"LESBIAN!" - Hayley, excitedly pointing at Kudelia who's pondering whether a single kiss from someone means you should marry them.
Hayley: "I could punt ED2's baby Mika."
Me: "He'd double tap you before he hits the ground."
Hayley: "He'd still make a funny squeak when he hits that ground though."
"I can't believe Takaki grew up to become a man." - Hayley, episode 50.
It's the one your gym junkie friend who always works out in a Vegeta tank top has seen and likes.
You know what? If you haven't seen this show prior to reading this you should in fact go and do that. No prior knowledge is required; we are once again rebooting Gundam and in a way more thorough than usual.
300 years prior to the events of Iron Blooded Orphans, there was a machine uprising. Not so much an Osamu Tezuka "what is the nature of humanity?" type machine uprising. More a grey goo scenario: continuously self-replicating machines plundering resources and trying to choke out any other life. It's a bold decision to place such an untapped scenario for Gundam into mere backstory but it speaks to an understanding that Gundam has always been a franchise about people first. A machine war could be a plenty fun setup for an entire show, but I think it's much more interesting to leave it as the setup for what's going on here.
So what's going on in Iron Blooded Orphans? Well, that war depleted huge volumes of resources and the army which killed the machines have obtained a monopoly on violence, keeping the four main political power blocs on Earth in an awkward, tense peace. It's very much what Martin Luther King Jr. described as a "negative peace", one where tension is absent rather than a "positive peace" where justice is present. Humanity won the war and all it took was grafting machine operating equipment to the spines of children, repealing all child labour laws to legalise that surgical grafting and turning a blind eye to slavery for a few centuries. Gjallarhorn, the name of that interplanetary paramilitary/police force have had three centuries to metastasise into a stratified organisation where the top level are in-bred aristocrats and the lower rungs are rife with corruption, bigotry and infighting. Earth's major economic powers all own stakes in various chunks of Mars and Jupiter, along with their own pet space colonies. It's Colonialism all the way down baby~
It's in these circumstances that a young rich lady with an interest in political activism received an invite from the reform-minded president of Arbrau (the Russia/Canada bloc in an amusing piece of world building) to come have a chat about Martian independence. Trying to spend more time with The Common Folk she hires a merecenary unit with a large number of child soldiers as her escort. Unfortunately her father's sold her out to the cops (Gjallarhorn) because he's tired of her troublesome ways, and since we've established the incompetence and corruption in said cops, they bungle the operation so bad the kids in the mercenary unit can stage a mutiny and take the company for themselves. From here the first half of the show is this ragtag group trying to take the girl to the politics building so she can do politics and save the day. The second half of the show is about the consequences to how they reached that point, along with exploring the complexities of life after such a moment is successful.
The mechanical design work in this show is so great, man. While mobile suits and space ships can operate on the magical sci-fi Ahab Reactors to generate gravity, do minor ECM and power cities, everything else is running on ethanol. It's not as smelly as the diesel powered junk Gundam 00 began with, but the grime and scars are everywhere. Gjallarhorn's sterile corridors are contrasted with scratchy, beat up murky hallways that everyone else has to navigate. There's no clean, fancy beam rifles or pink light sabres this time. It's all rifles, cannon and blunt weapons. Gjallarhorn, true to their aristocracy favour lances and swords for close combat. Everyone else uses clubs or halberds. Devoid of easy armour penetration, every fight has this clunky heft to it. Every win feels hard earned even when our lead pilot is at times terrifyingly skilled. Mobile suits feel the most intimidating, powerful and cruel that they have since ∀ Gundam or even F91. This all applies to the war crimes and super weapons too. It's all railguns and Rods From God, delivered in such a clean an effective example of why such space-bound weaponry is strictly illegal in the current day.
That's all before the neural interfaces give you brain damage. I've talked before about how part of the appeal of a piloted robot is the ways a living human is forced to take the form of a simulacra of humanity. We saw back in ∀ Gundam a restoration of that humanity, while Iron Blooded Orphans showcases the exact opposite. The UGY-R41 serves as a coffin for slaves throughout the show. Gjallarhorn use a near-comatose man as the operating system for an experiment in adult neural interface surgeries. Most devastatingly is the way lead pilot Mikazuki Augus' desperate fights leave him increasingly disabled over time. From a fit young man to a guy carried around like a sack of potatoes, frequently dumped facing away from where conversations are occurring. His body can move fine when attached to his Gundam but no attempt is ever made to build a portable neural interface for the guy. There's the obvious angle of "the more he fights, the less he's a man and the more he's a robot" but there's an extra layer of insult. The deeper into the show they go, the more his Gundam is given wolf-like attributes. Mikazuki Augus doesn't even die a simulacrum of a man, he's a simulacrum of a man pretending to be a wolf. A literal dog of war.
