"I'm glad Lockon and Allelujah are seeing eye to eye." - Hayley on debilitating injuries.
"Everything evolves to crab." - Hayley on the Alvatore
"Guess it's always at least a foursome with these two." - Hayley on Allelujah x Marie
"I'd really missed Gundam making me horny." - Hayley
After 100 episodes and a movie script, Gundam has returned from its time in exile.
Gundam is a real television show again.
Previous director Mitsuo Fukuda has left some marks on the franchise (The end credits themes bleed into the closing moments of most episodes, there's a "two characters on an island" ep in spirit, the final opening credits sequence features naked women) but what I talked about back in Gundam X has come to fruition. Episodes consistently stand on their own as a great watch while also frequently being in service of a multi-part storyline. Action scenes are filled with creative storyboarding instead of recycled footage obviously padding the runtime. The sound design and voice acting are once again top notch across the board. Even when some Industrial Light & Magic sounds resurface late into the show, they're always remixed to make something fresh rather than the "Hey look we're the Empire from Star Wars" beam rifles of the Atlantic Federation. Kenji Kawai (yeah the Ghost in the Shell composer) crafted a soundtrack loaded up with male choirs, brass and rock beats which gives the show this imposing, mysterious character which slowly morphs into something more heroic and inspirational. I wouldn't call the overall aesthetic package Peak Sunrise (the shift to high definition resolutions simply requires cleaner lineart than your Escaflownes and the like boasted) but there's a real sense of rebirth. After 7 years Gundam has finally entered the 21st century.
I'll get a couple of comparisons to previous entries out of the way before I give a quick summary of the setting and bang on about themes. As mentioned, director Seiji Mizushima (Full Metal Alchemist (2003) uses a couple of Cosmic Era directorial flourishes and I could swear he's doing it to flex on Fukuda. The naked women in OP4 signify the broader emotional shifts as the show starts screaming at you to reject a violence born from toxic assumptions of what men should be. The "two characters on an island" episode is a major shift in the relationships between several characters with an existing history and arguably the culmination of Sergei's character arc. It's about so much more than saying "maybe we aren't so different after all!" before Albi the Racist Dragon ceases to be Racist. Ending themes bleeding into the closing scene was one of the better elements of the Cosmic Era but the use of it in 00 blows the technique's past out of the water. It doesn't matter that I've seen this show and everything in the last two episodes screams at you that it's coming, Yuna Ito wailing "I love you, I trust you" acapaella as Anew Returner is incinerated by a beam rifle to the face is the sort of melodrama Gundam is often at its strongest for not shying away from. I cried for like 5 minutes after and Anew's one of the weaker characters in the show.
So besides Gundam 00's immediate predecessor series, the biggest comparison is Gundam Wing. Some of this will be detailed more when I discuss what this show's actually saying, but you can definitely argue that this is a show made by people who watched that nonsense, got as mad about how aimless and stupid it is and started writing notes on how to do it better. As cool as the gundams of Wing are, they're conceptual messes. You have a high mobility strategic weapon in the Wing. A stealth unint with the Deathscythe. An AoE-oriented artillery unit in the Heavyarms that's weirdly specc'd towards individual targets. A gundam built almost entirely for desert warfare in the sandrock and a... stretchy arm + flamethrower unit in the Shen-long? Diegetic reasons for why they were built aside, it's a set of concepts that are really hard to piece together in interesting group scenarios. By contrast, our four gundams have a much cleaner lineup: Exia for close combat, Dynames for precision ranged support and collateral damage reduction, Kyrios for high mobility high & run operations and Virtue for both heavy artillery and (secretly) revoking admin permissions as a safeguard against treason. They're also all expected to cooperate from the get-go so there's actual reasons to make creative team fights. Gundam Wing took like 44 goddamn episodes to realise that maybe a show with a superhero team should feature teamwork. As I wrote the other month, Wing has no idea what it really wants its world to be, what should be at stake or what it should actually say about anything. Gundam 00 knows exactly what it wants to be from the first second to the last.
