"Wow! It's the New Coke!" - Hayley
"This is a white woman's chihuahua" - Hayley on The Pink Haro
"The only emotion Kira's crying can convey is how bad last night's burrito is treating him." - Hayley on that one scene.
"These 90 seconds have told me more about this cast and made me want to learn more about them than 16 episodes of Gundam SEED have." - Hayley after I showed her the opening to Overman King Gainer
"Oh so the big innovation this time is the black tri-stars are going to be furries?" - Hayley on the BuCUE.
"A single leaf falling in the wind is a better realised and more immersive visual than anything we're seeing in Gundam SEED." - Hayley as she once again plays Unicorn Overlord to stop me putting another Gundam SEED disc on.
"Why aren't we watching this?" - Hayley on the trailer for Madlax included on the fifth disc.
"Coordinators and Naturals are incompatible societies because the former filter their freshly ground coffee beans while the latter drink instant." - Hayley cutting to the core of what this show's about.
"These two are like if Beecha and Mondo had no charisma and were also straight." - Hayley on Yzak and Dearka.
"I hate everything this show represents." - Hayley on 15 year olds who love to play the piano.
"Is Murrue up to the true burden of command: remembering the differences between Sledgehammer, Wombat, Igestellung and Helldart missiles?" - Hayley on Natarle's departure.
Hayley: This show's tech is a supermarket shelf. Jam jam jam jam jam.
Me: No, ZAFT just cancelled the jam. The show's left us the white bread.
Hayley works a stressful, tiring job and has been overbooked all year. We started watching every Gundam in January with the idea it'd be something we jump on in between other activities. Instead, immersing ourselves in a succession of worlds contemplating ourselves, our society and the path to a better world has been an ideal activity for us. I'm starting this way to highlight that it was not ZZ Gundam's sitcom hijinks, Stardust Memory's fascist apologia, Victory's clumsy discussions of womanhood or Wing's aimless rambling that drove her insane, but the jump from Ɐ to SEED which finally reminded her she has other hobbies and interests which she'd like to pursue for as long as it takes for me to stop waving my cheap clearance sale boxset of SEED at her threateningly.
Before we jump into scary topics like characters, themes and so on, on a basic level this show is such a downgrade on a basic television viewing level. Obviously Ɐ Gundam was allowed to go all out since it was the 20th Anniversary but watching this show highlights just how good at being a weekly TV show Gundam X was. We're not just constantly flashing back to earlier episodes with the assumption somebody's channel surfing and didn't watch every week; we're flashing back to five minutes earlier in the same episode because you're a dumb motherfucker who can't be trusted to remember or understand what you've just seen.If Gundam X were a precursor to how 21st Century Gundam would be paced and structured then Gundam SEED is a diversion onto the path of Naruto.
We're in the early days of the complete pivot to digital animation and the process is going much worse here than Ɐ's funny screen wipes. Horizontal dolly shots have this awkward jerking to them like a graphics card can't quite render fast enough. Every shot of the White Base Archangel looks worse than the average in-game Zeonic Front for Playstation 2 cutscene. We have the most egregious recycling of action shots since probably the original TV show. Character designs are headed by Hisashi Hirai and they're awful. Ghastly squashed face ghouls with plastic hair stuck atop their dress up toy bodies. If half these characters have been genetically modified to meet a sense of visual perfection, then the Cosmic Era has some of the worst beauty standards in human history.
We're forced to watch the worst opening sequences in the franchise as well every week. Merely switching up the song at the halfway point is no longer enough for record companies; we've gotta do it quarterly. It will be the standard going forward but fucking hell the second and third songs are dreadful. Aimless muzak pop devoid of the sorts of hooks you can associate with a show and thus purchase the single for. Thankfully the first and fourth work well. The visuals of the Cosmic Era opening credits all feel like brief cuts slapped into a folder for people to arrange in iMovie however many times the execs demand a fresh sequence. There's some degree of meaning to the individual cuts (Cagalli may be a fighter around Kira, but near Athrun... she's a woman) but it all feels so much lesser than what's been going on for decades. Gundam SEED can't sell you on a premise via credits as well as 08th MS Team and it doesn't even try.
The voice acting feels subpar for a Gundam show as well. There's a whole lot of high profile actors here (including multiple previous leads for the franchise!) but it often feels like only Mitsuishi Kotona (Murrue), Takehito Koyasu (Mu), Tomokazu Seki (Yzak) and Naomi Shindoh (Cagalli) are actually trying to put any nuance into their characters. Noboyuki Hiyama (Azrael) and Toshihiko Seki (Rau) are having a good time but they're both such card carrying hammy villains that they don't really count. The real standout performance is Rie Tanaka whose early appearances manage to perfectly convey a political activist lying through her teeth in her ditzy pop singer persona before knocking it out the park in the later stages of the show. I'm bringing this all up because our lead boys Soichiro Hoshi (Kira) and Akira Ishida (Athrun) are embarrassingly bad. In Soichiro's case the guy has simply never been that good in this sort of role, but Akira Ishida is clearly just clocking in his hours before going home. This is six years after he played a certain albino who caused a billion babygay awakenings. He's already proven he can do far better than what he puts in here.
