition of mayhem and mania on the moon - but not the one about holding cells being completely and utterly ineffective. I can deal. XD
Regarding UC Gundam as a whole: woah, there really is a misplaced princess from every halfway ambtitious country in gundam, isn't there? (I hope those royals have insurance.) Not to mention a lot of bad parenting. More on that in a bit. They also love their redheads, and Cecile/Cecily/Cecilia is apparently the most popular girls' name in the universe. (You know, like Catherine is in GW.)
Gundam F91 was also rushed and weird, but less so than CCA. Because it was so short, I don't have much to comment on. Yay, though, for Captain Leahlee (who cares that the real captain was Cosmo, he was an idiot) and her ability to have lesbian vibes with every other female character she meets. And Cecily was so pretty. I think this could have been a really interesting series if it hadn't been cut down into a movie.
And the creative team behind Victory Gundam seemed to think so too, because I noticed that they re-used the "let's throw in a whole bunch of pre-teens plus one actual baby" approach. Why the baby? Urgh. @___@
More on the bad parenting now. Victory has more of it than all the other series so far combined. Seriously, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE? If it wasn't for the fact that they so obviously DO care about their son, and he for them, I would have been glad for Uso that both of his parents died before the end credits rolled. "Oh, I'm so glad and proud that you ended up fighting for your life and killing people almost daily AT THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. And you seem to have coped with our sudden and completely irresponsible departure just fine! See honey, I knew we didn't have to worry about leaving him all alone in our little cabin in the wilderness, let alone the fact that we didn't even explain where we were going, what we'd be doing, or when we'd be back. He's gotten so tall!" The moms and dads from Hiland were probably even worse. What the hell kind of parent TAKES THEIR PRETEEN CHILDREN ALONG WITH THEM when they go out playing guerilla fighter? Leaving them behind is the better solution. At least Odelo, Warren and Suzy's respective folks have the excuse of being dead. Queen Maria, of all people, was probably the most responsible one. At least she left Shakti in the care of others. (Nevermind what happened once they found each other back.) But we never did get an answer about what happened to Shakti's adoptive parents, did we?
I sometimes come across people who complain that the adults in Harry Potter are all incompetent, irresponsible idiots and that nothing can get done by anyone but the kids. I never felt that way about HP. I did feel that way about Victory, from the first to the last episode. @_@
Okay, had to get that off my chest. Next, uhm... Well. I've always been told Victory would be completely and utterly depressing. I had formed mental images of a cast that had to be replenished every ten episodes because everybody kept dieing. Of a protagonist that went through so many horrors and injustices that he was reduced to a wreck of a human being by the end of the show - if he survived at all. And... it wasn't anything like that?
I mean, sure. The Shrike Team might as well have been called the Sacrificial Babe Squad, but they died so quickly you didn't even have time to get attached to them. The League Militaire (the good guys) relied far, FAR too much on a group of children who had yet to reach puberty, but if the effect was supposed to be painful drama instead of exiting adventure, it was kind of ruined by how ridiculously capable and invincible they all were. (Seriously, only one of the nine children died - one of the two oldest. And while he was planting death flags left and right all throughout the show, he didn't even kick the bucket until the finale, which almost doesn't count.) The only really painful things, were Uso's parents, and Mabeth/Marbet/Marvet's future babydaddy dieing just a few episodes after they'd gotten married. (Which was pretty epic, by the way. They used the ceremony as a decoy to escape the prison camp they were being held in, and Oliver's "Would you bear my child?" and Marbet's "Okay, sure." came in the middle of a shootout.)
Mostly it was just a fun ride. They did a good job capturing the sense of frenzie and chaos of Uso's first battles, which is an accomplishment considering he already knew how to pilot an MS pretty much perfectly. (Oh, hey, mom and dad left an MS flight simulator in the basement, what a coincidence! And such compelling evidence that they weren't training him to be a good little newtype soldier from the day he was born.) Unlike Zeta, the other UC show known as dark and depressing, this show wasn't filled with idiots, assholes, Paptimus Scirocco or THAT FUCKING WONG LEE. Zanscare's uniforms were hot spiffy and the worldbuilding made me drool; underwater cities, people who refer to normal cars and bikes and subways as things from "the old era" because they're all using hovercars and segway-like mini-hovers, a giant inhabitated solar battery... And Haro was adorable.
