"So the unique aspect to this world is there's... gnomes?" - Hayley on Dique Gunhale
"That's clearly more of a size queen." - Hayley on the Diva
"How did they make a half naked otter in a hammock so unsexy?" - Hayley on Lt. Woolf
"So they're saying the Diva was really a drag queen. Yes I know this one's cheap heat but the show doesn't deserve better." - Hayley on transforming a battleship exactly once.
"They really gave the Diva to a Captain Anus huh." - Hayley saying what's on all our minds.
"I miss Graham Aker." - Hayley on people shrugging off extreme acceleration.
The year is 2011. Gundam 00 as a creative project has completely wrapped up. Making a sequel to Awakening of the Trailblazer would either undermine everything it said or be a psychedelic space opera in the vein of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, making it a dead end for selling plastic model kits of cool robots. The Universal Century is currently milking dead-eyed nostalgia with Gundam Unicorn's individual direct to video episode releases. Stumped for ideas on how to keep the plastic factories churning, Bandai Namco turn to their new best friends at Level 5 to make the next inevitable Gundam reboot. After all they've churned out family friendly hits non-stop from Inazuma 11 to Professor Layton and most recently started gunning for Nintendo's money with Yo-Kai Watch. This is as safe a bet as you can make!
The pitch is strong too. Let's build a story so grand it spans multiple generations. Kids can grow along with the characters and talk about the more mature themes with their parents who are watching too! We'll draw parallels to the earliest Gundam entries in order to sell kits both old and new and bring Gundam back to a household name! It's the exact sort of concept that makes guys in suits who only understand finance and not the economics, logistics and reasons to fund Art in the first place.
See, we already have a model for multi-generational storytelling: you plan your damn sequel(s) in advance. Gundam AGE did not.
I'll try to talk about the broad strokes before diving into each smaller story. First, the compliments. There's a cute touch with the foley in this show. Initially, the woefully unequipped Federation forces have an arsenal which uses unaltered Industrial Light & Magic foley. The most Star Wars blasters possible. Over time, new developments replace these weapons with some new, much more bassy sounds. By the end of the show technology has moved to the point we're just using the 80s Gundam sound library again. No touch-ups. Second, the third Age was overseen by Masami Obari of all people. You can tell the second the opening credits start but there's some of his other flourishes as an artist throughout too. By all accounts he had a fun time of it, and him being very Normal about MILFs is a perfectly Gundam mindset to have. That's about it for pleasantries.The first ten episodes of Gundam AGE are terrible television. I think it would be easy to assume that it's the weird childish tone causing this, but it's not. By the standards of a studio which produced such high quality children's shows as Nekketsu Saikyo Gosaurer, Yuusha Express Might Gaine and obviously all-time classics like Yuusha-Ou GaoGaiGar, Gundam AGE fails to meet those standards. It's bad young adults television and even less appealing to children. The Cosmic Era is bad television because it's paced and structured in a way that shows its audience sneering contempt. Gundam AGE is bad television because it cannot pace a scene, let alone string several together in a satisfying sequence. The commercial breaks are frequently mistimed and always start with an awkward fade to black. Anime doesn't necessarily need an eyecatch, but it feels like such a step down from even Gundam 00 just flashing a little logo before the break.The pacing of episodes is all over the place, rising actions and climaxes all mistimed and emotional beats placed in the exact spot where they'll have the least impact. Episodes often feel like half an idea vaguely explored before the credits bump you away again. It's not just bad TV, by the standards of Gundam it's outright embarrassing.
The problem with a multi-generational story cramming itself into 50 episodes is ironically, you have killed the show's capacity for carrying the weight of time. Effectively you're making three 15-ish episode shows. This means you have to rush to a low stakes climax early on, and there's two times you need to wind back the tension to introduce an entirely new cast in a lower stakes environment. Speaking more specifically, Gundam AGE fumbles exploring how the passage of time affects both the characters and the world. We're too busy re-establishing stakes to explore the long-term effects of a war on society. There's barely any epilogue for most of the cast of any generation and very few return each time. It wouldn't take very much of a rewrite to fit the show's events over a 2-5 year timespan instead of 70. Instead of feeling like the largest story Gundam has tackled to date, it feels like watching a facsimile of the original show through to F91 played at 2x speed with worse music.