The best Gundam works understand subtext is for cowards.
This being the first TV Gundam entry to explore a terraformed Mars, it can be fun to read this as a distant sequel to AGE. The weird Orientalism of that show's Martians has been replaced with a far more apt and obvious metaphor: Mars is just Mexico now. Corn fields for the ethanol, simple spicy tomato-laden dishes to keep the poor boys moving, garishly painted shanties and a primary global export of cheap exploitable labour. There's something about deserts and dust which brings out the best in Gundam be it Amuro meeting Ramba Ral, all the great ZZ Gundam episodes in Africa everything about Gundam 00 and so on.
Speaking of Gundam 00, this show works as its pessimistic younger sibling. The overall direction and editing feel like a continuation of what's great about that show and a further realisation of the Sunrise Prestige House Style in a more practical way for television than Unicorn's attention to detail. Like 00 this is a 50 episode show split into two seasons to ensure a stable production schedule. Given that two years after this wrapped up the anime industry fell into a total systemic collapse and Bandai Namco are terrible at project management across multiple industries, this may well be the last 50 episode Gundam ever made and it's a strong argument for the format's existence. Everything has room to breathe, and episodes often feel like they're the front or back half of a 40 minute prestige drama. Watching this show weekly was maddening, but a decade distant from its original broadcast this is the sort of show you can lose yourself in over a week or so and not regret how many chores you've neglected to do so.
I finished the dishes yesterday, don't worry.
Beyond the production it's thematically the dark mirror to Gundam 00 as well. Setsuna F Seiei was a highly traumatised child who witnessed a miracle, inspiring him to endlessly pursue a better world even if he couldn't fully understand what that would look like for years. At the same age, Mikazuki Augus shot a man in the head down an alley way while a similarly aged child told him how cool it was he did that and they should keep on doing so together. The mid point of Gundam 00 is a catastrophic setback, providing lessons to learn from for a better world later. The mid point of Iron Blooded Orphans is a triumphant victory which teaches all the wrong lessons, pushing Orga towards his tragic end within 18 months. Setsuna F Seiei is aromantic, asexual and thanks to collaboration with his friends and coworkers medically transitions to his preferred gender of Gundam. Mikazuki hasn't had the time and mental energy to learn how romance works but he is certainly attracted to women and thanks to the terrible decisions of his friends his bodily autonomy is sacrificed to tether him to a 300 year old Gundam, leaving him unable to pursue his main hobby of studying agriculture. Gundam 00 pursues and achieves a technology and ideologically driven revolution. Iron Blooded Orphans is Materialist and about how heightened contradictions alone won't bring about a revolution. So many more factors are required. While both shows tell jokes, Gundam 00 is a Comedy and Iron Blooded Orphans is a tragedy.
Comparisons to the last creative triumph in the franchise aside, there are far fewer Gundamisms than usual. Sure the world map has a colony drop shaped hole where Sydney should be, but the weapon choices, political situation and complete lack of psychic powers are all significant breakaways. The most notable exception is we once again have a charismatic blonde villain in McGillis Fareed. For the first half of the show he's the purest Char Aznable tribute one could ask for: clever, manipulative and very obviously about to ratfuck his purple-haired aristocrat boyfriend. It's all delivered in a way that feels like fodder for existing fans looking to cackle madly as he starts working his magic and being every bit as toxic as Char in 1979. The beauty of McGillis is in the second half of the show. He's clearly building a plan to take over Gjallarhorn for himself but there's plenty of mystery as to what that entails. When his grand plan is finally in motion it's some of the funniest nonsense in the entire franchise: his plan was to turn on an old Gundam which has nothing but good thrusters and two swords. According to some legalese in the Gjallarhorn constitution, if you work out how to turn on this robot you are meant to run the organisation. It's a rule written down during the original war with the machines, but he assumes it just means flying a single robot will instantly force the other six ruling nobles with their fleets of 30-40 warships and hundreds of mobile suits to bow down and obey your every word. It ends as poorly for him as you'd expect.
