"Heavyarms really went Hawk Trowa on that thang" - Hayley breaking into the war crimes biz.
Hayley: "Really? A third member of the gang is a stoic man? You could put these boys in a room and three corners would immediately fill with sullen misery.
Me: "What about the fourth corner?"
Hayley: "Duo's
making out with Quatre there. They're having a great time."
"40 episodes in and we finally have a clear character motivation. Too bad it's just 'The Gundam made me do it.'" - Hayley on quality writing.
"Glad to see Duo's into women as well as a group of Italian men" - Hayley, less racist than everything about Quatre Raberba Winner
"Welcome to 'Whose Robot Is It Anyway?' where the plot is made up and the stakes don't matter." - Hayley, episode 49
This show's for the freaks so I'll get this point of order out of the way first: if you are someone who strongly identifies with Duo Maxwell, my DMs on bsky and Discord are open. Hayley and I would probably like to have a threesome with you.
Onto the review.
Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) was a sci-fi military drama struggling against the shackles of its super hero prison. New Mobile Report Gundam Wing (1995) is a super hero show struggling against the shackles of its sci-fi miltary drama prison. Our heroes can pull broken limbs back into place, shrug off 10m falls onto their heads and only take a month to recover from being in the centre of explosions. The RX-78-2 Gundam shrugged off bullets in order to showcase the dangers of new developments in beam weaponry, allowing Amuro to start off with a crutch which was useless by the end of his show. Now, unless the plot demands it the Gundams ignore everything thanks to their Gundainum Alloy From Outer Space. Mobile suit explosions, formerly so large and dangerous as to be a concern in their own right are now harmless, cool and frequent. Your average soldier piloting a Leo in this show is less threatening than even lone Death Army suits from G and those were meant to be disposable!
You can't have a superhero story without a team so let's talk about the Boys. Every since the original show Gundam has had a healthy contingent of women starting book clubs, mailing lists, magazines and (eventually) blogs to ship various men with each other. I already mentioned last time how G Gundam is catnip for bisexuals. Wing's boys, however, are clearly aiming for a younger female audience. Wing isn't for women, it's for girls. Our leads are the sort of boy band members a 12-16 year old girl will tear out of magazines and stick on her wall. We're here not for the carnal passion of Domon x Rain or the toxic desires your preferred Char ship brings to the table. We're after secret gifts from a dangerous boyfriend nobody must know about lest we both fall into peril. Rogues with hearts of gold who'll sweep in and whisk you away from your bad environment. Sullen boys whose hearts can only open to you. Rich boyfriends who meet your emotional needs. Somebody who you can look at and secretly think "I can fix him." Even our two adult men are about brooding, complicated pasts or being so damn in control that you'll go literally crazy for him.
Plenty of clips from this show do the broader Online Posting rounds. Heero tearing up a birthday invitation then threatening to murder the sender at the same time he wipes away her tears. Zechs declaring machineguns most not be used on a target followed immediately by an order to shoot down the target with that same machinegun. General Septem being dropped out of an airplane at a lethal height only for his actual death to be a perfect gunshot to the head in freefall. Relena, the girl whose invitation was torn earlier loudly callling to the open sea for Heero to kill her. When shown in isolation, these create a sense that Wing is a spectacularly insane show. The style of an Osamu Dezaki melodrama applied to the destination television franchise of Gundam. Unfortunately, it never fully commits to the bit. By the time Zechs has switched his motivations 6 times in the course of episode 16, the style tank is completely empty.
Gundam Wing is a deeply stupid show. To begin with that's a compliment. It's fun to see unambiguous heroes and villains who like to just Say Shit that sounds cool. Unfortunately the political drama begins. A more clever writer would use the ingredients we have here to make a statement on far right political infighting. You can make a Gundam Wing drinking game where you have to finish your glass every time a coup is staged. There's an endless succession of conspiracies, masterminds and allegiances are in perpetual flux. Most infurating of those is final villain Zechs Marquise but to talk about him I have to finally give a proper review of Char's Counterattack and my thesis on that film's antagonist.