Have I mentioned the music? It's all so terribly bland. I'm completely serious when I say that the most memorable music, vocal or otherwise, is a modulated single note sine wave which plays during quiet moments of tension aboard signature battleship The Diva. The score is as phoned in and submitted just before deadline as the show's screenplays.
Let's try and bash out a summary of the setting and events. We're a century two after whenever the Universal Century's calendar and Earth Federation finally collapsed. Like I said back when we were in that setting's reeds, we've finally had it explode into warring states. After some time of individual colonies fighting each other, a new treaty is signed and the Federation reformed. There's a large scale ban and scaling back on weaponry and mobile suit technology to de-escalate. All is well until an attempt at mass colonisation of Mars goes horribly. Turns out living near Mars gives you cancer. Embarrassed, the Earth Federation cuts off the project, its surviving people and covers it all up with a claim everyone there died. Jump forward another century or so and the survivors in the Mars region launch a war of revenge using some tech they found in a fragmented old pre-New Federation database. Their nation is named Vagan. The sole survivor of Vagan's first assault on a space colony happens to be the heir to an old family of weapons manufacturers, and so he sets off to build a new Gundam and Save The Day in a very childish manner. The rest of the show ensues.
There's something resembling a three act story in Gundam AGE. Not just the three generations it covers (Flit Asuno, his son Asemu Asuno and then his sin Kio Asuno) but distinct themes to each. Young Flit's story is an end of innocence. He starts out building a cool robot and weapons R&D device in order to fight faceless inhuman robot dragons. By the end he's failed to save a nice girl and has learned that the nameless enemy are in fact human survivors with their own goals and motivations. Asemu's story involves forming an emotional connection with a Vagan and dealing with his internal conflicts. That of losing a friend, and trying to find himself as someone unique from both his initial and others' expectations. Finally, Kio's story tries to relate to Vagans as a broader society, deserving of love and dignity even when so much pain has been wrought by both sides. It's all constantly undermined by the awkward pacing and obvious rewrites.
Flit Asuno is the only character to have prominence in every generation, and it's to the show's detriment that the show isn't entirely from his point of view. He starts out a bright-eyed wunderkind; a star engineer who's also a brilliant pilot, a naturally powerful Newtype X-rounder and the finest commanding officer in centuries. Yet, the messiah complex imposed on him by the parting words of his dying parents intersect with events to push him to become a workaholic plotting a genocide for decades. Fighting the monsters by becoming a monster and all that. The shifts in perspective leave no room for the connective tissue that would make the story something truly compelling and spark real conversations with families. The scars of the wars which influenced early Gundam are nearly gone from social memory. Flit's actions become somewhat baffling as a result of these creative decisions too. At the end of the second generation's storyline, Flit's accumulated enough evidence of corruption in the Earth Federation that he launches a coup. What you'd assume from this point given his extreme fanatical hatred of Vagan is that we'd do some ongoing Stalinist purges. He's already proven to be a workaholic and used to calling all the shots, so it'd stand to reason he'd position himself as either an absolute dictator, or at least the central figure that everything in the military has to go through. There's real world historical precedent and parallels an educated writer could draw from to make something compelling, and it would have far more interesting effects on the third generation. Instead, the Federation basically functions the same way and Flit retires to the Reserves for some reason.
Another broad problem is with Vagan and Vaganism itself. Vaganism is a fascist, eugenicist movement which uses social and technological means to groom children. Vagan society is geared entirely around a war effort. Vagan forces constantly attack civilian colonies, the sort of act F91 portrayed with such clear horror. Its soldiers begin as faceless unknowns and when unmasked they are all the same masculine scowl with shadows cast over their eyes, ominous cult robes and perfectly willing to die for the cause without hesitation. Their equipment is all rigged to self-destruct to deny the Earth Federation access to their superior technology or further insights. When we finally do see civilian Vagan society, it's clear that every citizen is either a soldier, working a position which provisions soldiers (effectively camp followers) or is simply too young to yet enlist. The biggest mistake in this final stretch is how Kio befriends a Vagan lad, but then the guy goes and enlists in the war anyway. Not a single Vagan with any agency serves as so much as conscientious objector. Furthermore, the artistic decision to give them an Arab aesthetic was made. These aren't just fanatics - they're Jihadists.