The obligatory 1 MS battle per episode got old pretty fast, but then I've been oversaturating myself with MS battles lately. The only problem I really had with Victory is that it has a huge ensemble cast, but none of the characters really stood out to me. Well, none except two: Chronicle Asher, the masked villain (why did he keep the mask on in space when he only started wearing it because of the dust on Earth?), and Odelo Henrik - the boy who died. Chronicle is an Honourable Enemy type character, and I really should have known better than to fall for another villain, but he's just so likeable! Odelo is an orphaned ruffian, a little prickly on the surface but with a deliciously soft, nakama-focused centre. He's basically a male, more tackle-happy version of Elle Viano from Gundam ZZ.
Curse their saw-it-coming-from-a-mile-away deaths! Odelo's was the first time Victory made me tear up. He was so young. He and Elischa were so cute together, and Warren and Suzy, and Tomache and all the others are going to miss him so much. At least he died with his parents' presence there, letting him know he'd be reunited with his mom and dad, and that they loved him and were proud of him. *sniffle* And oh Chronicle! How did you end up in such a miserable situation that all of the sudden? You'd done nothing to deserve that except fighting for a guillotine-happy dictatorship. There was something soul-crushing about his reaching and crying for his dead sister in mid-fall and then just - WHAM - slamming to death. Shakti's comment when Chronicle approached about "kindness wrapped in enmity" just killed me. Gundam finales are allowed to go crazy with the tragedy, but let me just mourn my deplorable track record of characters to get attached to. *head desk*
On a lighter note, the Gundam Love Curse is working overtime in Victory, with one notable exception. Notable because... after the battle that should have killed them for her daring to make plans for building a cottage on Earth and him asking if there'll be a room for him there, these two suddenly emerge and fly off into the clouds on a flying motorbike. Bwuh?
So, without further delay. In timeline-chronological order. Beware the Cuts: There Be Spoilers Beyond. And I still boggle over how wordy I got.
Char's Counterattack was rushed, weird, and all over the place. Char's desire to do a colony drop just seemed to come out of nowhere. I would give a lung for a ZZ remake with the original plan for Char and Neo-Zeon/Axis included. Overall, I gotta say that even though I like Char more than Zechs, Zechs's storyline felt quite a bit better executed than Char's. All those radical shifts in goals/ideology/general mindset between series didn't do him any good. I mean, he'd already lost me when he flew into a rage over Mineva Zabi's wellbeing in Zeta Gundam, and just when I thought I'd gotten a grasp on his new approach to life and the universe... CCA happens. And wanting Lalah as his mother figure? What the wut?
That said, I liked that they took some time out to explain the workings of funnels and the psychoframe, and I think it would have done the preceding series good if this had happened a little sooner. MSG was good with that sort of stuff, I felt, but Zeta seemed to just dump all this crazy new tech on us without bothering with any explanation whatsoever. I can only assume a psychoframe of some kind is what allowed for Camille's stunt in the final battle of Zeta? And Psycho Gundam's effect on Four? Of course, everything we learned about the psychoframe in CCA turned surreal again before the end, but that's just what happens when you hand stuff like that over to newtypes. I LOVE NEWTYPES. Holy crap, each new installment just goes and makes them better. Sure, there are some leaps in the logic of it sometimes, but I love the concepts behind them so much.
