ThatAnimeSnob

The very first thing everybody was yapping about this incarnation of Gundam was how it was about child soldiers. As if that is instantly making it better than the rest because it victimizes children or something. I hated the concept of “Just have a bunch of asshole adults mistreating children and you got yourself a masterpiece of drama” since the days of Now and Then, Here and There, which had pretty much the same hook. Remember the mother in Erased? What a masterpiece that was! (jk)

So here you are, watching children dying in war and calling it the most realistic thing ever because you got the feels, until the deus ex machina that is the protagonist pops up and saves the day with his seriously broken Gundam. So much for realism. And I am not going to pretend the Universal Century wasn’t full of overpowered robots (because it was) but at least they were piloted by characters with emotions and decent designs.

This one has its characters with puffy hair, eyes half their head, and the protagonist rivaling Inaho from Aldoah Zero in emotional depth. And what a masterpiece that was! (jk) Seriously, the designs are terrible and the names are silly, like Cookie, Cracker and Biscuit. This is stuff you expect to see in some moeblob school comedy, not a war drama in the likes Gundam the Origin.

You can throw in as many victimized children as you want and it’s never going to be taken seriously when you have a literal harem spaceship in it. Yeah, shipping is definitely what defines a serious war drama. Let’s throw in romantic triangles as well; I’m pretty sure that will make the characters more memorable… not.

And yes, Macross was doing the exact same thing, but over there everybody had something to offer to the narrative without being useless or annoying. Over here they are both damsels in distress; one is just cooking and getting herself kidnapped, while the other one is the obnoxious pacifist princess archetype that they keep reusing in many Gundam series and it sucks every single time.

And it’s not like it doesn’t try to be good as a war drama. Both sides have casualties and they are treated with respect, some sacrifice their humanity for more power, others are mentally devastated by the destruction. But when you have a single character hogging all the attention by defeating 90% of all the enemies and constantly being the only one who can save the day, it becomes rule of cool and takes away the drama. In a sense, it’s even worse than Gundam Wing for being neither cool nor dramatic.

And I just have to complain about the intelligence of the antagonists. For an organization that is supposed to be controlling human history for centuries, they can’t even do basic actions, much less use tactics in warfare. How can you take these guys seriously?
- They send mobile workers instead of mobile suits in battle, resulting to needless casualties
- They have no means to counter simple smoke bombs
- They want to kill the princess half the times, capture her alive the other half, without ever bothering to check out how she looks
- They have no means to jam transmissions yet get theirs jammed with made-on-the-run gismos

Wanna talk about the script? The continuity is all over the place. There is a scene they have Carta’s mecha pinned down and in the immediate next scene she has magically escaped, which makes no sense twice, since there is no way Mikazuki would have let her escape after killing one of his buddies.

The pacing is horrendous. The first half was ok to the most part, showing something new happening in every episode, as the characters were slowly traveling from Mars to Earth. The second season renders everything they achieved in that journey meaningless. It’s as if they didn’t get independence or stopped children from being used in war. You know, the reason they were fighting to begin with?

By taking that out, the show wasn’t even feeling like a Gundam series after midpoint, since there was no theme of colonies trying to gain independence. It became a generic mecha series that rides on the feels of “Child soldiers, oh no, this is so sad” with nothing to make it significant.

The second season drops the ball entirely, as it spends most of its duration in introducing plot points out of nowhere that result to nothing. The scriptwriter had no idea with what to fill the episodes with, so she was just wasting time with characters talking, plotting, and fighting in battles that had absolutely no bearing on the finale. Unlike the first season, which had clear plot progression and an objective by moving from point A to point B, the second one has everybody going in circles and achieving nothing of importance.

The finale is the only part that can be considered significant, and even that one is hollow since every major death and subplot had nothing to do with its outcome. Like, literally, nobody outside the main 2 characters gets any development or even matters in the longrun. You might as well rename the show Yuri on Ice in space. Nobody learned anything or was affected from all the battles and casualties they lived through those 50 episodes, once again proving what a failure of a war drama this is.

I am pretty sure the feelfags will be crying their hearts out every time someone kicks the bucket but just like the show as a whole, it’s forced and superficial, done for the sake of drama instead of somehow affecting the story. It’s nothing more than overblown tragedy, just like everything else Mari Okada has made, and you have evidence for the Nth time of why the Universal Century is the only timeline that is worth your time.