As the third Hayley quote up above suggests, there's a lot of really attractive people in this show. This isn't because of the various times well toned men are seen shirtless, Wang Liu Mei's constant outfit changes or how low cut Sumeragi's tops are. This isn't like Gundam Wing either where the boys are such outrageous charicatures that you want to put their poster up on your wall and fantasise what a chaste night out with a mysterious, dangerous yet caring boy could feel like. The lead gundam boys are so appealing because they're fleshed out, believable people with real damage motivating them. Setsuna's a small bundle of like a billion traumas from his time as a groomed child soldier whose fixation with the robot that spared him once has led to him taking up the gender identity of Gundam. Lockon Stratos puts on airs as a calm, confident man to hide just how much fury and hatred he's locking away. Allelujah's a good boy trying his best to overcome the fucked up torturous experiments of his past and consistently has some of the most vulnerable, humanising moments in the show. Tieria Erde spends 70% of his screen time as cunty as it's possible for someone who dresses in clothes their grandma bought for them from an op shop and the remaining 30% pining for Lockon. These are people where jokey rotten girl shipping conversations quickly lead to talking about how daily life in a relationship with any of them would actually work out. There's material which really captures the imagination here!
That's before we even get started on how great the supporting cast is. Take the first man seen in the show, AEU Ace Patrick Colasour. He's your classic cocky loudmouthed pilot who can't keep his hands off any woman he sees. He's immediately humiliated in the first fight of the show and never bags a win afterward. After a couple of comedic fumbles, his fourth or so appearance is reporting to his new commanding officer Kate Mannequin, who immediately sees through his nonsense and beats the shit out of him. A more cowardly show wouldn't write this guy the way Gundam 00 does, as he immediately falls head over heels with a such a cool woman and even takes a shot at asking her out. As we quickly learn, while Patrick Colasour is a rather stupid labrador, Kati Mannequin very much has a thing for puppyboys. It's a comic relief relationship but there's always this sincere tenderness between them that makes every appearance a treat.
Patrick's womanising barely qualifies as horny compared to Graham Aker. If Setsuna's gender is Gundam, then Gundam is Graham's sexuality. From the second his eyes fall on the Exia, he cannot talk about a gundam without dropping a double entendre. There's more depth to it as we go along but I can't stress enough how fun it is to see a guy enter the room and just start talking about how badly he waqnts to fellate a GN Drive. He's such a ridiculous, charismatic guy that it's inspired a new rule for me: if your supporting cast is weird enough that Sweatson Stero could fit in without a problem, then you've made.
I haven't even touched the surface of the more serious supporting characters. This is a show where absolutely everyone's either processing past traumas or creating new ones for others in ways that add texture to the world and are compelling to watch. For some the drama to utility as a world builder is more skewed. Somebody like Sergei Smirnov's slow burn journey to becoming the father he'd always let his career get in the way of on the drama end. Saji Crossroad and Louise Halvey futz around to no consequence (until suddenly there's every consequence) in order to show how daily life looks in the year 2307 AD on the other end of the spectrum. Saji's sister, investigative journalist Kinue bridges the two with some classic conspiracy thriller beats. She digs too far, too fast, too unsupported and the second she hops in a car with Ali Al-Saachez you can't help but point and shout "no! Don't enter the room with the monster!"
I'm over 1500 words into this and if I keep approaching things from this angle we'll have 5000 just going over character arcs. Let's switch it up and give the quick setting and plot rundown.
It's 2307 AD (no fancy calendars this time!) and the planet's fossil fuel supplies are finally run down. The last couple of decades have seen a bunch of wars while a massive pair of solar powered rings around the planet were built, power lines coming through three space elevators. Geopolitics have settled into a tripolar state with the three main powers being the AEU (Europe, Africa by technicality), The Union (Both American continents, Japan and tragically Australia) and the Humanity Reformation League (Russia, China, the rest of Southeast Asia). There's an uneasy tension going into a new weapons demonstration by the AEU when suddenly a group of four gundams (it's not the name of an operating system thank goodness) and a spaceship suddenly smash up a ton of military bases then play a video where a man dead for 200 years declares they're part of an organisation called Celestial Being determined to intervene in all conflicts until war is abolished. Over the course of their operations and interactions with the rest of the world, it turns out Celestial Being has some moles looking to hijack the movement for their own purposes. This comes to a head when CB's actions result in the most unified global actions taken since probably the United Nations' founding as everyone wants to take down Celestial Being. CB manage to just scrape by, assassinating the chief mole only for it to turn out this was all a plan by his retainer to steal CB's quantum computer and install himself as dictator for life of the newly united planet Earth.