CCA also had a bunch of interesting characters, and I am a sucker for that kind of endings. I just can't help it. *TEARY-EYED* And to top it all off, Gundam's small VA pool will never stop being amusing. Hi Trowa! Hi multiple Duo-grunts! And yay, Quatre's back again. Astonaige and Anna Hanna (the blond mechanic/jill-of-all-trades with the ponytail who's been around since Zeta - yeah, I know, I had to get her name from the gundam wiki too) are still there. And look, it's Cameron Bloom! Aww, he's pretty cool. I wonder where Beltorchika is supposed to have gone, though. Probably got tired of Amuro's lingering bouts of teenager-ness. Which is a good thing too, because the Gundam Love Curse is at full force again. :(
You know, whatever whackiness he may get up to, I really love Gyunei just for this: "When people like the captain [i.e. Char] get angry, they start destroying colonies." And you're there to make sure that doesn't happen? How, by getting him to drop asteroids instead? XD Oh, and he finally cleared up that whole thing about Char liking little girls. I kept wondering where that meme came from. (Because let's face it guys, it's just not true. The youngest girl he ever kissed was Lalah, who really was not that young - and besides, he was barely older than her at the time.)
I honestly would have liked to learn more about Gyunei. He was interesting. And Chan. She was nice. And Rezin the Snarktastic. And... you get the idea.
CCA marks the definitive end of the Earth Federation vs Republic of Zeon conflict. After that point in time, all the new enemies are no longer Zeon-offshoots, but completely new would-be space empires. Which is not a bad thing, but Gundam F91 suffered from having too little time to flesh out the new situation, and while Victory Gundam was set so far into the future that connecting back to the near-forgotten Zeon era would have been pointless, I would have liked just a tad more emphasis on the historical perspective of the Earth-Space conflict, for old time's sake. Gundam's narrator is usually pretty good at that, but Victory's was disappointingly vague.
The first thing that stood out to me about the new enemies was that both times, the bad guys' MS looked so different from the Zeon's. The Cosmo Babylonia of F91 had really creepy heads like gass masks; the Zanscare's in Victory looked like humanoid bugs. It was pretty cool. :D They had very different Weapons of Mass Destruction in the finale too. No more colony drops, but terrifying swarms of Bugs (F91) and a collosal mind-control machine called the Angel Halo (Victory). Very cool. Sadly, they have also abandoned the time-honoured tradition of mayhem and mania on the moon - but not the one about holding cells being completely and utterly ineffective. I can deal. XD
Regarding UC Gundam as a whole: woah, there really is a misplaced princess from every halfway ambtitious country in gundam, isn't there? (I hope those royals have insurance.) Not to mention a lot of bad parenting. More on that in a bit. They also love their redheads, and Cecile/Cecily/Cecilia is apparently the most popular girls' name in the universe. (You know, like Catherine is in GW.)
Gundam F91 was also rushed and weird, but less so than CCA. Because it was so short, I don't have much to comment on. Yay, though, for Captain Leahlee (who cares that the real captain was Cosmo, he was an idiot) and her ability to have lesbian vibes with every other female character she meets. And Cecily was so pretty. I think this could have been a really interesting series if it hadn't been cut down into a movie.
And the creative team behind Victory Gundam seemed to think so too, because I noticed that they re-used the "let's throw in a whole bunch of pre-teens plus one actual baby" approach. Why the baby? Urgh. @___@
More on the bad parenting now. Victory has more of it than all the other series so far combined. Seriously, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE? If it wasn't for the fact that they so obviously DO care about their son, and he for them, I would have been glad for Uso that both of his parents died before the end credits rolled. "Oh, I'm so glad and proud that you ended up fighting for your life and killing people almost daily AT THIRTEEN YEARS OLD. And you seem to have coped with our sudden and completely irresponsible departure just fine! See honey, I knew we didn't have to worry about leaving him all alone in our little cabin in the wilderness, let alone the fact that we didn't even explain where we were going, what we'd be doing, or when we'd be back. He's gotten so tall!" The moms and dads from Hiland were probably even worse. What the hell kind of parent TAKES THEIR PRETEEN CHILDREN ALONG WITH THEM when they go out playing guerilla fighter? Leaving them behind is the better solution. At least Odelo, Warren and Suzy's respective folks have the excuse of being dead. Queen Maria, of all people, was probably the most responsible one. At least she left Shakti in the care of others. (Nevermind what happened once they found each other back.) But we never did get an answer about what happened to Shakti's adoptive parents, did we?
