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**SPOILER ALERT: I WILL BE DELVING INTO SPOILERS ON THE PROLOGUE AS WELL AS THE SHOW WITHOUT IT WOULD NOT BE COMPLETE.**

Gundam as a series has been huge in Japan as well as in the West ever since giant robot fights were cool. Being fairly new to the "Gundam experience" can be daunting, especially when you are unsure where to start. The good news are Witch from Mercury (WfM) is very beginner-friendly with its rather digestible story and with a bunch of nods to previous Gundam series. Being part of the Alternative Universe means that you have no reason to go back to the og ... series and watch that to understand WfM. TL;DR You can go watch it and have no fear of missing out on anything else. Now, let's delve onto why I feel the first part of WfM was not so great and why the stinkers vastly outweighed the good aspects of the show.

Starting with the story, 95% of the show is high school hijinks Code Geass style, which isn't a compliment as they were old and hella boring back in 2008 and they are way older in 2022. Focusing more on the high school aspect of the show, there's a bunch of questions about how this school even functions logically, but my biggest problem is that the whole duel everyone to rise to the top as a sort of "tournament arc" does not work, because there are 0 stakes. Miorine (white-haired chick) gets married into money, which while a horrible situation, she could have had way worse done to her than that and Suletta (red-haired scrimblo) just gets expelled from school and goes back to Mercury. Also, if you have seen enough anime, you know exactly how things go when Suletta is a Mary Sue who can do anything when she pilots her Aerial, who IS a Gundam. Outside of the fights, it is the most inane and boring slice of life high school shenanigans and tropes in space. Talking about space, the show hammers in that Spacians are racist towards Earthians same how Disney hammers in trust in Raya. It feels so forced and in your face, but knowing a bit about how previous series have handled these topics and having completed the series, I hope they get to delve in more to the flip side of the coin and why this happens. Outside of that, the interactions of the main cast feel cliched and vapid rather than meaningful to whatever concerns the high school plot.

Now onto the part of the show that I really like a lot more and I wish it was the main focus from the start instead of the melodrama we got most of the time. The sociopolitical aspect of the show as well as interactions between the core cast and the adults of this universe is vastly more interesting and is what holds the show from being a complete lost cause. The reasoning behind the banning of Gundams, the megaconglomerate of a corporation owned by Miorine's father and the last two episodes have shown that the story is only getting started and that they will be going onto it way more on Part 2 I hope. This ties to the Prologue episode whihch is supposedly 21 years prior to the events of the main series. The Prologue showed us the incident that led Lady Prospera to want to enact her revenge plot. Also, we get to meet her daughter who isn't Suletta but Eri. THe theories behind what happened to Eri and who is Suletta is what keeps me engaged with the universe of this show, but until Part 2, the prologue serves as a better than average episode in the series, which says a lot about how better the lore behind the series is vastly more engaging than the main plot so far in Part 1 until the last two episodes. Tying to this, the side plot where Miorine gets funding for her own kickstarter to save Suletta's butt again was a rather ingenious method to show her practical and leadership skills at dealing with grave situations and it drives further home how much of a foil she is to Suletta's absent-minded personality. This in addition to Lady Prospera basically calling her a prideful brat showed a lot of great aspects about a main character and how much she has evolved with what she had learned and her finally being treated like a proper adult by her "only results matter" father, who treated her before as an asset. Now onto the last two episodes which to me were the highlight of the series in addition with the prologue, because everything went to shit. So Miorine's company that composes of the Earthian students of the Academy and Mary Suletta are going to another planet for a demonstration of their Gundam products which they are using for medical purposes. Her father is also there and that leads for the perfect opportunity for Earthian terrorists who have connections to Spacians to launch a full assault against them. The whole scene ends with Mary Suletta and a bunch of other folks with Mobile Suits fending off the terrorists. Meanwhile, Miorine finds her father who is grievously wounded by bullet shots and as she goes to get help, she is found by a terrorist who was about to shoot both of them. Unable to do anything, in comes in Mary Suletta and squashes the guy like a grape with Aerial all framed in a far darker and faded out gradient than usual. Any luster in the Gundam or Suletta's hair is washed out to the point that it emphasizes greatly how important this scene is. You see a cheerful Suletta falling into the splattered guts of the person and laughing it off as if she had slipped on a pile of mud. Miorine as anyone else would be was terrified of her as to her Suletta was now a murderer, a cold-blooded one at that. This hopefully marks the end of their transactional relationship and the start of two sides against each other. That is also where the first part ends. In short, the best part of this series is about anything related to matters outside of the academy.

Now onto the characters as I have not that many great things to say about. Mary Suletta or also known as the Witch from Mercury is a rather bland and uninteresting protagonist and she is also a victim to the uwu shy girl trope that has been going rampant since forever in anime series. She is socially inept to the point it makes her feel unbearable every time she hogs the screen and she is always the one that messes up and everyone else covers up her mess because she is so cute she needs to be protected when she is not on Aerial. Also, don't get me started that everyone that duels with her, she easily beats them single-handedly even in a group fight and the male character falls for her and proposes to her like the Mary Sue she is. I can see her importance behind the events of the prologue, but that doesn't mean I enjoy her as a character. Miorine, on the other hand, the more I think about her the more interested I am with how she will change in the series, despite being your generic ice queen. Lady Prospera is an enigma to many but as soon as you see the Prologue you know exactly what her motives are. Regardless, she manages to be easily the most interesting character every time she is given attention in the show. The student council are all generic tropes: the leader who is also a manipulative jerk who cares about others, the emotionless sad boy who gets angry when he shows any emotion, the delinquent frat bro who has a short temper and generic bimbo that is more of a background character than an actual character. The Earthians area also hella bland good guys and the obvious traitor is always the one that seems to be the mother figure of the group. Overall, the cast is tropey to the point they feel like npcs in SAO than anything else or pions meant to run after their affection for the Mary Suletta.