There's a lot of influence from Isaac Asimov's Foundation books here. The ancient super genius who sets plans in motions and seems to guide people from beyond the grave. The unexpected deviations and questions about where to go once the script's been thrown out. I wouldn't call this a knockoff or anything but it's just nice to see Gundam taking influence from something else for once. With a few exceptions (G Gundam is obviously influenced by Wuxia films, Professional Wrestling and the Akira Kurosawa classic Rashomon), Gundam has had this tendency to be influenced mostly by... Gundam. At its best this tendency helps Gundam resist cynical trend chasing (I love Macross 7 to bits but it's far more a mid-90s ass anime than G, Wing or X ever were) but at its worst you get the sort of stagnation the 90s OVAs and the Cosmic Era suffer from. There is something funny about the cutting edge of 21st century Gundam looking back to a series from the early 1950s for influence but let's chalk this up to how Mizushima and friends decided to adapt the sort of creative decisions that led to Zeon's Prussian cosplay back in the original.
Unlike Gundam Wing, where the initial premise is an excuse for weird superhero boys to fuck around while 15 different coups happen every fortnight, Gundam 00 is actually interested in exploring the geopolitics of its conceit. There's the sorts of episodes you'd expect from a good sci-fi military drama at this point like "how will Celestial Being overpower/out-think another military this week?" or "whose turn is it to confront the ghosts of their past today?". More importantly, there's episodes dedicated to looking at how other states are able to try manipulating Celestial Being's presence to their own ends. A nation declares it's breaking away from The Union in a gambit built to either goad Celestial Being into weakening Union presence (thus furthering the breakaway) or to crush their own military in a way that allows internal political forces to quell a nationalist movement and strengthen ties to the Union. Others deal with questions of how mercenary units can circumvent international justice or how CB can be a useful blunt instrument to point at terror networks, allowing for armed interventions in contexts which would otherwise be considered an invasion and thus diplomatic nightmare and tip the world's balance of power towards a security dilemma.
For a show from 2007 and thus smack bang in the invasion and demolition of Iraq, there's a remarkable amount of care in its portrayal of the Middle East. The presence of Jihad stems not from some mythical clash of incompatible civilisations, but Material causes. It's convenient for mercenaries to use the rhetoric when grooming locals into becoming soldiers. It provides excuses for conservatives afraid to engage with other powers, even when local resource exports are now extremely throttled. Kurgis and Azadistan are fake nations and the conquering of the former by the latter is an arbitrary moment in history but the scars and pain are still very much real. There's a restoration of a monarchy in Azadistan and it's treated as fake as any new Shah or Iran would be.
Have I mentioned the clothes? Characters are constantly changing outfits because that's a thing normal people do. It's the sort of artistic touch you don't usually see in anime because it means additional design work and can interfere with production pipelines, but its presence here may be a greater flex than how damn creative most fight scenes are.
I mentioned the gundams earlier but the mechanical designs are so great in this show. The Union has focused on trying to turn the F-15 into a robot as hard as they can. The HRL rely on sheer brute strength with pilot suits trying to showcase advanced visual aid technology but instead as dehumanising as any Scopedog pilot from VOTOMS. The AEU, ever the domain of compromise, simply try to merge the two concepts in a way that gives the Enact some gorgeous wide hips. All these predate lines of horrible, slow, clunky wrecks. They're used to denote the nations left behind, too poor for a real military and you can almost smell the disel fumes coming off the poor bastards. By contrast the Gundams are sleek, clean and feel almost otherworldly.
Celestial Being's ship the Ptolemaios is also the most inspired ship since White Base. See, most spaceships in sci-fi anime are taking influence from the Yamato in, well, Space Battleship Yamato. Thing is, the Yamato in real life was a product of factional infighting among Imperial Japanese Navy command with the dumbest faction coming out on top. It had a main gun so large that no factory could manufacture the rounds for the damn thing. It was given to Yamamoto Isoroku as an insult after his faction, firmly in favour of more aircraft carriers lost the debate. So, most sci-fi ships including most Gundam warships have a big laser gun and it's very cool. Not so with White Base! Much like how the show was about World War 2, its main ship represents an understanding of what actually was the future of warfare by trading a big gun out for more mobile suit deployment ramps and bulkhead landing capabilities. The Potlemaios is the first lead ship in a Gundam since the original to understand this. Celestial Being are about maintaining stealth, with their strikes swift and sudden. It doesn't need more than a few missile bays and points to attach emergency guns in a pinch when spotted.
