#GQuuuuuuux

[nijigasakilove]

His name is Shirouzu→ Shirou(四郎, 四 means 4)→ 4 in Italian is Quattro, so......

[wordsandrobots]

I suppose Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is not bad in the ways The Witch From Mercury was.

OK, I'm well aware that's an incendiary statement and I apologise, but 1) it's true and 2) I mean exactly what I say. My dislike of G-Witch was rooted primarily in the story being a shoddy mess, flying on moment-to-moment emotion rather than thematic coherency or the basic competency required to structure a long-form piece of media. That aggravated me, quite out of proportion to what would, had it been executed well, have been a rather tepid – if sweetly rendered – love story-slash-family drama.

And I want to be upfront about that not being the kind of criticism I have for GQuuuuuuX. Where G-Witch was full of meandering dead-ends and invocations of ideas it had no interest in exploring, this new show is aggressively tight. We don't faff around with side characters or get diverted into areas that never tie into the main plot, and there are no dangling threads left at the end. It's all very neat and tidy.

Neat, tidy, and thoroughly, depressingly boring.

The elephant in the room is that I'm not actually a Gundam fan, merely an Iron-Blooded Orphans fan who got curious about the franchise his favourite anime came attached to. I'm certainly not a Universal Century Gundam Fan. I have considerable respect for the first three Gundam series plus movie directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino, but it's tempered by an overall lack of enjoyment. I just don't like the original version of Gundam very much. Even setting aside the actual flaws – erratic pacing, persistent sexism, racist dog-whistling baked into central premises – there's nothing in the generational conflict, psychedelic metaphors and horrors of war (TM) to particularly interest me.

Which means I am definitively not the intended audience for Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, the latest and most oddly named entry in the franchise, a show that appears to operate on the underlying assumption one considers the 1979 Gundam anime and its timeline to hold intrinsic importance.

It's literally a what-if where the Principality of Zeon defeated the Earth Federation rather than vise versa. Not an alternative universe in the way Gundam usually does them, only repeating the outlines of imagery and themes. An actual honest to goodness multiverse-evoking AU, where the most obvious thrill is playing spot-the-difference and the spectre of this not being 'real' hangs over proceedings.

[The basic emptiness of your standard multiverse – that there are canonical versions of the characters to care about to the exclusion of all variants – has few solutions when executed within the boundaries of pre-existing media. Into the Spider Verse offers the nearest analogue to what GQuuuuuuX attempts, as it firmly focuses on the 'other' Spider-Man, powering through by insisting he is the main character regardless of any meta-rankings available to the audience. If no 'prime' timeline is acknowledged (and anything resembling one is scrupulously avoided) then the problem becomes moot.]

[The key word in that aside is 'attempts'.]

[By which I mean –

This has stopped being an aside. By which I mean, we are nominally meant to focus on new characters, or characters so ill-defined in the original version, these iterations might as well be someone else entirely. Machu, Nyaan, Shuji, Challia Bull, Xavier, and even to some extent Kycilia Zabi are distinct enough that it should be easy to consider this story theirs alone.

However, the thing – the thing, the core of the matter – is that GQuuuuuuX has no interest in shutting up about its predecessor. It looks at the looming shadow of the source material and whole-heartedly embraces it.

This is not done haphazardly. The cameos work. But the work they are performing is in large part to make a comparison to Mobile Suit Gundam. It's like the mechanical design: different enough to smack of potential and individuality, but ultimately in service of recreating the old more than producing something genuinely new.

This is Machu's story in the sense of following her journey from jumping into the GQuuuuuuX's cockpit to beating up the giant ghost of Gundams past and chilling on a beach with her MAV (I still don't know if it's a power move or cowardice to never have defined the acronym). But I'm hard pressed to consider the show truly committed to being about her, or about Nyaan, who experiences the bulk of the requisite emotional wrangling.

They are there, at the centre of the action, with an arc defined on their terms, navigating awkward teenager emotions like 'falling for the same guy' and 'running away to commit war-crimes for a would-be genocidal dictator because you didn't know how to apologise to your only friend'. Yet in the end, every challenge thrown at them boils down to '1979 intruded into their timeline and shit got weird'. Because of course it's actually a story about Shuji, revealed to be the central macguffin around whim events have been turning. A mysterious weirdo huffing far too much spray-paint and serving as a talisman of Machu and Nyaan's desire to escape a mundane world of death and taxes, he possess a connection to the Gundam (the 1979 Gundam, not the GQuuuuuuX mobile suit that gets top billing, or the Red Gundam we initially assume he's speaking for). This turns out to be because he's a traveller from another dimension, who has been chasing a comatose, world-hopping Lalah Sune. Everyone fights about it. It's very climactic.