Now let's go on the more positive aspects of the show which are the audiovisuals, which unsurprisingly to none are pretty good. The character designs are vibrant and flashy enough that they don't feel too alien with the show they represent. The Gundam fights look great and the CGI are mostly fairly well-implemented. The music compliments it really well and the main themes are pretty good as well. And that's about it. But as I say a porcelain vase means nothing if it is hollow on the inside and filled with cracks. In the case of WfM, there are already some visible cracks that could end the show to shit as we have seen that happen with other shows before. To conclude, WfM is a mess as of now due to its tonally deaf pacing, its rather mundane and tropey cast and most of its runtime being plagued with an introduction that brings in the worst tropes of shonen anime into 10 episodes. I am cautiously optimistic that Part 2 will vastly improve on it, but it has equal opportunities to put the nail in the coffin.

Webcomics have always had a cult following from anime and manga fans, since they offer quite a unique reading experience in contrast to manga as a format. Tower of God is one of the older webcomics that became very popular and well-liked by the fandom and the fact that it got an anime adaptation right now in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic is almost idyllic since many anime fans that are locked in their houses can now stream it with their leisure without needing to leave the comfort of their home. Now discussing about the product itself, Tower of God on paper sounds pretty ... cool. A battle royale through various tests where only a few select can climb to the top. It is not by far an original concept (e.g. 3% did it first as a tv series), however you expect it to be a never-ending thrill ride. A mindgame that never ends where brute strength and amazing intellect are not enough to help you alone climb the tower. It has potential to be a great series. Then, what went wrong?

The premise of ToG is simple. Pass all the tests set by administrators and reach the top to grant your wish. When they go to show the tests our contestants (I explicitly avoid saying our heroes) have to go through, that is where ToG lost me. The tests themselves are so badly designed that sometimes I do not even understand what the administrators are looking for. As for how our characters deal with these situations, it is almost exactly the same as how Hunger Games portrayed Katniss and Gale who look like they are well-fed and healthy in a poor district of coal miners. From the fact that the characters usually come out barely unscathed from any situation, that destroys any kind of tension the first two episodes promised us.

To talk more about the characters of ToG, they are all very one-dimensional. Bam (or Yoru, since that is the Japanese translation from Korean, which means night) is the worst offender because he is an obnoxious goody two-shoes Gary Stu. Not all characters with this archetype are necessarily bad since they can evolve beyond those flaws. An example of a character of this archetype done right is Aang from ATLA. He is the most lawful good character in the show with hax powers, however he has flaws that make him more than just the archetype he is based on. On the contrary, Bam never questions himself and even if something happens he does not change. Even by the end of the series, I still feel that he has not changed since the beginning except from getting new clothes. And I cannot speak with greater detail about Bam without mentioning Rachel. Apparently, the creator of the webcomic, SIU, did not think her character through and made her look very one-sided. There is a point when she has to make a crucial decision and this offers a chance for us to see multiple sides of her but it all boils down to her becoming a caricature of a character. And speaking about women in the show, all women in the show are presented as stronger than Bam in the show and very powerful, but towards the end they are far weaker than him, a newbie, except from Yuri who is OP just 'cause. This issue brings up another problem I have with how SIU writes his characters. They either don't get any development and they are the way they are without any explanation or get a sad backstory and have their character be defined by that and nothing else. There is also the issue that the ensemble cast is so big that there is no time to develop all of them. I understand if some characters are used as fluff to make the story more interesting or entertaining but when your main characters are walking flat cardboard, then we have a problem. The reason I do not think the ensemble cast is the worst is that the range of characters go from boring to caricatures to generic.

However, another aspect of the story that I think hurts the characters the most is the dialogue and comedy. The comedy of this show is below average and it is not just that the jokes aren't funny, but they are repeated and hammered down on the viewers a thousand times to the point that you wish you were watching fart jokes instead. I do not know which administrative authority thought the comedy and its volume in the show were a good decision, but they are definitely the worst offender in ruining any interest about the main story. The first and last two episodes were the ones I was most engaged in and they had the least amount of comedy in them. In short when ToG dials down on comedic antics and focuses on the story, it is entertaining and engaging.

Since this is a Korean webcomic, it was no surprise that Stray Kids, who are a fairly new sensation in the KPOP world, got to sing and write the main themes of the show, as they usually do with their songs. I will only be reviewing their japanese versions, which are fairly similar with their korean versions, because their english version...let's be honest...are cringeworthy. The OP is quite unique in that it does not resemble with any of their previous songs and in my opinion is a decent hear but not for many times and periodically. However, the ED is much better and I could see myself revisiting it again multiple times. As for the soundtrack itself, it is definitely not Kevin Penkin's best work but that does not mean it is not great. The music production is one of the strongest suits of the show since Penkin knows what kind of music and sound effects to use for each scene to make it stand out. As for the animation production, it is not the best animated show, it actually is quite average on that aspect, but the art style is what drew me into the show to begin with since it is a bit less detailed while remaining good-looking.

Overall, ToG, as the first release of the Crunchyroll webcomic series adaptations, is underwhelming to say the least but that does not mean that there will not be other series that I may like more. I feel very neutral overall with this series and I believe its second season may still be able to fix some of its major flaws from the first season, but I hold that thought with a grain of salt on the side.