You may have noticed that with one exception, there is a pattern to this piece so far. I've only been talking about Season 1. Yes, this is the second Sunrise anime to use the Code Geass: Lelouche of the Rebellion model where a 50 episode show is split across two seasons to allow an easier production schedule and give time for the suits to demand alterations based on focus testing and other bullshit. This is the part people have watched Gundam 00 have been waiting for, when I eviscerate Season 2 for its simpler politics, weird campy climax, shameless Amuro Ray meta jokes and just being a rehash of Zeta Gundam.
Too bad fuckers, I'm here to tell you Season 2 is good. More than good, it's great!
Believe me, I went into it expecting to spend 25 episodes doing a Zeta Gundam rifftrax with Hayley. Instead, we sat there affixed to the screen losing our minds. Hayley because she was watching great television, me because I don't think I've ever turned around on a show on a rewatch like I have here.
First, complaints that the show's structure changes. It doesn't! You get less "nations jockeying to manipulate Celestial Being and each other" storylines because that world order has been dismantled! That's what season 1 was building towards! Those same sorts of episodes exist in Season 2, but they're now about how minority groups interact with a unipolar world! There's episodes all about questioning what the role of the military should be, who should oversee it and when (if ever) the use of force is appropriate! The Middle East goes from a victim of colonial violence seeking to kill it via neglect into an entire region and millions of people a single state can treat as a rounding error on a balance sheet and directly slaughter with impunity! Season 1 kept asking questions of how to build a better world and what it should look like. Season 2 is about what happens when the wrong answer is chosen and makes its own damn statements on what needs to be done.
Can we talk about how much the A-LAWS suck and how perfect the ways they suck are? The world unifies into a single federation, appoints a peacekeeping taskforce which immediately tries to become the SS and their uniform is the greatest shitty fascist garb I've ever seen. The Titans were happy to just do SS cosplay. The A-LAWS wear these atrocious suits which try to be a trench coat but are too cheap to actually buy the coats. Everyone looks like shit in these fits and have to pretend they're the adults in the room. There's the usual sort of men of violence you'd expect up the top of the organisation, but Andrei Smirnov is a special sort of guy who sucks. He's your coworker who's never once second-guessed himself and balks every time you suggest he might need therapy for his daddy issues. He keeps trying to convince Louise to quit the group not because she's the heir to a weapons manufacturer whose quest for revenge will leave her life cruel and empty, but because he just wants to see her in pretty dresses. These dipshits are run by a guy trying to live a life on Bushido principles in the goddamn 24th century. They take the horrors of automated warfare from Gundam Wing and immediately start mowing down civilians. Billy Katagiri joins them just to get back at his ex. Zeta Gundam loved its random acts of cruelty but the Titans would never come up with something as both funny and petty as building two of the exact same death laser, then assume after the first one blows up that they'll totally get away without needing to revise the defense.
I will complain about Celestial Being's fits though. Sumeragi's new haircut is worse. More importantly, they have uniforms now. It was possibly something demanded to streamline production but it feels like the clothing has been laid out in the wrong order. You'd expect season 1, when the organisation hasn't been hijacked and forced to go rogue to be when they have uniforms, then switch to individual casual clothes in season 2. Instead, it's almost like a retcon. Yeah man, Tieria always wore a uniform with purple shoulder pads. Green blouse with mauve cardigan? Never heard of it!
As mentioned earlier, Season 2 is deeply interested in the role of militaries and why people join them. Previous Gundam shows tended to focus on grunts and NCOs. Conscripts forced by circumstance, people too desperate to do anything else with their lives or motivated by snap acts of horror to sign up and grab a gun. Gundam 00 spends a lot more time on commissioned officers. People who've made an informed decision and believe their work will be able to reduce harm. What's beautiful is that their ideals were all, within the text itself, incorrect. Sumeragi fucked up once and joined a cult. Graham fucked up once and became a horny adrenaline junky mulching his guts into mincemeat from the G forces. Billy became a misogynist. Sergei's pursuit of broader civic duty cost him his family. Hercury's liberal mindedness got 60,000 civilians killed because he assumed fascists won't just do that if you inconvenience them. The only military officer who really achieves their goal by the end of this show is Kati Mannequin, and that's because she abandons her previous ideals in order to become a whisteblower while gunning down the facists before they restart the killing.