So what is Gundam SEED? We've done post apocalypse Gundam, post-post apocalypse Gundam, kung-fu Gundam, deranged superhero Gundam and so on so how does the franchise kick off a new century in our world?
It's just the original again.
Yes, we're in a war between colonies and an earth federation. Colony troops steal a gundam and damage White Base The Archangel. Our normal teenager student winds up on board and has to pilot the remaining Gundam until we can get past enemy lines and staff the thing properly. We crash on Earth in the middle of a desert, before doing a bunch of water-themed episodes. There's a big space laser at the end. If you're 13 years old and this is your first Gundam, then it's going to make an impact. If you go back and watch any other entry, it's abundantly clear how dull this iteration is. Sure we didn't know what everyone on the White Base's deal was, but we sure as hell got to know Amuro, Fraw Bow, Sayla, Kai, Hayato, Bright, Mirai and those pesky children. What do we know about any of Kira's friends? Tolle is dating Miriallia. Miriallia is dating Tolle. Kuzzey wants out. Sai is a guy who gets cuckolded by Kira. We know more about the White Base's cook than we do the Archangel's helmsman!
A lot of how SEED re imagines elements of the original often makes them worse. Take Andrew Waltfeld, the equivalent of Ramba Ral. Andrew's meant to be an affable enemy officer who sets Kira on the path of questioning why wars are fought and when they should end. He's meant to be a nice guy and that's why he gets to return late in the show as part of The Nice People Faction. Yet he's still a guy who starves desert towns and calls it humane. Dude's still doing war crimes, but it tries to frame them as not that so you'll be sympathetic towards him. Contrast this with Ramba Ral, a guy who didn't really want the deployment he was given but felt like the political situation back home required him to go. He's constantly looking for ways to mitigate harm to his troops, even as he's beset by supply shortages from the local general looking to settle petty scores. He's there to highlight the ways people along the chain of command are trapped in systems of cruelty, as well as to show the ways fascist movements constantly stab each other in the back. I'd be remiss if I weren't a little horny in one of these posts so I'll toss out just how boring Andrew's visuals are to Ramba. Andrew's a conventionally tall dark and handsome guy. Ramba was a middle aged bisexual swinging bear. One of these is more creative than the other.
The Universal Century was an ongoing class struggle where people's needs were not met. The dystopia came from how the only idea ever allowed to sit on the table was "do a fascist uprising" and so people turned to it over and over again, or were remnants of the previous army to do so. Hell, as it wore on rich assholes realised they could just bankroll one on their own and bully the Federation into letting them just own a space colony or two. The Cosmic Era is also a dystopia portraying fascist movements and a class conflict, but its attempts to modernise the idea make things far messier than they should be. The space colonies are mostly populated by people who've been genetically enhanced in all sorts of ways. They're faster, smarter and better looking than everyone on Earth. Such a society deciding to break away from a broader federation would be a dick move, but the show decides to frame all conflict between the unmodified (Naturals) and the modified (Coordinators) as a racially motivated, bigoted conflict rather than a bunch of rich assholes thinking they can just break away and claim superiority. To make matters worse, the Coordinators' faction is portrayed as far more humane for most of the show's runtime. It's the Earth Federation who used nuclear weapons, and ZAFT employed anti-nuclear devices as a de-escalating retaliation. It's such a huge contrast to Zeon claiming they just want more freedom right before dropping a goddamn space colony on Sydney. This weird bias continues throughout the show. I already mentioned it tries to make Andrew Waltfeld's war crimes a humanitarian act. When Yzak opens fire on a shuttle full of civilians it's just a mistake of youth, even though his assumption it was a retreating medivac shuttle would also be a war crime. Dearka gets to turn his coat while nobody in the Earth Federation outside the White Base Archangel ever does. Kira says there's not many inherent advantages to being a Coordinator but the show never bothers to really show that as true.
Gundam SEED loves to steal valour, but not from Gundam. It's all well and good to take inspiration from other art, but it's a bit rich for this show to try inventing a new cool robot friend to replace Haro, get forced to put Haros in anyway and make them as annoying as possible then use them to throw shade on Ɐ Gundam like it isn't a better show in every way. Sure this franchise has pinched a bit from Star Wars before but it feels so strange and gross and cheap to use Industrial Light & Magic's blaster sound on the Strike Daggers' beam rifles. It's also a bit rich to act like the past of Gundam isn't worth respecting when your show's endgame involves the White Base Archangel fighting its evil counterpart the Black Base Dominion.