Casval 'Char "Quattro rem Bajeena" Aznable' Deikun is a man-child. He begins the original show with a perfectly normal chip on his shoulder: the ruling Zabi family murdered his father as a ploy to seize power and he wants revenge. He plots and achieves the death of their youngest member, his ex-boyfriend Garma. Having achieved stage 1 of his plan there's... no stage 2. He flounders and flails and desperately does whatever he can to avoid the firing squad for most of the show. What initial skill advantages he had against Amuro early on are completely nullified and outdone as Amuro becomes significantly better at making war than Char. He loses his final robot to preprogrammed routine. He's so salty about this loss that he demands a fencing duel with Amuro. Amuro has never held a rapier before yet still wins the fight. One quick, beautiful debate later and Char takes the chance to kill the last remaining adult Zabi with the greatest headshot in history.
Char, now concealing his identity with the hilarious 4 Vaginas moniker tries to serve as a mentor throughout Zeta Gundam. He even has a character arc of his own. As the civil war wears on he refuses the call to use his public speaking skills, political fame and circumstances of his birth to fight the soft power fight the AEUG requires. Finally, his boss is assassinated. With no outs left, he finally steps up and absolutely kills it in parliament. Yet, he flees the halls of politics as quickly as he can. He's been steadily banged up more and more frequently as the war goes on. He's tired, worse equipped and frankly less skilled than some of the up and comers amongst both his allies and enemies. He rejected a position more useful for the cause to take another chance
at proving he's the heroic ace warrior he trumped himself as in the
previous war. By the final battle his ass is kicked by both the last remaining Titans officer and his neo-nazi ex-girlfriend.
So he hides. He hides for 47 episodes. Neo Zeon manages to mangle itself with in-fighting, weird experiments and sexist nepo-babies. The political situation is a complete disaster. The Federation has no leaders, only ghouls determined to hide their identities while they quietly allow genocides to occur. Dublin is wiped off the map. The aftermath of ZZ Gundam is the perfect time to make a re-debut in politics to thunderous applause. People are so tired of the killing that they're migrating to the backwater of Jupiter. It's the perfect time to begin a bold new campaign of peace, justice and reform!
What does Char do instead? He rebuilds the neo-nazis under his own banner, appeals to the Federation's worst tendencies and pays them to let him start dropping asteroids on Earth. He sends new technological specs to Amuro so they can have one last fight for realsies no take-backsies to decide who's the best at robot fights. He says whatever the hell he thinks is convenient in the moment. He says one of the most unhinged final lines in the history of fiction. He loses the fight like he was always going to. He's a tragic figure because there's the potential to actually be the sort of hero he wanted to be and people wanted. Instead, he's so damn insecure about being a man who fights good that he loses it all, including his life before he's even as old as I am right now.
What is Zechs Marquise's motivation? Initially, he seeks revenge against those in power who dismantled his home kingdom. Having achieved that, he seeks revenge against the pilot who bested him in combat before a hostage situation forced the guy to blow himself up (he got better). Suddenly he's an ally of the oppressed space colonies. Now he's a willing participant in a trial by combat. Now he's furious that his buddy Treize sentenced him to a trial by combat they both agreed to undergo. Now he's the commander of a new secret battleship. Now he's morosely in a bar like Char that one time. Now he's the leader of the latest colony-oriented coup. Now he's got a death ray. Now he's trying to drop asteroids on earth. Now he's thwarting the asteroids and the remains of the death ray ship in a fatal, sacrificial explosion (he gets better). Zechs Marquise is much like the rest of Wing's script.
Gundam Wing feels like a story written by a guy asked to write a Gundam so he just skims a Wikipedia article, the TV Tropes page and tries to remember what he heard his kids watching while he read stock reports and did the newspaper crosswords. Gundam has crazy women, so we'll make Lady Une so infatuated with Treize that she develops a split personality! Gundam has a corrupt federation so we'll introduce that then disregard the meaningful levers of power whenever convenient! Gundams are special so we'll give em... uhh looks up on TVtropes who usually makes special robots eccentric mad scientists? Yeah that'll do that's good enough. Gundam had some guys who mimicked Prussia and some others who mimicked Revolutionary France so we'll put some fancy European nobility outfits on. That's good enough, we've made the deadline. Let's go home and think about anything other than this anime bullshit.