We need to talk about Saji Crossroad. He too sucks but that's the point. He was a harmless character mainly there to show what's happening to common folk. Well, that world is gone. His girlfriend's family were shot up by a rogue Celestial Being agent and now she's accepting weird experiments while she pilots a death robot. Saji won't stop whinging that the world isn't as simple as he remembers. He keeps yearning for a past that not only cannot be returned to, but that we saw throughout season 1 was cruel as fuck. He was just too sheltered and privileged to see those parts. That's really the core of it, Saji's character arc is all about coming to terms with just how privileged he is, and how his quest to return to the simplicity of his youth only makes things worse for everyone else around him. Tieria practically screams "check your privilege" at one point. Saji Crossroad represents the common folk and in doing so asks us how willing we are to change. Do we too prioritise our own comforts and absence of tension over a presence of justice? He's a really haunting lil dipshit.
I love Allelujah and Soma Peries/Marie Parfacy. While the start of their romance is a bit silly (oops this girl got a headache while trying to beat the shit out of me and remember she used to be a sad disabled girl), the ebb and flow of the two/four of them goes places. When a traumatic incident causes Marie to snap fully back into her militaristic persona, Allelujah's arc becomes about accepting the totality of her, rather than trying to force her to be something he remembered from long ago. By the end of the show, he's accepted her agency and she in turn gives back. I forgot to mention how fucking funny Soma being given the one pink mobile suit in season 1 is. She gets The Girl Robot(tm) while being the smallest, angriest and most serious character in the whole damn show. It's less funny when the GN Archer is also femme-coded, but at least the colours are the opposite of the Arios' on the colour wheel.
Alright I've eaten around the bush enough, it's time to talk about the show's endgame and Quantum Brainwaves. Quantum Brainwaves are the Gundam 00 version of Newtype shenanigans. The key difference is how they're acquired. In the Universal Century (and Gundam X which should've been a sequel to Victory yadda yadda) they're something some people are born with and develop while growing up in low gravity environments. While the original show suggests that all of humanity will develop such attributes and thus intrinsically understand each other to the point conflicts end, all the sequels dismantle that hope. Hell, by Gundam X the argument is "stop expecting conflict to end through genetics and start ending them by actually giving a shit about others!" Things are different in Gundam 00 though: Quantum Brainwaves are an observed phenomenon in some people, but all further development is artificial. Aeolia Schenberg predicted they'd be discovered and enhanced in people through his own technology, but we see that HRL has stumbled into the concept on their own in the 200 years since his death. The ultimate endpoint of bodies developing support for Quantum Brainwaves is to become an Innovator, boasting greatly enhanced lifespans, healing, physical abilities and all round better bodies for living in deep space for long periods. Celestial Being was hijacked by a line of test tube babies Aeolia invented as agents for the project and some of the mistakenly believed this made them a superior form of human. Nope, they're just here to facilitate bringing everyone into that state.
Over the course of season 2, Setsuna becomes an Innovator. This isn't something at all hinted at in season 1. I don't even think it was happening in season 1. There's nothing inherently special about Setsuna's genes which triggered the transformation; he just happened to be in the 00 Gundam's cockpit a lot. I genuinely think it would've happened to anybody put in that position. The process is furthered along all the more when the lead villain, Ribbons Almark arranges for Setsuna to be shot with the gun that gives you cancer. That only helped the process along. Every system contains the seeds of its destruction and all that. What makes this so distinct from the old Newtype model is that this is no longer a product of birthright. It's something that can happen to anybody, and that probably should happen to everybody. The Innovator process is less eugenics and more a vaccination against our own cruelty and lack of empathy.
This all leads to what is so delightful about Gundam 00. It's a show deeply interested in questions about how to build a better world, then ends with starting to build that world. This isn't like Gundam X's or ∀ Gundam's conventional rebuilds. We're taking the loud, bold optimism of Gundam Wing and building an actual thesis statement to make it real. There's no melancholy loss of Lalah Sune or ex-boyfriends punched into asteroids this time. We can be better! We can do better! Wounds can be healed. Gundam 00's first opening and ending themes are angry rock songs loaded with visuals of sad, angry men. Its finals are full of feminine vocals, soft pop ballads and wounds healing as the gundams become overgrown landmarks, long since left behind in favour of a kinder world.
When I first watched this show I was a 17 year old tricked by society into thinking I was a man. I couldn't articulate half my thoughts on this show, in particular since half of them were "I wish I were Sumeragi Lee Noriega". Well, I'm in my 30s this time and I am that bitch. I'm sure most of you reading this are going to disagree with how bullish I am on Gundam 00. Come at me. My tactical forecasts are backed up by a twink in a supercomputer and my tits are huge. This show's one of the best damn Gundam entries ever made.
No comments:
Post a Comment