Hayley: Garrod is a boy, not a man. A boy declares his love for a girl after knowing her for two days, one of which she was entirely unconscious for. A man would wait and get to know her better.
Me: How's that different from lesbians?
Hayley: If Garrod were a girl she'd have already married Tiffa.
"Garrod's turning down a MILF? No wonder this got axed!" - Hayley on good boys
"All I understood from that technobabble is this young man's having period pains." - Hayley on cyber newtype Caris Nautilus
"Fucking BUTTERBEAN?!?" - Hayley on the NRX-010 Gable, and presumably the resolution to WWF's Brawl for All at Wrestlemania 15 as well.
It's the show which killed Gundam.
The conditions were never going to be good for After War Gundam X. It's the third straight year of rebooting the franchise. It's built on a pitch which assumes some connection to the original show, despite the goal being to attract a new batch of 10-12 year olds whose parents can buy them model kits. Neon Genesis Evangelion just ended its original broadcast and gave everyone Discourse Brainworms. With the exception of the Gundam X (and arguably the Double X) itself, every robot design heroic and villainous sucks. The creative issues and franchise fatigue were always going to kill the ratings and tank merch sales.
The premise is wonky as well. "What if the climax of the original Mobile Suit Gundam was thrown awry by Zeon dropping 1500 colonies at once?" is a compelling idea, but this show actually isn't interested in doing a post-apocalyptic story. Even ignoring the Universal Century's established understanding of how that many drops would make Earth uninhabitable for a few thousand years at minimum, we have enough of an understanding of the world in 1996 to know that would be the case. Instead the worst horror unleashed on the planet in human history only really lasted about seven years before we could start rebuilding. There's decades-old forest growth in scenes and entire golden fields of wheat. WHEAT! Not something practical for growing in hostile environments like potatoes. Wheat. This is a themepark's idea of a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
I am not a Bandai executive though. I'm a writer at the bottom of the world who cares about Art. If After War Gundam X is a commercial failure, is it an artistic one as well? Let's dig in to what the show actually wants to do, say and how it achieves it.
So, the setting. The end of the world is a sales pitch to executives and downplayed as much as possible in practice. What this show actually wants to present is the collapse of a unipolar world order. The latest seccession war in a long history of seccession wars resulted in such a drain on resources, manpower, public goodwill and ended with enough damage to the planet that the government has completely collapsed while those in space just ignore Earth as a backwater. Still, the shades of the past refuse to release their grip on the future and there's multiple layers of generational trauma. We have unresolved conversations about Newtypes and whether they represent an ideal evolved humanity or are a funny aberration. As a franchise reboot this is an utter failure. As the sequel to Victory Gundam I was saying should be made after 1993, it's a perfect story to choose.
The question of Newtypes and whether humanity is actually on the brink of a new stage of evolution is explored in some fun ways here. We once again dip into the artificial enhancement well, but with an optimistic conclusion for once. Gundam has a long history of portraying autistic characters and Tiffa Adill is the most autistic character seen yet. Sure Amuro was reclusive an Kamille was an AuDHD bundle of fury, but Tiffa is the purest distillation of the Tumblr Autism Creature yet devised. Even so, her arc of learning to communicate with others in ways they can comprehend comes off as sweet and natural more than remedial. Of course the greatest exploration of Newtypes comes in the late teens. Okay, full disclosure here: deciphering Ecco the Dolphin is an early childhood gaming memory. I devoured David Brin's Uplift novels in my teens. I've paused on certain frames of Gunbuster's final episode too many times. I am a sucker for Sapient Dolphins in science fiction. That this show decides to dedicate several episodes in a row to Newtype Dolphins redirecting torpedoes and remotely detonating exploitative bio-computer systems is cool as shit. It's something that feels thoroughly Gundam while also such a weird, creative decision to run with. The show's almost worth watching just for this.
I've talked before about how Zeta Gundam established this franchise as being destination, prestige television. This run of 90s shows has been kind of weird, but Gundam X's storytelling techniques and structure often feel more like the post-SEED shows than what's come before. We have cold openings, next-episode previews delivered the way early 2010s American TV does them, and the cartoony hijinks are placed much more elegantly than something like ZZ Gundam. While the soundtrack doesn't have any standout tracks the way most television entries have up to this point, its orchestral tone gives this air of Serious Television that Wing loses once the title card's passed each episode. The story's comprised almost entirely of 2-3 episode storylines much like Iron-Blooded Orphans and Witch From Mercury will be. Obviously Gundam 00 jumps around much more since it's so fixated on world-building in its first half but you can see the blueprints for it all starting here.