Oh, no, right. This is *actually* a story about Lalah Sune, isn't it?

Isn't it?

It's…

Let me start over.

Machu is a bored 17-year-old , chafing at the confines of a mundane, career-focused life on one of the Side 6 colonies. She encounters a refugee named Nyaan, a delivery girl for the black market fleeing bullying cops, and together they are drawn into both an illegal fighting ring and political intrigue involving the rulers of the triumphant Zeon. These events lead Machu and Nyaan to meet Shuji, a weirdo hermit boy with a pet robot who imagines his mobile suit can talk to him and has access to a fantastical cosmic phenomenon dubbed the Kira-Kira.

Machu is able to join him in this altered space thanks to hijacking the GQuuuuuuX and becomes infatuated with him/it as a result. This puts tension on her burgeoning relationship with Nyaan, who she begins to view as a rival for Shuji's affections. At the same time, Shuji's desire to reach Earth (supposedly at the behest of the red Gundam) becomes a shared daydream between the girls, representing escape from their various daily problems. Things reach boiling point when Nyaan proves a far more capable pilot for the GQuuuuuuX and falls head over heels for the Kira-Kira, which Machu interprets as her stealing away Shuji and Machu's own 'special' connection to him.

Events with the conspiracy plot then run out of control, causing everyone to be scattered, with Shuji disappearing up a dimensional whatsit because he had an emotional reaction to Nyaan asking him to come with her and the girls getting drawn into rival factions within Zeon. Nyaan, suffering from rejection and guilt over Shuji vanishing, allows herself to be conscripted for the chance to Kira-Kira hard enough to get him back. Machu, meanwhile, encounters a semi-sympathetic authority figure who allows her to roam free in order to track down the source of various weird phenomena affecting this universe. In the course of doing so, she uncovers hints of the tragedy that lies behind Shuji's mission. Armed with this knowledge, she rushes to confront her friends, arriving in time to stop Nyaan from doing something appalling. This allows Nyaan to embrace her relationship with Machu when given a choice between that and assuaging her guilt, and the pair team up to prevent Shuji from likewise committing a terrible act. In the end, Machu faces off against Shuji's gigantic extra-dimensional mecha, refusing to allow him to go through with a plan that is sensible on the surface but involves a sacrifice Machu will not stand for –

[Wait. Hold on. Hey, so I know Yōji Enokido wrote for Star Driver and I can think of far worse things to crib from, but this is a little bit on the nose, don't you think? And not even an unequivocal endorsement of polyamory to top things off…]

Anyway, Machu is able to show Shuji he's allowed his mission to override his true feelings, Shuji declares his love for Machu, they kiss, things resolve peacefully, the Good Princess ascends to the throne of Zeon owing to the Evil Queen dying in the final battle, and Machu and Nyaan retire to a beach on Earth, finally achieving their dream of freedom, with Machu confident that while Shuji has disappeared again, they'll reunite someday.

What you may have noticed about the above summary is that this largely avoids things of the nature of 'tying off a dangling plot-hook from a 45-year-old anime'. It's self-contained, consistent with itself, and unconcerned with what we might consider 'fannish' questions, such as resolving issues of canon or 'lore'. You could easily do this story without any Gundam trappings whatsoever, if you wanted.

Being a recently-turned 38-year-old who has engaged with a not-inconsiderable amount of comparable media, I personally find Shuji's declaration that he has 'never met anyone like' Machu rings utterly hollow. There are hundreds of similar tales, dealing with exactly these kinds of emotional stakes. It's very far from original. But if we allow that originality is not a pre-eminent virtue, we should judge the execution on its own merits.

Here is where we run into the major problem plaguing GQuuuuuuX, as a series. That plot summary? I would barely be exaggerating if I told you the show delivers the adventure in an identically brisk fashion. We get all the pieces needed for the beats to function, but absolutely not one jot more. There is only just enough runtime awarded to the arcs of the central characters for their actions to follow from their personalities and circumstances. Beyond that, the space available in this twelve episode run is devoted to something else entirely.

Namely: Golly gee, look! We did a Gundam AU!