McGillis Fareed isn't just a fascist; he's the first real exploration in the franchise of how fascist anti-intellectualism frequently leads to a belief in the occult. Char Aznable is a manchild because he refuses to take responsibility for his actions and constantly flees from the less glamorous roles his skills and heritage are calling him to take. McGillise Fareed is simply a man with the mind of a child. A 6 year old's understanding of politics. No plan beyond "this robot will make me king instantly." What stings is you can understand why he's so stunted. He grew up as yet another orphan, forced into prostitution from a young age. He's not even a noble's bastard son; his adoptive father picked up a pile of boys from a brothel, forced them to compete against each other then adopted the most competent only to rape him further. Right wing politics often supports pedophilia because it provides an easy avenue to maintaining power over people. Iznario Fareed does this to McGillis, and McGillis in turn does the same to the 9 year old Almiria Baudauin as part of his own politicking in Gjallarhorn. The cycles of cruelty, trauma and poor education apply as much to the ruling class of Iron Blooded Orphans as they do the peasantry.
He's a sharp contrast to endgame antagonist Rustal Elion, another of Gjallarhorn's 7 ruling noble families. He's a liar, a regular crook, schemer, war criminal, and will be remembered by history as a gracious reform-oriented liberal. He understands how broken the current system is and even wants to improve things somewhat, but he wants to do so while maintaining every privilege he currently enjoys. The last few times we've seen antagonists to the left of George W. Bush in Gundam they've always been written to say a couple of left-leaning sentiments followed by some real psychotic nonsense to taint all the ideas with the same brush. Full Frontal, Gilbert Durandal and so on. Rustal Elion feels like something far more real, like a Barack Obama or a Bob Hawke. Maybe a Gordon Brown. There should be better people than Rustal Elion taking the reigns of power by the end of this show, but part of the tragedy is that sometimes deeply gross people do a few things correctly.
I'm running through Gjallarhorn, so let's talk about the other notables. Julieta Juris is the most interesting of the bunch, even more than stooge turned revenge-seeker Gaelio Baudauin. She doesn't know it's what she's doing but she desperately wants to be like our lead pilot Mikazuki Augus. She just wants to hop in her robot and do a pile of violence and serve purely as Rustal Elion's attack dog. A major distinction between the two compared to Mika and Orga is that Rustal really doesn't want her to do so. He's frequently trying to mentor her in statecraft and introduce her to people with varied, alternate ways of thinking to her own. Mastery of violence is useful in the current world order, but it's only going to fade away if society is actually improved somewhat. Her entire arc throughout the show's second half is coming to the slow realisation that she isn't as good at killing as she thinks she is, shouldn't want to be as good at killing as she thinks she should and that pursuing such a path further will lead her as dead as the Gundam Barbatos whose head she claims in the final episode. She's one of the rare antagonists to learn the lesson good Gundam always teaches: kill the Gundam in your mind and grow the hell up. Otherwise, Gjallarhorn is full of various shades of nincompoop. There's plenty of corrupt assholes but the deranged aristocrats are the real treat. Iok Kujan serves as a constant reminder to Julieta what a life of pure privilege leads to: absolutely zero skills beyond the occasional rousing speech. He makes life worse for everyone around him. His counterpart in the first half of the show is useful stooge Carta Issue, a woman whose dialogue was probably written in the script as "Kikuko Inoue makes funny noises here". In a show so serious and somber in tone it's a real stress relief to have such a horny freak running around with her harem of men she's hired as a personal guard purely because they look like her beloved McGillis Fareed. That the show decides that even her death is something as tragic and undignified as any other loss of life is a real testament to the empathy trying to break through such a dark show.