Well, sort of. See, this would all be inconvenient for young Kio if he's going around saying we should be nice and get along with such a brutal society and movement. Thus, the final 15 or so episodes suddenly pivot to revealing that the Vagan leader plans to kill as many Vagans as well as Feds. The self-destruct doctrine is retconned to "Vagan troops used to hide their identities but now don't because everyone knows they're human". Kio's attempts at the Kira Yamato "just shoot the engines" fighting style would be immediately proven futile otherwise. I don't like to use the term "plot hole" very often, as writing fiction often requires contrivances to keep events moving. The complete backpedaling of Vagan doctrine in the later stages does feel like a hole though.
Gundam has had ongoing problems with how it portrays women since the original show. What was once something that felt like a period piece of late-70s media is now just gross Conservative views. While the robots of AGE's three generations are meant to evoke the RX-78-2 Gundam, the Zeta and the ZZ, in spirit this show is a successor to Victory. Women are meant to be mothers or to die for a man's character growth. The sole exception is Millais, a member of the first generation's bridge crew who captains the ship in the second generation. For the crime of not pumping out children or dying, she is simply not mentioned in the third age at all. Captain Natora Einus of the thid generation is assigned the bridge by a command looking for her to fail. She gets no female mentors, be they Millais or perhaps Romary, a bridge operator in the second age. Nope, she learns the ropes of command from a man.
Conservatism rears its head in other ways too. There's a burning passion for maintaining nuclear families throughout. Flit's childhood is tragic because he lost his parents. Almost every character is paired off to make babies through the generations, with women retiring from military service whenever they secure a man to breed em. The second generation has to rush through 18 months of relationship building in a scant two episodes, but the image atop this post should make something clear: there is meant to be a romantic tension between Asemu, Zeheart and Romary. This would be a non-monogamous relationship and so Zeheart is required by the script to always pursue Vagan doctrine at all times. I could take things going tragic in the end more easily if we'd had a slower burn and real ebbs and flows to him feeling torn between loyalties. It's clear that these relationships were something the studio took pride in as well, as the second generation is the only part of the show to receive a punched-up movie duology re-cut. Kio deserved a story where he gets to beg his Uncle Zeheart to turn away from violence. The class politics are dreadful as well. The first age prominently features a space colony where the working class population eke out an existence in maintenance tunnel slums. The wealthy upper class continue to wage a long-ended war between two old warring state colony factions. This isn't resolved by holding the wealthy to account and empowering the poor, but by telling the two wealthy factions to face the real enemy: those pesky foreign invaders.
So much of Gundam AGE feels like it was driven by marketing pitches first and narrative weight second. The second generation ends with Asemu falling in line with his father's vision and coup, yet suddenly he's a space pirate pursuing de-escalation through theft of weaponry from both sides when he returns in the third. His motivations for avoiding his wife and son for 13 years are flimsy and all feel like they were driven by "wouldn't it be cool to have a black pirate gundam? It's not like we have a Universal Century manga sequel to F91 we've been avoiding an adaptation of for like 15 years or anything" more than what would be fitting for the character. Speaking of Asemu, a bunch of his character arc feels undercooked. Unlike his father (or son), he's not a Newtype X-rounder but still aspires to being a skilled pilot. One way to work around this deficiency is to be faster and dumber than people who can read you quickly (the Garrod Ran from Gundam X approach), but given his mentor is a former racer turned squad leader, I think that's the wrong approach. He should've learned how to be a more tactically-oriented, pilot, developing skills at coordinating with others to create situations sicko pilots can't find a twitchy way out of. That would feed better into becoming a rogue ship captain later in life. The absent father element could've been handled far better as well. Consider Asemu staying in the Federation and pursuing his approach surreptitiously, requiring long stretches away from home. Contrast that with Flit, firmly at the top of Command with more free time outside macro scale planning meetings, doing everything he can to monopolise Kio's time and push him towards the streets of blood Flit so desperately yearns for.
This is the final single run 50 episode television show. Reconguista in G is 26 episodes, Iron Blooded Orphans is 50 split over two seasons like Gundam 00 and The Witch From Mercury is at least 13 episodes short of where it should be. Given what a creative and financial failure this show was, it's not a surprise Bandai Namco has balked at trying the formula again. The death of the 50 episode Gundam is perhaps the most tragic legacy Gundam AGE could have left us. Flit Asuno may have finally let go of his hatred, but it cost us so much creative potential to do so.
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