I want to talk about misogyny in the Cosmic Era but I think that's going to have to wait until we're through the next 50 episodes and a movie. Suffice it to say that I don't have many kind words to say. For the moment, just consider that Andrew Waltfeld took the brunt of the LaGOWE's explosion yet it's his wife who didn't survive.
Gundam SEED keeps asking for comparisons to the original show, so I want to talk about the role of the Gundam itself in each. When Amuro found the RX-78-2 Gundam, it was an advanced prototype with thicker armour, higher mobility and more advanced weaponry than what Zeon was fielding at the time. These initial advantages become crutches for Amuro as he's thrust into fight after fight, slowly dwindling away as they have to deal with gravity, physical and emotional wear and tear and improving strategies to fight the thing. As the show rolls on, Amuro becomes more and more skilled and pilots like the Gundam is an extension of his body. By the late stages of the show he's so damn good that the Gundam can't even keep up with his reaction times and they have to improvise solutions to keep the joints falling apart on him. At the very end of the show, he's forming psychic connections with people at and wins his final fight by setting the Gundam on autopilot. He's gone from an isolated weirdo to someone so good at reading people that he doesn't even have to be in the Gundam to win. To go back to my old rambles about what it means for us to build a machine in our image then force a real human into that simulacrum, then the RX-78-2 Gundam is a cocoon. It is something he enters, is changed by and then outgrows to become something more. The metaphor may or may not have been intended back in 1979, but I think it's worth mentioning that 20 years later the System-99Ɐ Ɐ Gundam begins its own show as a statue to a forgotten god and ends its run deploying butterfly wings before sucking a violent manchild into a cocoon while Loran, someone who has spent 50 epsidoes rejecting violence is allowed to walk free. (While here, Romi Park's acting was better than almost any line read in SEED.)
The GAT-X105 Strike is beneath Kira Yamato. From the first time he enters its cockpit he is faster, smarter and more in tune with the mechanics than the engineers, mechanics or intended pilots are. He rebuilds its entire operating system in a couple of minutes. His fighting style is so fast and frenetic that the Strike often runs out of power before he's done. Whenever new physical complications come into play, he's factored the math into his adjustments by the end of the fight. Much like Newtypes, Kira also begins attaining a level of spatial awareness and focus above what is normal for a human. Unlike Newtypes, this is not an interim step before learning how to better connect with others. The GAT-X105 Strike is destroyed in a seemingly fatal explosion before Kira is whisked up to the heavens. Here he's given a new suit with an angelic appearance, unlimited energy and ammo and an aimbot that allows him to every so humanely dispatch masses of targets with ease. His voice, body language and demeanor instantly change into somebody wise and confident. The ZGMF-X10A Freedom is Kira Yamato's apotheosis.
This all feeds into where Gundam SEED really starts to deviate in theme from Mobile Suit Gundam. The original show is about desperate struggles for survival, the tragedy of humanity and a hope for a better, kinder world to emerge from the ashes of this war. SEED is, I am loathe to admit, an anti-war show as well. It starts to improve greatly in the scene where Miriallia pulls a knife on a captive enemy soldier. For once, the show hits all the right rhythms for a tense, dramatic moment as her friends try to pull her away, Flay reaches for a gun and Miriallia realises she's perpetuating a cycle of violence with no end as she knocks the gun away. From this point on the show pivots from the original's quest for survival to trying to cut off the heads of two horribly fascist militaries. ZAFT troops start shouting way more bigoted comments than before. I've said before that the Universal Century was setting itself up to end with either annihilation (the path canon took), a break into smaller warring states or a revolution overthrowing the abusive hierarchies. Gundam SEED wants to take this final route, but it's too scared to even give the people a golden truck like Endless Waltz did. Instead, the day is saved because a select few people, superior from birth wielding weapons more powerful than everyone else's are able to dispatch several politicians and a superweapon. They are able to do this all thanks to equipment, support and ideology provided by the good people of Japan ORB.
What's most infuriating is that the show manages to stick the landing. While most of the actions are taken by our special group of generous elites, Patrick Zala, the Coordinator politician calling the most obviously for blood isn't taken down by his son Athrun. It's just a random guy in the room who shoots him. It's the only time somebody close to a normal person is allowed to have agency and if more of the show had been about this then I wouldn't have been so harsh. The final big robot fight is between Kira, who believes people can see past their bigotry and Rau le Creuset, a nihilist who's spent most of the show trying to engineer the death of all humanity. Kira doesn't exactly win the debate, but he doesn't really need to. The absurdity of Rau's goals are obvious on their own.
The real horror is that we have another 50 episodes after this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment