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The Big Gundam Watch, Part 2.1: Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Episodes 1-25

Originally, my plan was to do these posts after finishing each series/movie/OVA, but at the point I’m at in this particular series, I already have more to say than I did about Mobile Suit Gundam. It’s also entirely possible that by the time I finish, some of my current observations will be less relevant, so I’d like to crystallize my thoughts at this halfway point.

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam! For as long as I can remember, Zeta Gundam has been hyped up as one of the best series that the Gundam franchise has to offer. Or at least that’s what I remembered hearing years and years ago, and maybe that was only in reference to the Universal Century shows. Either way, I was a little more apprehensive going into Zeta than I was with the original series because I remember it being hyped up, and nothing is more disappointing than accidentally setting your expectations for something too high.

So, how has it turned out so far? Get ready, because it’s a lot of text below the break.

BLACK AND WHITE, AND KAMILLE:

I really need to start this off with my two biggest complaints about Zeta Gundam, especially since they wind up tying into each other: first, the conflict between the AEUG and the Titans is less interesting than war between the Federation and Zeon, and second, the morality of the conflict between the AEUG and the Titans makes Kamille come across as completely unhinged for way too goddamn long.

The reason I say the conflict in Zeta is less interesting is because the sides are so much more black and white than in the original series That probably sounds weird, because the villains in that series were a family of out-and-out fascists, one of whom interpreted a comparison to Hitler as flattering. However, there are two critical things to note: because the One Year War was an actual war, you would wind up seeing examples of Zeon’s military who are just soldiers with no ideological investment in the war (which is a separate ethical can of worms not relevant to this particular discussion), and the fact that the Zeon leadership was pretty clearly evil didn’t mean that the Federation leadership was strictly good. Scenes like the Zeon pilots going to check up on the widowed mother and her kid after they split up from the rest of the refugees, or the squad that tried to blow up the Gundam driving up to the White Base in plainclothes so they could meet Amuro and the crew face-to-face without fighting anymore, or the Federation generals telling Bright and Mirai straight-up that they’re going to be decoys for the real military, or the woman who takes care of the war orphans at Jaburo matter-of-factly telling the White Base crew that “these kids are the future of the military” all add up to paint a picture of the reality of war being grayer than just “good and evil”.

In Zeta, the Titans are a unilaterally evil force. At first it was subtle, in that I figured by nature of the Titans being an elite faction of the Federation military, it would be occupied exclusively by varying degrees of sociopaths. But their cruelty ramps up at an alarmingly fast rate, culminating in seeing Titans leader Jamitov Hymen sitting on a throne that looks exactly like Degwin Zabi’s (it might actually be Degwin Zabi’s!) while he receives an oath from Scirocco literally signed in blood. By that point, it’s abundantly clear that top-to-bottom, no member of the Titans deserves even a consideration of sympathy. The sole possible exception is Sarah, who’s clearly being groomed by Scirocco, the same way that he seems to be trying to groom everyone under his command (successfully with Jerrid and unsuccessfully (so far) with Mouar), but I don’t have a clear enough picture of her besides that to really call it one way or the other.

On the other side of the conflict- and this is the real meat of the issue for me- the AEUG is unilaterally good. It can be argued that they’ve done bad things, which can be summed up as “taking [action] knowing the Titans would retaliate in a way that could get innocents harmed”, but that’s really it. There are no sinister ulterior motives, or even selfish ones. I keep waiting for Wong Lee to reveal that he’s actually a war profiteer and he’s bankrolling the AEUG just so Anaheim Electronics has a reason to keep manufacturing mobile suits, or maybe Blex would reveal in a private conversation with Quattro that he’s a spacenoid supremacist, or something from someone. But no; at least to the halfway point of the series, it seems everyone is operating on the same level, and for the same unquestionably good goal of stopping the Titans. Having the protagonist’s faction actually be as well meaning as they appear isn’t bad writing, but it feels less ambitious, especially coming off Mobile Suit Gundam where I was expecting the Federation to be presented as total heroes.