Gundam X doesn't dedicate as much of its time purely to developing its supporting cast the way something like G did but it's still leaps and bounds better than Victory or Wing. An episode dedicated entirely to the hotheaded Witz and calm ladies man Roybea feels a bit sloppy in its melodrama but sticks the landing really well. Two men whose motivations shift as they realise what they thought was home simply doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't hit the way say, either time Amuro found one of his estranged parents did but it gets the job done. Of the supporting cast the strongest by far is femme fatale Ennil El. Raised in space yet stranded on Earth as her father was part of a ground invasion force by the Space Revolutionary Army, 1996's stand-in for Zeon. She tries to hit on our 15 year old lead and goes on a little quest of revenge when he turns her down. It'd be easy to read as a spiteful woman story but we genuinely see her lose a lot of people close to her and have to reconcile with how senselessly cruel her father's intentions were. An entire episode is dedicated to her becoming Historic Good Friends with one of the women who works the bridge of this show's main battleship and she then spends the next ten or so episodes yearning for a closer connection only to keep running away because she doesn't think she deserves better in life. We've had plenty of fodder for shipping men in Gundam with each other but this is the first real lesbian moment for the franchise. That it spends a fair bit of its runtime as Doomed Yuri only makes the Ennil/Toniya ship all the sweeter.
Sadly, like a lot of elements to the show, things fall apart when the poor ratings and sales figures result in 11 episodes being shaved off the run-time. Ennil simply returns without comment around the same time Tiffa is once again kidnapped. Previously it's been by Newtype researchers looking for something to exploit. Late in the show, she is kidnapped by the television series Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. I mentioned before how the multi-part episode structure is a strength of Gundam X but this first sojourn into space feels completely off. There's some nice ideas and worldbuilding about what's been going on in the remnants of the SRA but it all feels like the wrong sort of escalation. We're in the middle of exploring how the previous world government is rebuilding and exploiting ethnic divisions when suddenly a different show entirely starts up. It's a pity because one of the nicest ideas present is that this world's equivalent of Zeon 'Char "Quattro zum Bajeena" Aznable' Daikun is introduced here and breaks the cycle of villainous rivals by actually growing the fuck up. He was shaken by the horrors of war and his experiences with the world's previous Gundam lead and while still a military man, spends the rest of the show seeking to de-escalate conflicts and build a better world.
Gundam X has a funny gimmick: the Gundam has access to effectively a Weapon of Mass Destruction so long as the moon's in view. We gave a robot the Wave Motion Cannon and the show has the wisdom to use it sparingly. Partly to maintain the awe and tension but also because it, you know, will kill enormous amounts of people every time it's used. Instead it's employed in creative situations like using the recoil from the blast to escape a nuclear reactor meltdown quicker. More often the threat is what's compelling, and the consequences for employing this thing in the first place. When I say that this show is very good, this is the sort of element I'm praising. Keep this in mind for a few entries' time...
I'd be remiss if I didn't praise our leads. Garrod Ran feels like a more tempered, smarter written Judau Ashta. He's the same sort of shouty man of action but his inexperience and indecision play much more prominent roles in his development over time. I already praised Tiffa's development so I should mention that the romance between these two is handled deftly. By the time we achieve a single chaste kiss a couple episodes from the end it feels sincere, cute and the right sort of chemistry for these two kids. Not every romance needs the raw sexual tension of Domon x Rain and it's so much more authentic than anything Wing teased. That said, Garrod's sense of fashion combined with how a lot of this is written makes the experience of watching Gundam X feel as much like you're watching a successor to Densetsu no Yuusha Da-Garn as you are the latest entry in Studio Sunrise's premier science fiction military drama franchise.
This is an easy show to forget exists but I'd say it's worth it even if you aren't undergoing a project like watching every Gundam. Like every entry, it's in conversation with itself but in interesting ways. Gundam X opens with mockery of both certain types of Guy from early Gundam entries and a joke about Fist of the North Star. By the end the show calls for an emphatic rejection of certain ideas prevalent throughout the Universal Century and a call for a kinder world. We need to kill the political concept of Newtypes in our mind as much as this show kind of calls for us to kill the era of 90s Gundam. That the show materially followed through on that thesis is, in its own way, a perfect end to this run of shows.
Both songs by Romantic Mode kick ass by the way.
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