Aldnoah.Zero Episode 1 Discussion

Kaioshin_Sama said:


Tomino actually came out of the post war Japan period so was writing a lot from personal experience and stories he heard from friends and relatives. It's what sort of gave it that visceral human touch and he wanted to tackle themes of war, love, loss, trauma, politics and sorrow with the franchise instead of just letting it become another toy commercial for Bandai. He has to fight for every inch of getting to tell the story and make the show he wanted to and lost just as many battles as he won initially, more wins with the movie version of the original series.

Gen Urobuchi is an interesting writer for sure, but he's from a totally different generation than Tomino with different life experiences and upbringings (guaranteed much easier life) and IMO most of his stories lack that human touch feeling and maturity (they are dark and unsettling but not necessarily mature or striving for more realism) that made Gundam such a big deal back when it first aired and had people identifying so strongly with characters like Amuro, Char, Bright, Sayla, Lalah and all those other memorable supporting cast characters. He's not a total sellout or anything but he's also clearly more comfortable and content to just do the bidding of the people that sign his paychecks and cave to their demands compared to Tomino and this shows promotion gives off this sort of "Fuck Gundam! Yeah we're going to stick it to that franchise and do it better than it ever could" commercial feel to it as opposed to trying to tackle the issues that Tomino wanted to tackle with Gundam and to buck the trends of the time entirely. Really no other series had attempted to do what the original Gundam did at the time or to have that level of maturity and complexity to it's storyline since they were all mostly just formulaic super robot shows. It was so different at first people weren't even really sure that they liked it but it quickly became apparent that it had done something no other original anime TV series had done up to that point.

TaisakuSentou said:

Completely agree, but since the newer generations come by, the need for a truly 'mature' anime isn't really there. Things, like a lot of death and some characters having a few screws loose, seems to be enough for them. All in all, shows like this will sell well because of how relatable it is to the majority of all the viewers. I just don't like how most shows aren't taking that sort of risk to be completely different than what the industry gives, just to cause another revolution of new standards for all anime.

Uncanny said:
The first half of the episode was really bad. It was poorly explained as to what was going on, and subsequently fairly difficult to follow.