There is a forty-five minute prologue to GQuuuuuuX detailing the events of MSG if Char Aznable – resident charismatic schemer and comical hat-wearer – had gotten his hands on the Gundam. Since including this wholesale in the episodic version (there is a cinematic cut of the early episodes) would have meant releasing the series with the actual main cast vestigial in their own introduction, the flashback was made the entire second episode instead. This is what might be considered 'a bold move', thoroughly kills the forward momentum not half an hour in, but I do appreciate the bluntness of the approach, revealing as it is of the creative priorities for this show.

Because I don't think there's a solid argument for so extensive a flashback being at all necessary. We need to know several pieces of key information contained within, namely that Challia Bull (who Char manoeuvrers to his death in the original timeline) is now Char's protege and co-conspirator on a plan to remove the Zeon leadership; that Char's use of the Gundam tipped the scales in Zeon's favour during the war; and that Char disappeared towards the war's end, when a confrontation with his estranged sister Artesia was interrupted by a massive version of the Kira-Kira effect, later dubbed a 'Zeknova'. That's not a lot. Certainly, I would say, not forty-five minutes' worth of context.

No, the joy here is in the redux. It's in going over events from Mobile Suit Gundam, imagining how they might play out differently if the starting conditions suffered an alteration. The Gundam gets painted red! The Federation never develops GMs! Gihren and Kycilia Zabi survive the war! Dozle still doesn't! New variants of the Guncannon! Artesia gets to drive one! Solomon is nearly dropped on Granada! Char never meets Lalah –

We'll…

We'll come back to that.

It's all lovingly rendered, with a keen eye for when to replicate the artistic choices of the original and when to adjust them. It understands that MSG is frequently quite beautiful and why. It is also the place we can most clearly say, in a derogatory fashion, that this is just Universal Century fanfic.

If the point is just to ask 'what if', what then is the value of that exercise?

To an extent, I suppose there doesn't have to be any beyond the fun of playing with familiar toys. I'm a fanfic writer myself. I'd go so far as applauding anyone taking a corporation's money to put their fix-it on the big screen. That's extremely funny. There is a niche, broader than it probably should be but present nonetheless, for 'official fanfic', allowing creative people to stack up their favourite bricks and make a bunch of in-jokes on the company dime. I'm disinclined to be too dismissive of this as an exercise, if only because throwing that particular rock risks getting glass everywhere.

Even so… is it unreasonable to ask for more? In-jokes are an occasional treat but hardly a meal on their own and nobody likes to be thought of as a clapping seal, satisfied merely with gleeful recognition. Mobile Suit Gundam is, above all else, a show with something to say. There's plenty of scope here for a conversation with its messages, infusing the delirious rearrangement with concrete meaning.

Since GQuuuuuuX concludes with a battle between our new heroes and a monstrously gigantic version of the original 'white devil' Gundam, Machu convincing Shuji to stop blindly following what he erroneously thinks is the only way to do right by an avatar of the original show, we must consider the possibility that the message is about escaping the weight of 'Gundam' as a concept and forging something new. That's a trivial read, isn't it? And if it is the correct one, then let me be the first to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

No, but seriously: are you fucking kidding? Did anyone actually imagine doing it this way was how you sell that kind of meta-commentary? Like I already said, GQuuuuuuX, as a product, loves the shadow cast by Tomino's Gundam. It wants to marry that shadow! GQuuuuuuX and MSG, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Sure, this show thinks the original Gundam is kind of sinister and wants to position Machu as a 'true' newtype, correcting Shuji and Char's overbearing attitudes. At a narrative level, I see how you could get to reading this as a commentary on growing beyond one's roots, or a tale about the interplay between younger and older generations, using Gundam iconography as a stand-in for the old guard.

But as a finished product, GQuuuuuuX name-drops, with considerable fanfare, Gates Capa, Zeta Gundam's most 'he sure was there' cyber-newtype. It hinges a not inconsiderable amount on the audience being aware of who Artesia/Sayla Mass is, why we care when Char realises he’s fighting his sister, and that it can be considered an improvement if she takes his place as a leader of Zeon. It fully expects you to know the major beats of MSG and how clever it is at subverting them.

I'm not expecting a total rejection of Gundam here. That would be ridiculous. Reclaiming what is best from the past while not allowing it to dominate the future is a perfectly fine sentiment. I still find it laughable to suggest a series that devotes an entire episode and a half to doing over the original in miniature and absolutely hammers the audience with shot-for-shot recreations of Famous Gundam Moments (TM) can convincingly communicate such a message. That's preaching abstinence while running a brewery. You don't get to make your entire pitch 'roll up, roll up, see the amazing Gundam 0079 AU', then pivot to 'well we ought to consider how best to navigate the legacy of long-standing media properties in a way that allows them to remain fresh and vibrant while honouring the legacy of previous works'. Get real. You name-dropped Gates Capa.