This would lead me to starting to talk about Kamille, but before that, I need to talk about fanfiction. Despite Mobile Suit Gundam and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam being written by the same person, the more I thought about it, the more Zeta really comes across like Gundam fanfiction. It was present right from the start, where within the first half of the first episode we see Char (who is no longer Char but still has a special red mobile suit) wondering if he just felt AMURO RAY [pause for audience applause] or perhaps LALAH SUNE [pause for continued applause], but I gave that and some of the other stuff like it a pass because in Zeta’s original context of “sequel to a cult show that first aired half a decade ago”, fanservice is not only expected, but appreciated. There’s also the legendary status of Char and Amuro, with the two of them regularly being alluded to without prompting, but again, ok: Char was Zeon’s super ace and legendary for his skills even during the original series, and Amuro Ray is this universe’s version of Audie Murphy. I also noticed was how often everyone was hitting each other compared to the original series; I don’t know if BRIGHT SLAP™ was a fandom meme back in the 80’s, but I feel like it must have been considering how much more of a staple “corrections” are in Zeta. All the proper breeding pairs from Mobile Suit Gundam wound up together too, with Bright and Mirai (which I have more to say about in a different section), Fraw Bow and Hayato adopting Kikka, Katz, and Letz, and even an explicit mention that Amuro is still carrying a flame for Sayla. The sealer, though, was after Mirai asks Amuro if Kamille is like him, and he essentially replies “no, he’s better”, followed by the start of the next episode with the blunt as a sledgehammer “FOUR COULD BE MY LALAH!”

After that, everything kinda fell into place as I realized that Kamille is just Amuro with everything about him cranked up, in the way many fanfiction writers will model their OCs after a character they like, just cranked up. Amuro liked to mess with machines, Kamille designed mobile suits as a hobby. Amuro had a strained relationship with his parents who were separated and his dad was overly invested in the military, Kamille had a totally fractured relationship with his parents who were in a toxic marriage and BOTH of them were overly invested in the military. They were both 17 when they wound up getting involved with a huge conflict after hijacking a Gundam, but their responses to the nature of their respective conflicts is where actual problems start to manifest for me.

Amuro was a moody teenager who would react in frustrating ways, but those frustrating reactions made sense and were well motivated. He refused to sortie after a number of conflicts because the responsibility of being the Gundam’s pilot was overwhelming him, and he had only survived so far by virtue of how powerful it was, not because he was particularly talented. He deserted and stole the Gundam because being the Gundam’s pilot had become central to his identity, and the idea of losing that was unacceptable. He constantly expressed resistance and reservations about actually being conscripted to the Federation military because he didn’t trust them, and he was right not to, because they were considered canon fodder by all of the brass.

Kamille is a very moody teenager who tends to react in even more frustrating ways, and like Amuro, there’s motivation in his character: he has an insanely short fuse, and no ability to think even ten seconds into the future. I was originally hung up on the way he attacked the MP who was detaining him, but it ultimately wasn’t all that different from running up on Jerrid because of an off-handed comment about his name while he was surrounded by other Titans. All the mobile suit hijacking and constantly, flippantly disobeying orders also ties into this aspect of his character. The thing I’m still hung up on, though, is how fucking long he spends mistrusting the AEUG for no actual reason.

As previously established, the AEUG is exactly as well-meaning as they say they are, and never do anything to betray the fact that their stated goals and actual goals are one and the same. It would be one thing if he had been dragged to the Argama by force after he stole the Mark II just to get revenge on that MP, and was now involved in a conflict he had no interest in, but he willingly walked over to Quattro and crew and said “yeah I’m with you guys now”. The crew of the Argama were exceptionally patient and kind with Kamille while he stole mobile suits and threw tantrums, not actually suffering any repercussions until Wong beat the shit out of him, at which point Quattro and Emma say “we probably should’ve been sterner with you” and then don’t actually change the way they handle him.

His reluctance to fight gets more and more irritating as you find out more and more about how bad the Titans are, too. I figured the moment when he witnesses the aftermath of the chemical attack on Colony 30, and specifically kneels over the mummified corpses of a mother and her infant child, he’d come to some kind of realization about the necessity of fighting against the Titans, but the next episode is instead spent throwing a fit because he was uncomfortable having killed Lila. In fact, he spends most of this run of episodes yelling “WHY DID YOU MAKE ME DO THAT?” whenever he kills an enemy pilot, and all I can think is “what did you think mobile suits are for, dude”. The absolute most frustrating instance of this was during his date with Four: she laments the fact that they’re destined to be enemies, and with a completely straight face, he says “only because of the imaginary lines drawn by adults”. Moments later, he asserts that the AEUG is different from the Titans when the Titans start firebombing the city, but at this point he’s witnessed the atrocities the Titans are capable of multiple times over a very short period of time. The idea that even if he was just talking with his dick he would seriously try to pull a “both sides are bad” is just unbelievable.

