Gundam not part of the Western anime community

In my experience, if non-anime fans know any mecha anime by name it's definitely Gundam so I don't know where you got that idea.

@BilboBaggins365 @Guilmon1 @IKKIsama @TheMechaManiac Thanks for clarifying. I see what you're getting at now.


Was it not? I hardly remember it tbh. Politics then?

There's a reason for that, it's hard to get into and not very good. I watched the Hathaway movie last weekend and have now watched every UC entry (except ZZ), and overall it's a very mixed bag, some good entries like Origins, War in the Pocket, Unicorn, but most of them aren't very good with terrible writing, and I mean terrible (ahem Zeta, Char's Counterattack). The mech action is special, I will give it to Gundam that no other franchise does realistic mech action like it, ie Stardust Memories, 8th MS Team and then you have weird music fusion in Thunderbolt, which was cool.

I've seen people write that the characters are good in Gundam, I disagree strongly. Yes there are some decent chars like Ramba Ral and Hamon Crowley, but too many awful character writing, feels like they were written by people who love robots but don't understand people, and I include Char in that category. He became a walking legend rather than a person and just didn't make sense. Too many edgy teenagers who fall in love at the drop of a hat and then jump in the cockpit of a gundam suit (which wasn't being properly guarded, again!) to go and save there crush, only to be disappointed or die. Or washy women who want to be slapped by a man, ahem Mirai, or don't know what they want and so chose some arrogant arsehole, Reccoa Londe. Ughhh.

Personally I enjoyed IBO most and that's because it's not bogged down by all the UC details, which are inconsistent most of the time and hard to follow.

There are lots of other mech out there more readily accessible and worth watching, main one being Macross imho.

@SawronZXZ Politics, battles, beautiful women, it has all of that. Psychology? Pfft. Not the kind of show that focuses on introspection.

Eh think mecha as a whole is a niche whitin a niche in anglophone anime spaces. I really dislike using "western" when refering to what pretty much is just the american/canadian anime space considering Go Nagai and by consequence the Mecha stuff he did is much more popular in Europe and Latin America than in the US.

Gundam is still the juggernaut of mecha so even if not a lot of people actually watch Gundam most people have the faint idea of it, I think things get really obscure when you start talking about non-Gundam mecha like the Takahashi stuff or the non Gundam Tomino stuff or hell even pre-90's super robot stuff.