Actually, the whole incident with the Titans is quite illustrative. This serves as the third in a series of asides with different Clan Battle mobile teams, each acting as a prefigurative mirror to the main characters. Ex-Federal Forces pilot Shiiko Sugai throws her life away trying to conclude a grudge from the war, abandoning connections of the present in a way that parallels Shuji's attempts to do the same. The demobbed Black Tri-Stars, down a member since Mash went into politics, are as disgruntled with their lot as Nyaan and showcase Zeon using people up and spitting them out, the very peril she risks to bring Shuji back from the Other Side. And Deux, the weird cyber-newtype dog-girl Gates is here to babysit, alludes to Machu's growing partnership with the GQuuuuuux by seeing herself as the heart of the giant Psycho Gundam. Only freakish and weird and definitely hitting someone's kink square on the head.

Ah, yes. The Psycho Gundam. Used as an over-powered monster of the week, an excuse to up-end the status quo so everybody can get off Side 6 and go do useful plot-furthering things, and never mentioned again.

I raised my eyebrows when this episode aired because if you know anything about the first three Gundam series, you'll know that's not how the Psycho Gundam works, as a narrative device. Far from being an one-off monster, it is a foe with a deeply personal connection to the protagonist(s), via its poor, doomed pilots. It's a fully-formed dark reflection of what newtypes can or should be, the girls within compelled to do battle by a twisted version of the 'fight for what you love' ethic that defines Lalah Sune, the OG newtype of whom they are lesser copies.

…we're getting there, I promise.

The Psycho Gundam has weight to it, in its original context. An illustration of everything that can go wrong with sending young people to war, of their exploitation by establishment forces and potential for killing on a massive scale. Also it makes an excellent monster, because it's flipping huge and evil-looking, pitching familiar design cues over the edge into 'this is going to eat you alive'. Like so many things in GQuuuuuux, introducing it as a 'world-ending' twist is a good choice.

Yet the result is weightless. I can draw the parallel with Machu, but there's no sense in which the show itself goes out of its way to do so. The Psycho Gundam arrives… blows up down-town Side 6 to try and kill Kycilia… then gets exploded by Challia. Machu and Deux never interact in any meaningful way. Gates is swatted like a bug and the Titans play no further role. So why bother? Why expend precious minutes setting this up? Even if they were genuinely going for a parallel, it's not an important one. The previous two ClanBat teams are considerably more significant in that regard. This is just – well, it's just because. It's they gave us money, let's redo all the classics. It's imagery alone, separate from what that imagery originally meant.

Literally all that is required of the episode the Psycho Gundam appears in is to propel Machu and Nyaan on to the next stage of the plot. This does the job, but the fan-pleasing inclusion adds nothing concrete because it could have been anything. A meteor strike, a police raid, Machu's mum finding out what's been going on. I'm not asking why they went with a callback instead; that much is plain, see above, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. What I'm trying to point out is that if you separate the iconography from its meaning, you reduce its presence to an empty signifier.

The Psycho Gundam as a version of how Kycilia uses Nyaan? As an mirror of Shuji's situation? As Machu and the GQuuuuuux's evil twin?

Nah, no time, we need to hit the fanservice quota then quick-pressé the next few character beats because – I cannot stress this enough – we spent animation budget on a Gates Capa cameo. The plot is speed-run in precise proportion to the amount of space waffled away on for-the-sake-of-itself references, and the result is… is …

All right. Fine. Fine! I guess I can't keep avoiding it for another three thousand words.

The death of Lalah Sune is the load-bearing tragedy of Mobile Suit Gundam. The long shadow within the long shadow that is Gundam's history. Killing off this girl to further the development of the boys in her orbit is as core a component to the whole thing as you could hope to find. Naturally, therefore, GQuuuuuux's AU is ultimately revealed to rest on a version of Lalah as well.

Who may in fact be the 'real' Lalah.

Except she isn't. At all. Because this show doesn't seem to understand Lalah Sune or her death as anything other than an icon of the franchise.

Lalah could have been the herald of a new age. She and fellow teen-pilot Amuro Ray could have been friends, lovers, soul-mates. She could have shown Char a healthy way forward. Only, of course, she and Amuro meet too late, when they're already trapped on opposing sides in the war.