A better arc for Kamille would have been if if he was totally on-board for fighting and supporting the AEUG’s cause from the start. Make him teetering on bloodthirsty, since that’s the impression you get based on his actions in the first few episodes, and have that aggression cranked up even higher by the deaths of his parents. Then, after witnessing what happened on Colony 30, he’s still eager to fight, but his motivation starts to shift from just wanting to lash out at the Titans to realizing that if they aren’t taken down, people are going to continue to get hurt the way he’s been, and worse. In all this, he’s still very emotionally charged and prone to fly off the handle, but the motivation for why he’s doing it feels more natural. Then you have him kind of cool down to the stable level he seems to be at by the time he gets back into space, because now in addition to having met his idol Amuro and realizing he’s carrying a ton of baggage because of the war, he also reflects on how callous Quattro was in light of Roberto’s death, and how he doesn’t want to be like that. His reaction to Quattro’s reaction was the first instance in the series I really felt in tune with Kamille, and I feel like they didn’t give it nearly as much time as they should have.

I guess three full word processor pages complaining about the main conflict of the story and protagonist might lead you to believe I haven’t been enjoying the show, but my poor attention span wouldn’t actually allow me to watch 25 whole episodes (with 25 more to go) if I didn’t actually enjoy it. So now let’s take a break from problems and talk about…

THE STUFF I LIKED:

The improvement in production quality is insane. Just a few years and there’s no more of the aggressively scratchy lines that seemed omnipresent in the original series, and that’s not even talking about the completely gorgeous theatrical quality openings and ending. As a side note, while it’s disappointing that the Western release of Zeta doesn’t come with either original opening or ending track, the replacement music they use feels perfect, although it definitely sets a different tone.

Originally, I thought it was intended to actually be a secret that Quattro is Char, but that instantly goes out the window narrative and then in-universe shortly afterwards. Literally everyone either gets the vibe that Quattro is Char, or knows outright. That’s actually a more interesting dynamic, though, than “could Quattro be Char”, because the Quattro disguise is ultimately just for Char himself.

I mentioned that I really liked Haro as a mascot in Mobile Suit Gundam, so I was really happy when he suddenly showed up again. I did get worried he was going to overstay his welcome with how much more immediately present he was than in the original series, but they dial it back after an episode or two. I also had a good laugh at gags like tripping Reccoa so Fa could sortie in the Methuss. Speaking of:

I really like Fa and Katz, because while the two of them trend towards being colossal fuckups, they’re still endearing in doing so because they’re well motivated. Fa really wants to be helpful, because when she first joined the Argama she felt completely powerless to do anything, and on paper serving as a mobile suit pilot is the most helpful thing she can do. As such, she made like all the other protagonists and started jumping the gun to get into combat, but unfortunately for her, she’s The Girl™ of this series and thus has completely eaten shit every singled time she’s sortied. Katz has a slightly better action track record, including (shockingly) single-handedly rescuing Kamille from Jerrid and Mouar, but he fell for the classic “surely this cute girl can’t be an enemy” blunder. And you know what, I’m not even going to hold that against him too hard (for now) because one of the several people who told him not to get close to Sarah should have specified “it’s incredibly obvious you have a crush on her and are emotionally compromised”.

Despite all the grousing I did about the conflict being less interesting than Mobile Suit Gundam’s, the antagonists in Zeta Gundam, particularly Jerrid and Scirocco, have been way more engaging. I actually think Jerrid has the most clear and concise character arc in the series so far: he’s a typical privileged bully content to spin his wheels under the assumption he’ll naturally move up in the ranks until he meets Lila, who humbles him hard enough to realize that he needs to be better. In particular, her final chat with him about not becoming like Jamaican is what primes him to become a willing pawn for Scirocco, because Jerrid is capable of recognizing that Scirocco is different from the other Titans COs, and stands to gain valuable knowledge and experience by sticking by him. On that note (and following up on my fanfiction observation from earlier), Scirocco is Super Char: in addition to being an ace Newtype pilot, he’s also a wellspring of charisma, easily able to manipulate the Titans brass with basic gestures of submission while also effortlessly cultivating a faction of Titans loyal to him, like Jerrid and Sarah. MSG’s archvillains definitely suffered from the episode count being cut, and I’m sure The Origin and all of the stories that take place during the One Year War will properly establish the likes of Gihren and Kycilia as monsters, but for now, Scirocco has easily been the greatest individual threat to date.

