"Mmmmmrrrrrrgh" - Hayley's reaction to the above frame
It took a grassroots fandom of women starting book clubs, mailing lists, magazines and conventions to start the ball rolling, but by the time Mobile Suit Gundam was re-cut into a movie trilogy and sponsourship moved from Clover's die-cast metal toys to Bandai's plastic model kits, Gundam had become a pop culture icon. There's a curious gap in this cultural awareness though:
If you just randomly mention "Gundam" to a baby boomer or Gen X they'll quote lines from the original show, dance to Sassotaru Char and bring up the Black Tri-stars' Jet Stream Attack. The original show is what they're thinking of.
If you talk about what Gundam is to a Gundam Fan though, their brain is immediately conjuring up Zeta Gundam.
From the opening seconds of the intro you know things are different now. The silly heroic themesong's been replaced by a cover of a Neil Sedaka song with questionable legality. The shading is far more intricate. What were once laboured motions of clunky robots are replaced with sleek, high thrust maneuvers. The show proper abandons its previous disco and funk for a synth-assisted orchestra that feels more James Band than most James Bond films do.
Gundam is now prestige television.
We're still going to explore high concept ideas and big picture themes but we're no longer the little guy punching up at executives. We are the machine and we can damn well afford to do so however we want.
It's Universal Century 0087. Zeon lost the war and was forcibly renamed to the Republic of Zeon as pretty much a vassal state. Their war machine wasn't so much as dismantled as it was... repurposed. Zeon troops are simply part of the Federation military and the Federation military was already kinda shitty. Since the Federation itself has no interest in addressing the material concerns of the working class out in space, protests start flaring up. How does the Federation try to resolve this?
By arming the cops and letting them become the SS.
If the original Gundam was about World War 2, then Zeta is about a combination of Operation Gladio, Clean Wehrmacht narratives and the suppression of the Japanese Student Protests. Shit sucks. People are angry. The seeming potential for humanity to evolve past conflict has been hijacked and exploited by weapons manufacturers and secret police looking for new methods of torture.
It's the perfect conditions for a new autistic teen boy to hop in the brand new Gundam MkII! While Amuro was introverted and slightly catty, Kamille is loud and insecure. A lot of Zeta Gundam plays around with the audience looking for patterns and similarities to the original show and having this guy shout and punch his way through his scenes for a large chunk of the show's a nice way to contrast how things have changed. Gundam is a media franchise that is in conversation with itself a lot and that starts as early as its first sequel.
Take Jerid Messa. A core part of the original show's success is the cool, mysterious rival Char Aznable. Jerid is a man who thinks he's this show's Char. He's not. Partly because the real Char is busy having a ton of character development but mostly because Jerid is a complete loser. He sticks around all show by virtue of simply not dying but he never succeeds. When I watched this as a teenage boy I had no idea how this doofus could keep making girlfriends. As a woman in my 30s I know that if I were to date Jerid I could totally fix him. At least give me a Baund Doc before Kamille runs a beam sabre through me.
On that note, I think it's interesting how radically the character designs for members of the Titans, this show's new dumb SS wannabe group are. In the previous show, there were three types of Zeon Guy:
Fresh-faced younger recuit who will die by the end of the episode through their commanders' incompetence and our heroes' resilience.
Grizzled aging NCOs and low ranking COs who are powerless to stop their superiors' heinous acts or poor strategy and try to keep their men alive as long as possible. The Gundam will kill them in two or three episodes' time.
Horribly emaciated rich assholes at the top of the chain. If you're lucky, their ship will take a beam rifle to the bridge in 10 episodes' time. If you're really lucky they'll be assassinated by one of their contemporaries in another pathetic grab for power.
There's some Nazi in there but also a fair bit of Prussian Aristocracy to the Zeon command. The titans meanwhile all come off as far more modern far right figures.
Jamaican as the Charlie Kirk type of squish faced suit-wearing dipshit
Bask Om as the sort of rusted-on GOP rep who just wants to nuke Iran before he's too old to issue the order himself
Paptimus Scirocco as the trendy younger guy who thinks he's clever because he read Mencius Moldbug blathering about The Cathedral
Jerid Messa as the sort of guy who thinks he's hot shit because he listens to Andrew Tate and The Joe Rogan Show
Yazan Gable as the sort of guy who listened to Rogan once then immediately hit the gym, optimised his meal macros and is more ready than anyone else to start the killing.
This is a show about Reaction. Reactionary movements, characters flying from emotion to emotion and an approach to writing as much built on eliciting audience reactions as it is telling a fully coherent narrative.
Zeta Gundam is a soap opera.
There's plenty of big picture themes and ideas, but it often makes little sense on a weekly basis. So long as characters have a reason to argue, a robot fight to force them to get their shit together a bit and a closing shot of new flagship the Argama cruising through space/toward the sunset, then that's a good episode of television. If you watch this show week to week and talk about it with your friends or letters to a magazine, it's an addictive experience. If you watch it in a row, the cracks form.
Why does Hamann Karn attempt the dumbest, worst assassination attempt in history? Why do we keep bringing back tragic psychic weapon experiments long past their narrative value? Why is Katz Kobayashi ever allowed near any vehicle? Because they make you point and shout and grip the edge of your seat when the gang has to clean those messes up. When your action looks this great and your actors are working this hard to sell the often deranged thesis statements their characters espouse, it makes for an experience that sticks with you.
I think this helps us to understand the character of Reccoa as well. Gundam as a franchise is usually written by men, about men and has... complications with writing women. In the original show it feels like a sign of the times. For a show written in 1985 it starts to grate. Yet, I still read Reccoa as less of a "women are bitches and liars and dumb" moment and more "Reccoa is an adrenaline junkie who may also have had some weird psychic shit hit her when she first ran into Scirocco". In her own way she's emblematic of the show itself: often fun in the moment but wonky in the big picture.
This may seem like an unsatisfactory note to end on but as well know Zeta Gundam's ending is famously ti
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