She is the one to confront Amuro with the moral question of why do you fight? Lalah can answer this: she fights to protect the man she loves, who saved her from the ill-defined circumstances of her past. Unlike Amuro who has to be press-ganged and cajoled into battle, Lalah has a purpose, right from the start. By her assessment, this is the more natural state. You fight to defend what you care about, the people or homeland in your heart. Anything else is, by implication, inhuman.

This message sinks in. By the end of MSG, Amuro has passed through trying to take out the Zabi family in order to stop the war and moved on to using his psychic abilities to guide his crew-mates – his friends, his home – to safety. Newtypes should not be aimless weapons, fired by whoever can pull their strings, but protectors, keeping each other from harm. This is the optimism Amuro embraces, contra Char's more cynical claim that war is necessary to bring out newtype strength. The final argument places Lalah and Amuro in one corner and Char, the other, as pay-off for Lalah's despair over finding herself fighting someone who should be her ally.

It's not a particularly nuanced debate. It doesn't particularly need to be. Things continue in much this vein until Char's Counter Attack, where Amuro is still berating his long-time rival for being a cynical sod with no faith in humanity. The extent to which the story – or indeed the author – agrees with him is interesting to map, but I want to focus on Lalah herself. In outline, she is a somewhat worrisome concept. A magical Indian girl attuned to things beyond the material world, hypnotically beautiful and devoted to her handsome blonde captain? This could easily be a recipe for disaster, especially given her role is to die for Char and to traumatise Amuro. Tomino has a long list of sacrificial female characters to his name, hardly counterbalanced by his equally free-handed killing of male characters, and he's frequently quite dodgy on race too (looking at you, Turn A Gundam).

The thing about Lalah, though, is that she is important. Her significance isn't earned merely from the act of providing Amuro a moral compass with which to navigate his newtype status; it is built up over a solid seven episode block prior to her death, painting a picture of a girl who is at odds with mundane reality but far from a naïve waif. She states outright in her first episode that she's aware Char only took her under his wing because of her extra-sensory perception. She allows him to throw her into the war extremely fast, struggles with controlling remote attack drones under combat conditions, and experiences first hand how quick Zeon soldiers are to defer to newtypes when it comes to undertaking dangerous missions. Once she finds her bearings – plus confidence in Char's presence alongside her – she quickly racks up a body-count comparable to Amuro's. We see, in effect, her undergo a compressed version of the conditions that brought the protagonist of the show to the point where his reaction speed is outpacing the Gundam's.

It's an intriguing parallel, particularly because it happens on Char's direct orders. Yes, Lalah adores him. But he's accelerating her development for his own ends – and I think we're meant to recognise that Lalah knows this, going along with it because she loves him anyway.

Perhaps that's a stretch. Perhaps I'm misreading the cues. Despite what it might appear, I come into these things expecting I will be proved wrong at some point. I'm talking about fiction written in another language, from another culture, 46 years after the fact. There's no guarantee my interpretation is what was intended.

Still, a tension undoubtedly exists within Char and Lalah's relationship. Kycilia thinks meeting Lalah made him believe in newtypes. We know Amuro played a roll in this too, but Lalah is clearly a key part of his motivation shifting to wanting to build a future for newtypes. In his arrogance, he appoints himself as judge of who is allowed into that future and how it should be shaped. Lalah lets him dictate her life, yet after her death she stands at odds with him on this. Even before then, when he defers to her authority in the battle against the Gundam, she orders him to put on a spacesuit, implicitly criticising his assumption that he can always bring back his mobile suit in one piece. Obviously she does this because she loves him. It is nonetheless push back against his high-handed attitude.

How much you feel any of this counts within the broader tropes, I don't know. It's still important to map the contours of the way Lalah is presented to us. Quite apart from anything else, the show tells us it's Amuro she's star-crossed with, not Char. Amuro is the one she laments did not come to her sooner, who she is horrified to find herself fighting. And that's Char's fault, in major part.

Saying 'Lalah loves Char and dies to protect him' is therefore a very incomplete description of what happens during the penultimate battle of Mobile Suit Gundam, as plot threads that have been percolating throughout the show crash together. Amuro and Lalah's powers project them into liminal space, allowing them to gain a total understanding of each other. Char, blinkered by the here and now, arrives to attack Amuro, ordering Lalah to 'stop fooling around with him'. Sayla flies inadvisedly close, trying to get Char to see sense, prompting him to swing at her fighter and Lalah to hold him back from accidentally killing his sister. Amuro, enraged, takes advantage of this opening to attack Char. And just as our boy is about to skewer the red-clothed bastard right in the Gelgoog, Lalah moves her mobile armour into his path, the beam-sabre vaporising her cockpit.