I read that at some point after the release of Char’s Counterattack, Tomino specifically singled out and thanked BL fans for sticking with the Gundam franchise more reliably than any other demographic. Fujoshis do tend to be the most ride-or-die part of any fandom, even if it’s only in that specific way, but I never got much of a sense of any chemistry besides a generic “two cute boys” between Amuro and Char. Zeta’s a whole different story, though; there’s a thick level of homoeroticism palpable through several female surrogates.

The pacing of action scenes in this show is nearly immaculate. Combined with how good it looks even without comparing it to Mobile Suit Gundam it’s been incredibly easy to get totally absorbed and blow through a bunch of episodes right in a row. I do have issues with the non-action scenes, but that may be because…

THE (other) STUFF I LIKED LESS:

I mentioned that I’m watching this series in Japanese, and unfortunately, the subtitles available for Zeta Gundam seem less good than the subtitles for Mobile Suit Gundam. Best as I can tell, the subtitles on the blu-rays are the same as the ones I’ve been able to find online, which I believe were sourced from the original Bandai DVD releases. I often found myself having to rewind multiple times to understand what was meant for a particular scene, or even switch over to the English dub for a second and go “oh, it’s just phrased weird in the subtitles”.

For example: there’s a scene where Henken’s complaining that they didn’t manage to destroy any of the Titan ships while leaving Amman; the subtitles translate what he’s saying as “we can’t attack Jaburo if we’re supported by the people from Grenada”. I interpreted the line as “due to the support of the people of Grenada, we are unable to attack Jaburo” and I couldn’t understand how that made any sense, until I switched to the dub, where the line was “how can we expect them to take Jaburo if they’re so timid?”

There’s another scene where, after Beltorchika gets the cold shoulder from Amuro, she asks Mirai “won’t you tell me about the person Amuro fought”, and I assumed she meant Char and got confused as to why the following conversation got so heated. Switching over to the dub made it much more clear that she was actually asking about Lalah, which was not properly contextualized in the subtitles.

The last thing I’ll mention on this subject is that I also noticed a typo where Blex referred to Zeon Zum Deikun as Zeon Zum Daikun, which is the straight romanization of the character’s name. All this leads me to believe that the original subtitle track was at least partially a machine job, which makes it a real bummer that it hasn’t been touched up since.

Newtypes are more present than ever now, but they feel even more ambiguously defined than they were in the first series. I was under the impression that the designation of “Newtype” referred specifically to the extrasensory perception abilities that allowed Amuro to start pulling superhuman combat maneuvers towards the end of the war and, more concretely, allowed Lalah to control the Elmeth’s bits. I would have thought that the existence of Cyber Newtypes like Rosamia and Four and the related phenomena they display, especially with Four and the Psycho Gundam, would lock that definition in, but the term also seems to be used interchangeably to refer to a generational and/or living divide between Earthlings and Spacenoids. Further complicating matters is when other characters discuss Kamille or Amuro and say that they haven’t “awakened” as Newtypes, when like… yes, they have. Kamille and Amuro themselves tend to deny the idea that they’re Newtypes, which I interpret as them saying “I’m not special” rather than actually thinking they’re not. I get the impression this is something that’s lost in translation again.

Something that probably can’t be chalked up to rough subtitles is that this series has a serious grudge against exposition. The use of opening narration from the original series is almost entirely gone, and characters tend not to introduce themselves or firmly establish the names of locations or even mobile suits. Seriously, I don’t think anyone says Henken’s name until he leaves the Argama.

The mobile suits in this series are pretty cool all around, but I don’t like how there’s no clear design distinction between sides like in the original series. I understand and like the idea behind having a lot of the Titan’s mobile suit designs hew so close to Zeon mobile suits, but I don’t think they lean into the concept as much as they should have. Maybe the Mark II Gundams could’ve had more Zeon mobile suit design element, which in addition to making them look more in line with the Hizacks and Marasais, would also create a much greater contrast when the actual Zeta Gundam shows up looking like a true successor to the RX-78. Or maybe the Hizacks and Marasais could’ve incorporated some Federation design elements by being more angular, but still having the distinct mono-eye. I think the closest anything comes to actually executing on this hybrid concept is the Galbaldy. I also feel like none of the AEUG’s original mobile suits have any design commonalities between them, which is lame: the Rick Dias, Hyaku Shiki, and Methuss are all cool designs, but they feel like they could have come from three totally different series.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS:

I can’t imagine the back half of the series is going to have any moment funnier (and more cathartic) than this:

Also funny: much like “blame it on the misfortune of your birth”, even when you know “I came here to laugh at you” is coming from a mile away, it's exactly as funny in context as it has been out of it. Maybe even funnier!