What's infuriating about watching a show with writing this poor is that the action is also the weakest in the franchise so far. Every entry up to this point has taken care to convey an idea to its combat. The original is desperate flailing by underdogs and abandoned vets. Zeta is professional and cruel. ZZ is often absurd yet clearly puts thought into making ever silly situation believable in context of who's doiong what. CCA shows pilots at the height of their skill and strategy. F91 contrasts new technology and human spirit against smug nobility. Victory is an under-resourced, desperate struggle where dealing with a single mobile suit or battleship can take an entire episode. Even G Gundam, the silly kung-fu robot show is one long string of classic, effective pro-wrestling booking with a cathartic end every week.
Speaking of G, holy shit does Wing manage to outdo G in racism. No amount of Tequila Gundams or Mandala Gundams can compete with Quatre Raberba Winner. We're bringing back 19th century orientalism. The noble white man must lead his loyal, noble yet savage Arabs to victory. I love this sensitive twink to bits but yikes!
Wing has so many ideas it rushes through that it's worth mentioning the ones which are actually unique and interesting: the lies of Augmented Reality and the Automation of War. We've had plenty of cyber newtypes hit with the super science Bad Ideas Machines but we haven't seen something as interesting as the Zero System before. "Hey we made a computer which uses machine learning to predict combat faster than the human brain can, but it will often either show you too many possibilities and cause decision paralysis or convince you something is an enemy when other context outside the fight would make it clear it's not." In an age of generative large language models making up nonsense which politicians and businessmen then treat as truth, it's a haunting idea to load this into war machines. Same goes for the attempts at making fully automatic pilot systems. The mobile dolls easily identify robot targets, but they also start extrapolating that to the pilots inside. Therefore, anyone in a space suit is a threat. When operating in space. You know, where you need a space suit to live? Sadly, they're never fully realised and explored in the way they could. Treize's objections amount to automation making war an undignified experience. The issue with automating tools of death is you have no brain with agency capable of deciding to not use a weapon in the first place. That's too complicated an idea to flesh out for this show, so onto the pile it goes.
and yet
For the first time since the original show, we have a completely optimistic ending. Even G Gundam grants personal satisfaction for its leads but leaves with haunting questions about how corrupt, violent and destructive the Gundam Fight is for society, the planet and the places we live. Wing is a show which believes with all its heart that a better world is possible. Sometimes we must fight because the levers to power refuse to move the way they must. Deep down, people yearn for peace and when it is offered will gladly take it every time. There is not a shred of irony in this deeply stupid show, and I can respect it for that. Gundam Wing contains all the contradictions of Gundam as a franchise and of trying to tell a story about broader political forces while all agency belongs to a few with positions of hard, violent power.
It was the perfect show to introduce Americans to this franchise. Smarter than anything on television at the time, yet so bleedingly stupid as to be no threat to American hegemony.
There is an OVA sequel re-cut into a movie. Both are entitled Endless Waltz. Hayley was dead silent throughout the viewing. The design of the gundams are all retconned into something much cooler and harder to animate than the TV show. The two new songs White Reflection and Last Impression are bangers. There's an attempt to retcon the origins of the cast to try and imbue more meaning and theme. It's all so shallow and pointless that I'm not dignifying this with a separate post. The final shot of Heero is far less compelling and enjoyable than his final exchange with Relena in the show. Watch it if you must but you can play like 15 different Super Robot Wars games if you want to see Heero fire a big beam at a bunker that badly.
We started out Gundam Wing hooting and hollering. By the end we were begging for anything else from Gundam. Even returning to the One Year War would be a relief from this inane hell we created for ourselves.
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