I sometimes come across people who complain that the adults in Harry Potter are all incompetent, irresponsible idiots and that nothing can get done by anyone but the kids. I never felt that way about HP. I did feel that way about Victory, from the first to the last episode. @_@
Okay, had to get that off my chest. Next, uhm... Well. I've always been told Victory would be completely and utterly depressing. I had formed mental images of a cast that had to be replenished every ten episodes because everybody kept dieing. Of a protagonist that went through so many horrors and injustices that he was reduced to a wreck of a human being by the end of the show - if he survived at all. And... it wasn't anything like that?
I mean, sure. The Shrike Team might as well have been called the Sacrificial Babe Squad, but they died so quickly you didn't even have time to get attached to them. The League Militaire (the good guys) relied far, FAR too much on a group of children who had yet to reach puberty, but if the effect was supposed to be painful drama instead of exiting adventure, it was kind of ruined by how ridiculously capable and invincible they all were. (Seriously, only one of the nine children died - one of the two oldest. And while he was planting death flags left and right all throughout the show, he didn't even kick the bucket until the finale, which almost doesn't count.) The only really painful things, were Uso's parents, and Mabeth/Marbet/Marvet's future babydaddy dieing just a few episodes after they'd gotten married. (Which was pretty epic, by the way. They used the ceremony as a decoy to escape the prison camp they were being held in, and Oliver's "Would you bear my child?" and Marbet's "Okay, sure." came in the middle of a shootout.)
Mostly it was just a fun ride. They did a good job capturing the sense of frenzie and chaos of Uso's first battles, which is an accomplishment considering he already knew how to pilot an MS pretty much perfectly. (Oh, hey, mom and dad left an MS flight simulator in the basement, what a coincidence! And such compelling evidence that they weren't training him to be a good little newtype soldier from the day he was born.) Unlike Zeta, the other UC show known as dark and depressing, this show wasn't filled with idiots, assholes, Paptimus Scirocco or THAT FUCKING WONG LEE. Zanscare's uniforms were hot spiffy and the worldbuilding made me drool; underwater cities, people who refer to normal cars and bikes and subways as things from "the old era" because they're all using hovercars and segway-like mini-hovers, a giant inhabitated solar battery... And Haro was adorable.
The obligatory 1 MS battle per episode got old pretty fast, but then I've been oversaturating myself with MS battles lately. The only problem I really had with Victory is that it has a huge ensemble cast, but none of the characters really stood out to me. Well, none except two: Chronicle Asher, the masked villain (why did he keep the mask on in space when he only started wearing it because of the dust on Earth?), and Odelo Henrik - the boy who died. Chronicle is an Honourable Enemy type character, and I really should have known better than to fall for another villain, but he's just so likeable! Odelo is an orphaned ruffian, a little prickly on the surface but with a deliciously soft, nakama-focused centre. He's basically a male, more tackle-happy version of Elle Viano from Gundam ZZ.
Curse their saw-it-coming-from-a-mile-away deaths! Odelo's was the first time Victory made me tear up. He was so young. He and Elischa were so cute together, and Warren and Suzy, and Tomache and all the others are going to miss him so much. At least he died with his parents' presence there, letting him know he'd be reunited with his mom and dad, and that they loved him and were proud of him. *sniffle* And oh Chronicle! How did you end up in such a miserable situation that all of the sudden? You'd done nothing to deserve that except fighting for a guillotine-happy dictatorship. There was something soul-crushing about his reaching and crying for his dead sister in mid-fall and then just - WHAM - slamming to death. Shakti's comment when Chronicle approached about "kindness wrapped in enmity" just killed me. Gundam finales are allowed to go crazy with the tragedy, but let me just mourn my deplorable track record of characters to get attached to. *head desk*
On a lighter note, the Gundam Love Curse is working overtime in Victory, with one notable exception. Notable because... after the battle that should have killed them for her daring to make plans for building a cottage on Earth and him asking if there'll be a room for him there, these two suddenly emerge and fly off into the clouds on a flying motorbike. Bwuh?