As much as fate or destiny has a hand in everyone coming to this deadly pass, the tragedy plays out through their decisions. Nobody is passive. They act according to their natures and their instincts, and Lalah transcends her death (in one of the most beautifully animated sequences in all of Gundam), showing just how far newtypes can really go. Thereafter, she continues to haunt the narrative(s) as both guilty burden and guiding light.

She is fascinating. A real Gordian Knot of Gundam's strengths and weaknesses. If you were to, say, imagine an alternate take on MSG, it might be an interesting exercise to consider how a character like her would have developed free of Char's influence. Would she be doomed to suffer under other poisoned saviours? Or could she break out on her own, a blooming flower of empathic possibility rather than a doomed, dying swan? I think, were I to attempt this exercise, she and Sayla would be the characters I'd most want to explore, beyond their roles in the existing narrative.

Thus I can only conclude GQuuuuuux was written to spite me, personally.

The first version of Lalah we meet is native to Machu's timeline: one who never met Char. Six years after the conclusion of the war, she is still on Earth, working at a brothel (I enjoyed watching The Origin and even I despair over having to hand it to that production, but it wasn't this crass). Not only that, she's stuck in a refrain of Someday My Prince Will Come, her psychic powers allowing her to see a rescue that never happened. The entirety of her characterisation is despair over not having met Char. You know, the guy who in the original version is 1) the reason she dies and 2) emblematic of the other side of the debate from 'newtypes should not be weapons'. I'm not saying it's wrong to read Lalah as in love with Char, but to reduce her to it, entirely?

That's extremely dull. And makes me think several key components of MSG flew over somebody's head. Especially since GQuuuuuux's next move is to reveal a *second* version of Lalah, frozen in time inside her mobile armour at the bottom of the ocean.

You see, in a putative 'true original' version of the events in MSG, it was Char who died in the fight with Amuro, not Lalah. Stricken with grief, OG!Lalah used her phenomenal cosmic power to create an alternate timeline where that didn't happen. Only, unfortunately, Char dying in a battle with Amuro is apparently a multiversal constant, so she kept witnessing it and kept freaking out over it and creating new universes in an attempt to save him. On and on this went, until she arrived in the GQuuuuuux version of events, where Char got the Gundam and never met her, and she could accept the latter if it meant he kept on living. Unfortunately, Quacks!Char cottoned on to her manipulation of the timeline, decided he didn't like it, and tricked Kycilia into building a huge dimensional gateway through which to punt the intrusion, actively rejecting the version that allowed him to survive because, I don't know, he's a contrary muppet who shouldn't be left in charge of a milk-float, let alone the future of humanity.

Meanwhile Shuji, who cares about Lalah for reasons never established but strongly implied to be linked to some version of Amuro (by which I mean they got the original voice actor back in for a couple of lines, which is a – shall we say – loaded decision given recent events), has been following behind OG!Lalah and mercy-killing iterations of her so she doesn't have to go through the grief explosion trauma any more. Something something endless cycle of tragedy and oh my stars and muses where do I even begin with this bollocks?

First of all, my instinctive reaction of 'newtypes don't work like that' is valid only insofar as the actual original Gundam series never raise the concept of alternate universes or going back in time to alter the past. Yes, Amuro thinks newtypes will be able to control time and Lalah can see time, but this is used to establish a perspective far beyond the limited, earth-bound ambitions of the Zabis and the Federation elites. There's never any sense in which time-bending is the point. Rather it represents everything everybody could be doing if they weren't killing each other for the sake of greed and hatred. But OK, fine, newtypes can create universes now. Whatever.

Second of all – remember everything I spelled out a few paragraphs ago about how Char bears a greater deal of responsiblity for what happens in MSG, how his intervention actively prevents Amuro and Lalah from meeting under constructive circumstances? Well, all of that! I get why you'd latch on to 'Lalah loves Char' as a defining part of her character. It is. But there's so much more there! Yet the thing these wazzocks took from that is 'oh I bet her powers would run out of control if Char had died instead'? 'Wouldn't it be awful if she kept trying to save Char and it kept failing?' 'What it it was fate, huh?' 'What then?'