There's plenty going on with our ill-fated guys, gals and tamaki-shaped pals too. While most of the men are absurdly shredded, the show deserves praise for Biscuit Griffon. The closest to a conscience of the men in team leader Orga Itsuki's life, he's a chubby lad who's never condemned for his figure by the show or most of the cast. There's various moments when you see that the guy's built up plenty of strength and fitness suitable for the mercenary life, and you can see the muscle underneath his fat when he too goes shirtless during combat. Not everyone's metabolism works the same and sometimes people just have that sort of figure regardless of diet or exercise habits and it's nice to see the show respect that. With loudmouth ladies man Shino there's constant teases of pairing him with engineering twink Yamagi Gilberton. It's only after Shino's death that we learn the guy was fully aware and was intending to start reciprocating after the fight which killed him. There's a lot of burying the gays in this show, but it's a rare case where I can forgive the act. The show's a tragedy, and part of the tragedy is that the queer characters should be able to take the opportunities to pursue who they love without fear but are prevented by the circumstances from doing so. Shino's slow burn bisexuality is a fun contrast to Eugene. Both lads lost their virginity from the same brothel on the same night, but while it gave Shino confidence in his identity, for Eugene it's clear that he's one of the most repressed gay men in the franchise. He's one of the few survivors of the show so he has time to work things out. The same can't be said for poor Aston, who comes so close to becoming Takaki's boyfriend, only for the trauma of his enslaved youth to leave him saying he regrets finding any joy in life. There's some fun teases early into the introduction of company accountant Merribit Stapleton. Everything about her first few episodes suggests there will be sexual tension between her and Orga, only for it to never eventuate. Orga is too traumatised, too fixated on his goals for the company, too aroace and frankly a bit too misogynistic for it ever go anywhere. That's not to say Orga goes around abusing women, but that the circumstances of his miserable life have taught him to only trust men, not women. Thus it's a fun twist later in the show that she's built a serious romance with grizzled aging mechanic and team uncle Nadi Yukinojo Kassapa instead. I didn't think it quite worthy of a top of the post quote but there were a few times Hayley remarked that the show was more skilled than most Gundam entries at making her enjoy heterosexual pairings. Likewise, the aborted romance between Akihiro and Lafter is compelling television. There's something between them, they both want it but neither feels the time is right or that they have the capacity to actually explore things when the opportunity arises. That it's right before Lafter is the target of a mob rival's assassination hurts all the more. It's the rare death of a woman in this franchise that feels genuinely shocking and not just a hack moment of drama to further a man's character development.
We're past 3000 words so I should get around to focusing on the main characters Mikazuki Augus, Orga Itsuka, Kudelia Aina Bernstein and Atra Mixta.
Mika and Orga's brotherly relationship is so compelling because it is every bit as detrimental as it is positive. Mika's firmly in the "short, quiet and weird"category of Gundam leads and Orga's a confident speaker always hatching plans. At their best, Orga gives Mika a vision and direction of what to aim for while Mika gives Orga the quiet confidence that the goals are both worthwhile and possible at all. At their worst, Mika uses Orga's leadership as a crutch to avoid thinking and making decisions of his own. Mikazuki isn't much of a talker but he's always watching everything around him. He's not lost in his little world of electronics like an Amuro type, he's constantly making up his own mind about what's going on. He just insists on outsourcing the final decision to Orga, offering his own body and desires as a sacrifice to what he assumes is something better than this own thoughts. This sucks because Mika on his own is interested in engineering, agriculture and spending time with those around him. Orga becomes fixated on getting rich quick in as loud and violent a way as possible, certain that with enough of a reputation nobody would dare cross the group again. It's a path pretty much guaranteed to make enemies, even before Orga is embroiled in mobster politics, aristocrat infighting and recruited by one of the dumbest fascists since Gihren Zabi. Orga made it through his younger years through forming extremely tight bonds with a select few people, but this compels him to loyalty to far worse people who don't deserve his time or troops even if they spoke to him first. This all leads to Orga treating Mika not as a friend with his own interests and life, but a gun to slay human foes and the operating system of his strongest mobile suit. It's such a toxic relationship and yet perfectly understandable why they're both like this.
Kudelia Aina Bernstein (hereafter just Kudelia. I don't think I need to pad the word count on this piece) could be read as a continuation of the attempts at exploring young woman politicians started back in Wing with Relena Darlian Peacecraft Darlian. Gundam 00's Marina Ismail explicitly avoided any of the wild serves in narrative Relena went through (is she a story about revenge? Revolution? Undermining the establishment? Achieving change through sheer force of will and charisma? All of these? None of them?), Kudelia very much feels like an attempt at taking the concept and actually making a real character. Her initial attempts at connecting with the working class are treated as an absurd joke; Kudelia too unobservant to tell the differene between intentional slights and the boys being too polite to let the machine grease on their hands stain her. She has an attendant and advisor of her own who serves as much a plant by her sponsour as a serious mentor. When said attendant winds up taking a bullet for her, Kudelia starts taking better lessons from her losses than the rest of the boys do. Her resolve to make a difference stiffens, but she realises just how little show knows about how the world works and how despite the space colony riots beginning around her, she is not equipped to bring about the revolution others are expecting of her. This particularly stings as reach the third opening theme, a song practically screaming at the cast to stop messing about and overthrow the injustice of the current world order while Kudelia... runs a mining company and does small scale philanthropy. Of course, it's not until the final few episodes we really learn why she's so passive in the second half of the show. Her main sponsour, the genteel treat boy Nobliss Gordon is an arms dealer. There's no point staging a revolution if it's going to have Raytheon branding on every flag. Even as the show ends, her first glance liberal democratic methods are more a guise she's adopted to conceal the seething rage she's developed since the show's events. It may not be soon, but there's still a chance she puts two bullets in Rustal Elion's head in another decade or two before kissing her wife.