Resource considerations seems to come up way less as a plot point in Zeta Gundam than it did in the original series, which I had originally marked down as a negative. As hamfisted as it could be sometimes, it did help sell the “real robot” feel that Mobile Suit Gundam was going for. But after I thought about it, I realized the reason resource considerations haven’t come up as much is because there really hasn’t been a situation where the AEUG hasn’t been isolated from supporters, compared to White Base being on the defensive and in hostile territory for more than the first half of the series.

I mentioned before that I understand Char’s legendary status in-universe, but what I really don’t get are people like Kai and Hayato asserting that he should be a politician. I don’t know if it’s intended to be the conventional wisdom that a distinguished military career eventually leads to a career in politics or something about Char specifically, but even if the entire human race somehow found out about how Char fought for Zeon in order to get revenge on the Zabis (and maybe they did, based on what Hayato says), I don’t quite get why everyone would feel so strongly about him taking up politics.

Not sure if Kamille’s comment about noticing more and more women on the battlefield is further acknowledgement of the fact that there’s very little left of humanity to fight wars so women are more prominently involved than they would have been in the past, or a nod to the fact that there were like four women total outside of White Base involved in the One Year War, or I’m reading into it too much and it’s just an incidental sexist remark because it’s the 80’s.

So, Bright and Mirai. I’m happy about the pairing because Bright and Mirai were my favorite White Base crew members, but their relationship feels kinda arbitrary and a little out of nowhere. Bright very obviously had feelings for Mirai, but she never once reciprocated them or even seemed to acknowledge he had them in the original series. Plus, a lot can happen in eight years, but Mirai going from rejecting her arranged fiancé because he wanted to keep her out of the war to becoming the ideal tradwife/Yamato Nadeshiko is a weird trajectory for her. Of course, I bet the actual reason they wound up together was because they both have those funny cartoon eyes.

Also on the subject of Mirai: you can tell this series was made in the early 80’s because of how many women have fucking terrible haircuts. She hasn’t shown up yet, but I’ve known about Haman Karn’s goofy pink broom for years, and Emma’s solid orb of a pageboy haircut is truly awful, but worse than either of them is what they did to poor Mirai. Her hair in Mobile Suit Gundam was a perfectly acceptable mom haircut, they didn’t need to age her 40 years with this new abomination. Congratulations to Fraw Bow, though, for making it to the new decade without winding up with an awful hairdo.

Despite being a total nothing character, I thought they managed to do a lot with Four’s handler, Namicar. She’s shown to be extremely sensitive to motion sickness, having to grab onto the sides of moving platforms or sit down with a handerkerchief while they’re on the water, but the moment she’s under duress she forgets about her weak constitution and becomes ultra competent and assumes control of the situation. Just a fun bit of physical character work I noticed and appreciated.

The second opening seems to confirm a suspicion I had that Rosamia and Four are related, because in addition to both of them being Cyber Newtypes and Four’s name being “Four”, the girl in the intro looks and is dressed like Four, but has Rosamia’s hair color. However, I’ve also been wondering if Beltorchika is somehow related to the Cyber Newtypes too, specifically because she has the same colony drop nightmare that Rosamia talks about, and even refers to it in the same way as “the sky falling”.

There’s a line in the subtitles where Kamille refers to himself as “an autistic child”. I originally brushed that off as another example of poor translation, but it got me to thinking about if that was actually intended, and if autism research was even at a place in the 80’s where people would know about it. According to a bit of light search engine legwork, the 1980′s is actually when autism spectrum disorders started to be understood the way they are today, so it’s entirely possible that Tomino intended for Kamille to be on the spectrum. But I’m not really qualified to talk about it much more than that, both because I haven’t finished the series and I also only have a very surface level understanding of autism.

Final thought that only occurred to me as I finished writing the last two points: is it possible that Kamille is actually a Cyber Newtype? This one feels like a stretch for a number of writing-related reasons, but it would go a long way towards explaining why Kamille is emotionally unstable the way that the other Cyber Newtypes we see are. I doubt this one, but it’ll be fun to revisit later if I turn out to be right.

Onwards to the back half of the series!

#Gundam #Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam #Zeta Gundam #Kamille Bidan #The Big Gundam Watch #anime #blu-ray #long post

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