That. Is. Not. The. Part. Where. Fate. Plays. A. Role. In. Mobile. Suit. Gundam. If anything, if we are going to talk about terrible fate, Char is an agent of it against Lalah. Which, OK, very clever, he gets to do that again by rejecting her Poly-Anna present. Only the net result is still this:

We're now meant to read MSG as the solution to this hypothetical problem.

Right? That's the implication, that after Machu stops Shuji and OG!Lalah wakes up and is for once allowed to move on peacefully, she goes back and dies in Char's place so events can play out as they are 'supposed to'. Lalah's entire purpose, textually, as a person, is reduced to saving Char. Not dying because that blonde numbskull couldn't get over himself for five minutes and accept that maybe he couldn't beat the fifteen-year-old nuclear bomb. Not dying when a split-second of rage on Amuro's part finally bears horrible consequences after forty episodes of him tantruming his way across the battlefield. Not dying to show how thoroughly fucked up it is that multiple world powers gladly feed their children in meat-grinders.

No, Lalah Sune dies making sure the events of 0079 go the way they were meant to. And also I guess Shuji gets to stop playing the most depressing game of transcendental whack-a-mole.

Hoo-flipping-ray.

I have been grappling with this farrago for several weeks, because I could see where this was going from the exact second Quacks!Lalah started talking about how Char was always fated to die. And I hate it. I hate it because of its complete inability to articulate anything about Lalah Sune as a concept.

Is it saying something about how Gundam's history looms large over its present, how each iteration is a the warped child of its predecessors, how we need to be willing to let the kids stand on their own two feet and not put them down for their own good?

Maybe. Probably. Perhaps.

I don't think it's doing any of those things especially well, because, as discussed, it's pressing 'skip' on all the cutscenes to get to more continuity porn.

Equally: I don't care.

I don't care! This is insipid. Pointless! Frankly insulting to what it's supposedly paying homage. They included a re-animation of the fight where Lalah dies, as illustration for this faux-original version of events, and all the important dialogue has been cut out. We get none of the voice lines or character exchanges through which the actual original version conveys the meaning of what's happening. I honestly think that fairly adequately sums up everything wrong with GQuuuuuuX.

Images, shorn of substance. Like the Psycho Gundam. Like Lalah. This isn't a conversation with the work on which it's riffing. A conversation would require some acknowledgement of what the work actually said. GQuuuuuuX prefers to mute MSG's voice and do its own thing.

Apparently, newtypes are defined by their suffering and having the strength to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps now. Funny. I thought that was the Red Comet's line. Seem to remember the other two parts of MSG's Catastrophe Throuple taking issue with it. Well, who cares. Look at the Gundam! It's gotten huge and turned totally white because it's known as the White Devil! You get it, yeah? Don't you? That's meta-commentary, that is.

I am bored by this show. I was bored before I began watching it and nothing it had to offer elevated my opinion off the floor. I could do more work to talk about the things I think it did well. The art style, the mecha design, the opening sequence. Or I could go on more rants about its read on UC canon, such as how it imputes maternal instinct in Kycilia Zabi of all people, for the sake of a cheap inversion of Char's infamous 'she could have been a mother to me' line. I have decided, however, that I simply cannot be bothered.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux has a solid grasp on plotting and how to tell a story focused on a particular goal. It conveys its message of the Kids Are Alright with cut-throat directness. It simply cannot afford to do anything else because it is otherwise swamped with a boatload of surface-level impressions of an extremely well-directed anime that I am sure had a big impact on the authors of this complete misunderstanding of what Mobile Suit Gundam was talking about. Or perhaps they got it and I didn't, in which case I dislike the Universal Century even more than I thought.

What I know for sure is the frustration I felt overThe Witch From Mercury's terrible plotting ultimately stemmed from how much potential that show had. It threw out so many ideas, so fast, it positively sizzled with possibility. The net result was a hot mess, but at least it was hot.

In comparison, this conflux of all-consuming veneration for past images, warmed-over teenage angst narratives, and bargain-basement fanfic concepts lands with the vim and vigour of a wet fart.

Let us never speak of it again.

[creature-unlimited]

they just announced G Gundam 2 and they're putting yuri in it this time

[hybridreviews]

G-Quacks! G-QUAX? G-QUX? I don't know.