Sorry how did that last sentence end? It's time to talk about my hero Atra Mixta. The world of Iron Blooded Orphans is too poor for anybody to own a haro or haro-adjacent mascot, so we simply have a young woman who fits the bill instead. Short, scrawny and a stammering mess, Atra is the exact opposite of Kudelia's refinement and expensive education. Still, the girl escaped a life of sex work on her own, learned to read, write and cook as fast as she can and is seen at the wheel of more automobiles than almost any other character in the franchise. She's established as a friend of Mikazuki's for the last few years with some classic anime childhood friend romantic tension and that's brought all the more to the forefront every time she sees Kudelia and Mika in a scene together. It's all blocked out as your usual boilerplate anime love triangle situation but Atra never makes the right facial expressions or the pining "Mikazuki..." lines one would expect. She's always just looking and thinking at both of them in a curious way, occasionally muttering that they look better together than she ever would. It's fun material to pay attention to on a rewatch, knowing where it all leads. That begins 11 episodes in when Atra is hit with the lightning bolt realisations that she's both bisexual and polyamorous and immediately starts flopping around a total mess like in the image at the start of this piece. The remaining 39 episodes are peppered with our bi disaster hero fumbling the bad boy and bitch she's so desperately after only to have even less idea what to do when both reciprocate. It's not like this is the only thing Atra has going on; she's one of the few characters with a stable sense of morality throughout the show and in her own way presents a vision of what everyone should be aiming to build and protect in the first place. Is it burying your gays to kill the man in a MFF thruple? I'd still say so; non-monogamy is as much a part of breaking a cisgendered, heteronormative nuclear family as the gay parts. Yet, this is still a show which ends with a canon homosexual relationship seven years before Gundam's most famous example to date.
Atra had to learn about non-monogamy from somewhere and that source is a much more complicated aspect of the show: the mob-affiliated trading company The Turbines. They're an all-woman company headed by a man whose policy is that all adult female employees are his wives. Given that the company is mostly a support program for women in need, this feels like it's trying to riff on Johnny from Guilty Gear (and Arbrau prime minister Makanai Togonosuke looks a whole lot like Kum Haeyun so I guess everyone was big on the early stages of Xrd during pre-production), it all comes off as weirder and grosser than it should. Perhaps if there were just a couple of women who had that relationship status with him it would work better. Still, this is a world with broken, fucked up relationships all over the place, people frequently making questionable decisions and an ongoing criticism of Patriarchy. Naze Turbine dies and while the girls are meant to fall under the protection of the mob's boss, he doesn't do a particularly good job of doing so and they only really pull things back together when one of their own women takes charge and dons the exact same white suits in one of the coolest lesbian moves in the show (second coolest is probably how Atra gave Kudelia that hand-braded bracelet without fumbling the moment).
This is a show about boys and men and much like G Gundam, it's about how assuming they have to behave in certain ways only serves to make them worse. Orga thinks he needs to be a fast-paced, decisive, risky leader and it costs him everything. Mikazuki thinks men need to act more than think, and it only enables his closest friend's worst tendencies. McGillis believes men should be mighty lone wolf leaders above it all and gets even more allies killed than Orga.Countless men take to thuggery, piracy and abuse of those they consider weaker than themselves and it only makes their own lives more miserable. Iron Blooded Orphans isn't necessarily causing for the removal of all men from power, but it is one that asserts a need for women to feel empowered and have an equal role in decision making if we are to live in a better world.
Gundam is at its best when it's delivered as a 50 episode television show. This may well be the last ever made. If so, it is in many ways a culmination of decades of thought how to use the format to craft emotional, thoughtful, haunting science fiction. Where Zeta Gundam ends in tragedy as a shocking swerve, Iron Blooded Orphans is an intentional tragedy which if anything resonates even stronger in 2025 than it did in 2015. It doesn't have to be your favourite. Hell, I didn't think I'd ever watch this show again but sometimes even my clumsy fumbling pays off.
I sure hope the next entry is as good as this!
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