[trans-ralsei]

revolutionary girl char aznable

[yuritxrt]

Happy machu day to those who celebrate

[darthpeezy]

I will say that as indifferent as I am to G-Cucks on a thematic level, I find it hilarious that Char getting a single dub over Amuro (in an alternate universe where Amuro literally never got into the robot and so Char quite literally only got a dub by default) made our boy so angry he transcended universes just to fold the chillest Char in half.

G-Cucks is not a serious show and I love it for that.

[teenagemutation]

Gundam GQUuuuuuuX

[gremoria411]

Okay, new Gundam G Generation game. I can’t think it won’t be on consoles, so I’m pretty hyped. I probably won’t shut up about this for quite a while.

But that’s not precisely why I’m making this post.

See, we also have another Gundam announcement;

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux, which looks to be a theatrical release. Don’t know if it’s UC or an AU yet (I’m betting UC, since there’s a very Zaku-esque mobile suit in the trailer).

Now the new mobile suit design reminded me of something, so I did a little digging and found this:

The D Gundam First, a mobile suit from the Manga Under the Gundam: Double Fake, from 1988.

And guess what mobile suit also appears in the new trailer for Sd Gundam G Generations Eternal?

[offbeateurobeatmiku]

So fucking hype for GQuuuuuuuX, it looks really good I hope there's yuri again

(also the new gundam design fucks I really want a gunpla of it)

[nijigasakilove]

FINALLY we get more Char and went back to the OYW to see what really happened that day. I love seeing all the cool what-if style twists in this alternate timeline. This dope, a lot of cool concepts and ideas introduced. The sky’s really the limits with this show we’re in uncharted territory and I’m enjoying every second.

It’s funny how we’re aping so many concepts from across the UC. Last week we did a lot of zeta stuff, now we’re getting more CCA and unicorn style stuff. Instead of an Axis shock, it’s a Solomon shock in this timeline. The big miracle is char preventing Solomon from destroying Granada. Sayla becoming this timeline’s big newtype pilot was a nice twist too! I kinda wanna see the sorts of battles she was getting into and what Bright was getting up to as well.

I feel like what Char saw was probably similar to unicorn OVA 7 and what he(technically frontal) showed Banagher. Maybe the Kirakira is something that connects multiple timelines and universes. A 4 dimensional space between universes that exists outside of time. Maybe that’s me being too marvel/DC but given the dialogue about char seeing time and talking to someone.. it would fit.

I really liked watching the stuff on Granada with Nyaan and Kycilia. The theories that she and Machu are this timeline’s char and Haman feel so real now lol! It’s odd seeing her in full Zeon attire, but she and Kycilia seem to have a student teacher relationship and while Kycilia is definitely using her, you can see how comfortable Nyaan feels. She finally has something that’s just for her, that she doesn’t have to share with Machu or anyone and I think that sense of purpose and loyalty to Kycilia she’ll inevitably develop will be a big part of the story going forward.

Miguel being a spy was so obvious lmao. He was too eager to bake Nyaan a cake. Buddy got turned into cheese by Nyaan using her psychic control of the GFreD, oof. When she gets full control of that thing it’ll be scary. Also it literally looks just like Eva 01 and the way they set her up as the pilot is almost a 1:1 copy of the scene from Evangelion lol.

Next week should be a Machu episode. Can’t wait to see what she’s been getting up to, I just know she has to feel so betrayed by Nyaan abandoning her.. WAIT LALAH IN THE PREVIEW OH MY GOD WHAT IS SUNRISE COOKING??

Edit: also just rewatched the last few mins. No way that’s really char right??!!

[wormfoo]

gqux finale 💪 (thoughts below the cut)

LOVE WINS KYAAAAA HAPPY PRIDE MONTH

it's "people die when they are killed" ... all over again

hey eva01. hey girl

lmao

also i don't know if this was revealed before but AMATE DYED HER HAIR RED? her hair color is naturally black like her mum's?

anyways...

this show seemed mad rushed, i feel like a ton of things were left on the cutting room floor (so to speak). kinda like gwitch (no wonder they were conceptualized at the same time). based on what i've read on the wiki and from the grapevine, unsure if they were still trying to play it safe or what. it feels like simultaneous attempts of making some metaphysical gundam show and a regular (?) wartime story -- too many things happening and not enough time to resolve them all. whatever. go my fanfic beetle

anyways this show was crazy, def not 4 everyone but it was fun while it lasted. cya everybody in the tag 👋 until next time!

[osoanimation]

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX Going to See Opening and Poster

[hybridreviews]

I'm going to piss some of you off.... and that's a good thing.

[notokayfabe]

Top 5 Char Moment of All Time